With the China US trade war raging, stocks are jittery.
Keppel corp has dropped to 6.36, sembcorp 2.83, singtel 3.1, still waiting for them to drop further. Meanwhile am trying to save money so that can be prepared to go into market.
Keppel corp - waiting for it to drop to $5plus.
Sembcorp - $2
Singtel - $2
Most of the stocks that I currently am holding had made some regains after the world cup ended.
Stocks that I currently holds
Singtel
Keppelcorp
Sembcorp
Boustead
Though they had made some regains in the prices, the prices had not gone back to their prices before the world cup.
Last week, I decided to sell my capitaland (CL) and Hong Leong Finance (HLF)stocks holdings.
Both stocks were bought using my cpf monies.
Sold CL at 3.55 and HLF at 2.7
Made a total profit of approx 6k.
One reason for selling them now was because I decided to buy Singtel.
As shared in my earlier post, one yardstick which I used, is that the dividends from stocks bought using cpf should be >2.5% (interest rate in OA) as these monies came from my CPF OA. If the monies we're to come from SA, the dividend should exceed 4%.
Why singtel. Based on current price of 3.27, the dividend yield is >5%, doubled of OA interest. Although dividend is not a guarantee, i thought it is a decent return. With the 4th telco coming in soon, Singtel share might take another beating which would make it even attractive.
I came up with an investment checklist that I thought will be helpful to myself to use when evalating which stock to buy
Recently we were almost going to switch our 7 year Toyota altis to another second hand car.
We went to chat with my hubby's friend who works as a car salesman. Actually we had no thoughts of changing car as there is still 3 years to go for our altis car.
He asked us to try out the cars he had in his shop. Well there were a few cars that were not too bad, e.g nissan teanna. Actually he did not recommend us to change our car since we bought it when coe was high.
In the end, we got sold on the idea that maybe we should change our car.
But reality is even if we sold our car, we still needed to fork out 10 over thousands.
Our bank account balances was over 14k. So it was not wise to empty our pockets just to switch car for no apparent reasons.
I told my hubby this. But he wasn't listening to me. Instead he felt it was OK to switch.
The point is this was not a need. It was obviously a want. We may have to fork out monies for his medical expenses in the later part of the year and he thought that it is going to be all right.
I am not a reckless person, nor am I going to spend monies recklessly. Monies will not drop from the skies and if we do not practise prudence, we may have to end up borrowing monies from family which is a big taboo.
I refused to budge and told him flatly that I did not agree to switch car.
A few days ago, my sister approached me asking if I coukd help her invest 50k in stocks.
The few questions I asked is what is your expected returns per year and how long can you hold the investment.
Initially she told me 20k a year. Immediately I rejected her telling her that her returns are not possible. I am no magician to be able to generate such returns year in year out.
Then she relented and said decent returns a year. I pondered over the weekend what kind of stocks would fit her as her holding period is only a few years.
Her expectations are different from mine. Oil and gas companies are out of the questions. Reits might require injection of funds which she wouldnt have. In the end i zoomed in on the telco.
Telco are stable companies. I checked the 3 telcos M1, Starhub and Singtel.
Of the 3, I could say confidently that Singtel is the biggest player and if i were to buy this stock myself, and if the stock market prices somehow were not available for the next 10 years, I would not be so worried. It also has stable dividend payouts.
I informed my sister whom in the end, did not want to invest in Singtel because she felt the dividends based on current prices, at 5% is too low.
I told her honestly this is the best I could find. If she wants an alternative, she could ask my elder sister for advice because my elder sis is an active investor. The discussion ended on this note.
