To The Moon

Wing Tai is a property stock listed on SGX with a listed subsidiary on HKEX.Investment ThesisWing Tai is a property Group with about an equal amount of assets in the Property Development and Property Investment segments. About 50 % of the assets are in Singapore and 35 % are in Hong Kong. The diversity has provided the Group with some protection against any slowdown in the property market.While its performance had declined from the 2013/14 peak, the Group seemed to have arrested this decline. I do not expect losses going forward. Wing Tai is currently trading at a significant discount to its Book Value and EPV. There is a sufficient margin of safety to invest in Wing Tai. RationaleWing Tai is a Property Group. An equal a

If you are a fundamental investor, your goal is to find a good company trading at a discount to its business value. The challenge is having the expertise and time to do the detailed analysis to find such stocks. This is where the Fundamental Mapper comes in. This is an app design for the layman investor to give him a picture of the relative fundamental performance of a company as well as its investment risk. The position of a stock relative to its sector peer is mapped onto 4 quadrants as illustrated. The goal is to hunt for companies in the Goldmine quadrant. These are fundamentally sound companies with low investment risk. The performance is based on the past 6 years financial data while the investment risk is based on comparing the business value with the current market price. A low ris

Over the past few months, I have been working with an social investment platform to develop an app that plots the fundamental performance of Bursa Malaysia companies on the horizontal axis and the investment risk (intrinsic value compared to market price) on the vertical axis. This Fundamental Mapper aims to simplify the fundamental analysis by visually presenting the standing of a company relative to others within the sector as illustrated below. The investment risk is updated daily while the fundamental analysis is updated quarterly. It is currently at the Beta testing stage but I would like to get feedback and comments on the Fundamental Mapper - what is wrong with it, what else would you want to see, etc

When a company boast about its revenue growth you have to see it in the context of its sector. Digital Turbine, a mobile platform service provider is a good example. In 2021 and 2022 it recorded triple digits growth but this was due to acquisitions. Since then, revenue has declined despite increasing worldwide advertising spend. If the sector is growing but the company is not, this is a red flag. The company is facing a challenging turn around. Refer to page 20 of INVEST for more insights. https://notice.shareinvestor.com/email/newsletter/invest/pdf/Vol210-Invest-07Jun.pdf

You would have thought that the packaging sector is a mature and unexciting one compared to the aerospace sector. But NYSE Ball Corp thinks otherwise. The company had 2 segments – packaging and aerospace. But in Feb of this year, it completed the sale of its aerospace business for USD 5.6 billion to concentrate on its packaging business. The company stated that the sale of the aerospace business would result in an estimated pre-tax gain of USD4.8 billion and an estimated USD4.5 billion in after-tax proceeds. Part of the proceeds would be used to pare down debt and the balance ear-marked for growth. Despite being in a mature sector, many US companies were able to achieve double digits growth via M&A exercises. A good example of this in the packaging sector is the merger between WestRoc

One of the challenges when valuing companies is projecting the future performance. My trick to do this is to assumed that the future = the past. Based on my understanding of the company and sector, I then judge whether the future is the same, better or worse. I then use the past 10 years performance to value the business. If I get a margin of safety based on this, I would consider it very safe if I had judged that the future is either the same or better than the past. Of course if there is no margin of safety, I look for another company. If you found the above useful, I have other such hacks in my 500 pages value investing e-book, “Do You really want to master value investing”. I am looking for feedback/review on the book. I am prepared to provide a pdf version free in return for the fee

Aptar (NYSE: ATR) creates dosing, dispensing and packaging products for the global beauty and phara sectors. Over the past 10 years, its revenue grew at revenue grew at 3.7% CAGR while PAT grew at 5.2% CAGR. You would think that with top line and bottom line growth, this would be a good performance. However, it ROE its 2023 was about the same as that in 2012. This standstill return was because there was declining operating and capital efficiency. As an investor, your focus is on profitability. The market is not going to re-rate the company is the growth is because it is using disproportionately more assets and capital to grow revenue and earnings. Moral of the story? Do let companies distract you with the wrong metrics. Is Aptar then a terrible investment? Find out more on page 20 of INV

Ternium is a South American steel company. Although it has some mining operations, these serve mainly in-house and are a small component relative to the steel output. It achieved revenue and profit growth through organic growth and acquisitions over the past 11 years. It has a strong financial position and a good capital allocation plan, creating value for shareholders. A Valuation based on the steel price cycle shows a sufficient margin of safety, making it an investment opportunity. If you are already invested in steel companies, this might be a good geographical diversification

Silgan (SLGN) is a leading manufacturer of sustainable rigid packaging solutions for the world. Its revenue and earnings have grown through acquisitions and price growth, rather than organic growth or volume growth. It has a high debt-equity ratio and no signs of strong fundamentals as there were no uptrends in ROE and operating parameters. There is no margin of safety at the current high product selling prices. With an unsustainable Reinvestment rate, it is not an investment opportunity. I screen for US stocks frequently but not all are investment opportunities like SLGN.

Boise Cascade or BCC is one of the largest producers of engineered wood products and plywood in North America. Its growth in PAT over the past decade was driven mostly by the past 2 years' outlier product prices, which have since declined. The company is fundamentally sound with strong financials. BCC is a cyclical company heavily influenced by the housing sector, and valuations based on probability-weighting the outlier prices show no margin of safety.

Ever since coming across an article suggesting that the packaging sector would benefit from the growth of online retailing, I have been hunting for packing companies. My search went beyond Bursa and included US. Why the US? In 2023, the total return (dividend + capital gain) for the Bursa KLCI was about 3%. The S&P 500 achieved 26%. Even accounting for forex losses, you can see why the US is better. But this does not mean buying blindly. You still need to do fundamental analysis. Take the example of Avery. This is NYSE a global materials science and digital identification solutions company. Despite its acquisitions, its revenue only grew at 4.4% CAGR over the past 10 years. While ROE and net margins have been trending up, there were no improvements in other operating parameters, I th