Friday 5 June 2009

The Start Of A New Thing (5 June 2009)

Dear readers,

Today is the start of my blog. We live in very exciting times having coming off from a massive market crash, with many markets having recovered 50% from their bottoms. While I wished I can say I had so much foresight I sold everything and then re-entered the markets on 9th March. That was certainly not what happened to my personal investments. But I had been adding a considerable amount to my investments over the last few months (will likely to continue to add more in future). So, I am looking forward to the continued rally with great anticipation.

I was told that blogs need to be kept short and sweet. So, rather than post my entire portfolio in detail. I will just mention the more interesting investment choices I have made more recently.
Asia remains by far my biggest holdings (55% of my portfolio are Asian equity funds, and this doesn’t include Asian single country funds or the Asian sectorial funds I have). The reasons I like Asia are many and I won’t go into detail here. Suffice to say, Asia’s power is on the ascendance, and this will show up in every way from the confidence of Asians, to its purchasing power, and definitely, its stock markets as well. I am confident the Asian market rally will continue and my portfolio reflects that confidence. If you want details on why I believe so, this article “After the Strong Run up in Markets, What's Next?” that I wrote recently summaries this.

I have on late also added a Russia equity fund and an Indonesia equity as more speculative investments lately. Russia is an equity play on oil price. On Indonesia, while some still think that Indonesia has terrorists, Muslim fundamentals, racial riots. Nothing could be further from the truth. Politically, Indonesia is more stable than Thailand or Malaysia at this point in time. The large population of Indonesia also gives it many of the demographic advantages that China and India have currently as well.
These are small and admittedly more speculative investments within my much saner portfolio, and as such, together, they only take up 4% of my total unit trust portfolio. I hope to keep this up regularly, and welcome investors to share their views with me on this forum thread I will start as well. We are all here to learn, and everyone, including me, hopes to learn something new from the active sharing of ideas.

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