This will be a quick post to touch upon the 3 things that are related to gaming industry, particularly Tencent - given that it is currently the talk of the town at the moment.$TENCENT(00700)$In case you have not heard of the news that were circulating this morning, China's state-run Economic Information Journal Daily - stole today's headline by titling the article "Spiritual Opium Grows into Hundreds of Billions of Industries", which likened online games as hazardous especially to young people and seek to regulate them as soon as possible.This sends a spook across investors and spiral down to gaming stocks such as Tencent and Netease which dropped more than 10% this morning.1.) China already imposed gaming curfew for minors in 2018 r

I wrote about the importance of having the right mental mindset in order to enact a perfect execution strategy in investing.In this article, we’ll explore a little deeper about devising a game plan on Averaging Down as an investment strategy.Do note that the focus is primarily on fundamentals first, technical second. As such, as and when we find that there is sufficient value in the company, we will consider purchasing and will use technical to aid our entry and exit positions.Is Averaging Down an Effective Strategy:First, you need to have resources or what we often termed it as warchest.In an ideal world where we have unlimited warchest, that would be nice.In a real world, many of us have a limited resource.Our funds are likely to be limited and even so, we want to cap the

Alibaba Group Holdings started the new fiscal year quarter 1 reporting for FY2022 by delivering a pretty decent resultsRevenue for the quarter is at US$31.8 billion, which represents a 34% increase year on year. This includes the consolidation of Sun Art, which was consolidated into the Group numbers from previous quarter.Without Sun Art, revenue would have grown 22% year on year.Monthly Active Customer (MAU) for the platform ecosystem grew to 1.18 billion globally, which is an increase of over 45 million from the previous year. This is broken down into 912m for China consumers and 265 International consumers outside China. Inside China's 912m active users, 828m is mostly engaged in Taobao and Tmall - a dominant China retail marketplace.Income from operations and EBITDA decreased by 11% an

As part of this newly featured series I am making to refresh the segment, I will be interviewing people from all walks of life into looking what they do for their day job, what they do outside of their day job, what their plans are for investment, and what are their thoughts for retirement. In the fourth instalment series of this segment, I had the privilege to interview the 3 co-founders of the renowned The Joyful Investors (“TJI”) blog at the same time, and here we’ll look at what are some of their priorities towards investing for income, creating value for their readers and fulfilling their own retirement plans. For those who are not aware yet, TJI is run by the three co-founders on a full-time basis – Hazelle, Kathy, and Keith since 2020 and they’ve grown prominent in the past recent

First on the disclaimer, Vertical Spread Options is a relative intermediate options strategy so please understand the mechanics and exercise it with care. A vertical spread is sometimes called a credit spread – which involves simultaneously buying and selling of options of the same underlying at the same expiration date with a different strike price. The goal of a vertical spread is to optimise return through maximising profits while limiting downside risk. This optimisation of returns is achieved through a combination of mechanism which the way options premium and time expiry works – i.e time decay works in favor of options seller (against option buyers) and implied volatility moves with the bullish/bearish direction of the market. A vertical spread strategy reduces these challenges fa

On Friday last week, investors investing in China education stock received a huge shock after major financial news reported further restrictions to the education tech sector bringing in further rules and regulations in order to curb the economy plan of the country further.$New Oriental Education & Technology(EDU)$$TAL Education Group(TAL)$$Gaotu Techedu Inc.(GOTU)$ This has sent over major big cap names plunging heavily down on the day, and this year alone they have gone down 85% – 97% from the peak. Just take a look at how the top 6 losers performed in 2021 and it will send every investors shivering thinking about investi

Software as a service (SaaS) companies are among one of the fastest growing segments in the world in the past two years due to the rapid adoption since the pandemic.Based on a subscription model and being centrally located on a remote cloud network, it is becoming the go to platforms for many organizations due to its needs, affordability and flexibility.In 2020, SaaS businesses grew on average by a massive 78% due to changing world order because of the pandemic, which forces people to isolate and companies to re-shift their models centrally.SaaS is not alone – as the first cloud service to take the lead among other cloud services, the rest have also grown into significance and will continue to play an important role in our ecosystem in the next decade.But like all industries, SaaS companie

Tencent Holdings Ltd$TENCENT(00700)$ is one conglomerate company in China which has triumphed and dominated so many winners in the past few years that it has become increasingly difficult for investors to buy in and own them simply because they keep on getting better and stronger each year. In fact, if we look across the past 10 years of making for Tencent, the best time to buy and own the shares is the day the company is making its 52-week high because you know they are just going to beat that record on its own down the road. The only 2 meaningful times which investors can get in at a reasonable valuation after the huge run-up was back in 2018 due to a regulatory crackdown which they’ve dropped 49% from peak high and then today

‌$Alphabet(GOOGL)$  ‌ The stock market is a voting machine in the short term but a weighing machine in the long term. Investors might recall just about in the past three-month, Alphabet was hit by a slew of bad news. These include Google AI Chatbot Bard flubbing its answer during the demo, followed by threats about Microsoft Bing potentially replacing Google Search as the number one engine in the years to come. As a result of these bad news, shares of Alphabet plunged to the $90s sometime in Feb and since then, it has continued to struggle against the other mega peers who have been picking up momentum. Google keynote 2023 presentation done earlier this week has embraced AI and many other updates in its revolution – the full article which you

I was reading this article last week on young graduates seeking for employment when it struck me that I have once been in that stage before more than a decade ago – and as I will detail later below why I think it sets a good place to start. Back to the article, one of the interviewee applied for over 60 applications, received just under half a dozen back for interviews, and secured 3 job offers. That is a pretty decent stats (3/60 = 5%) in this kind of environment. Another interviewee being interviewed also mentioned that it is uncommon for graduates to apply between 100-120 applications, only to receive one or two job offers back at the end of the day. Another problem which many graduates are facing today is the mismatch of job vacancies and prospects to what the graduates are seeking

I am having my off-month visiting my parents during this school holiday so I will make the updates quick.Another roller coaster month – one month up another month down and this month another month up again.It seems like volatility has been the sole theme this year with many unpredictable event happening. Any bit of news coming out will send the market into one direction after next, which makes it very difficult to establish a position of short term long or short. I do not have much short term positions in the holding so the above positions are pretty much for the mid to longer term.Many of those are also underwater at the moment (although some saw a green on one of the very rare good week) so there’s not much to do except slowly adding to the existing positions.The Chinese stock positions

‌$Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$  ‌‌$Twitter(TWTR)$  ‌ Earlier this week, Mark Zuckerberg announced the initial version of Threads, an app built by Instagram for sharing and networking with text. Most people would be familiar with how Instagram works where billions of people around the world connect with photos and videos, so the vision with Threads is an expansion of the ecosystem to create a space to express your ideas with words. It has already occupied the number one spot in the charts for social media apps in store this week so you can quickly see how that escalates. Latest news is that Threads has passed 2 million sign-ups in the first two hours launch in App Store, and 30 million sign-ups in le

Unity Software Inc (NYSE: U) ‌$Unity Software Inc.(U)$‌crashed by nearly 30% in post-market hours after announcing its Q1 FY22 results which disappoint investors. The steep crash in the stock price follows the downward momentum of many other recently announced US companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Upstart, Teladoc, Cloudflare, and many others. Q1 Earnings Review: The company announced its Q1 results which actually topped the higher end of the revenue estimates at $320m – which was up 36% year on year on the same period. Unfortunately, in an environment where market is cynical on companies that have yet to make bottomline profits, most of the other metrics do not really matter at the end of the day (not at least for the time being). An important

This is a follow-up from the previous part 1 of the article where we mentioned that we’ll be moving out back to our place next month. You can find that article link here. So after we made our decision to move back, we quickly contacted our routinely familiar agent to list our current place for marketing. Back then, we weren’t sure of the demand situation so we made it a point to open it both for sale and for rent. As you might know, the rental market has been in buoyant mode since the easing of Covid-19 restrictions and borders, and no thanks due to inflation and rising demand (expats coming over) – the rental market has also been on one way direction since then. To give you some context on how the rental market for private properties have performed in recent years: - Jun 2022 rents in

‌$THE HOUR GLASS LIMITED(AGS.SI)$‌‌$CORTINA HOLDINGS LIMITED(C41.SI)$‌Pent-up demand for luxury watches have never been higher since the era of Covid-19. Easy monetary policies globally combined with the relentless rising cost of goods material and inflation have spiked up demand for luxury watches around the world. According to a research study, Rolex brand accounts for one-quarter of the entire Swiss watch industry’s annual turnover based on implied sales of CHF 8 billion in 2020. As a result of these, prices for luxury goods have seen a significant double-digit increase since the start of the pandemic. If you think buying watches is just a wasteful hobby of the riches, you might want to think twice.

‌$Alibaba(BABA)$  ‌‌$Alibaba(09988)$  ‌ Alibaba Group Holding (NYSE: BABA) just reported earnings for the quarter ended 30 June 2023. Let us take a look at its reported financial results in a nutshell: Revenue was up 14% year on year to RMB 234,156 million (USD 32,292 million). Income from Operations was up 70% year on year to RMB 42,290 million (USD 5,860 million). This was due to the one-off reversal of share-based compensation expense of RMB 6,901 million (USD 962 million) which helped to boost. Without this, income from operations would still have been up but lesser by 43% year on year. Net Income attributable to ordinary shareholders was RMB 34,332 million (USD 4,735 million). Non-GAAP net