Financial Freedom SG

It’s the earnings seasons when you receive bulky annual reports from companies that you have invested in.

In a way it is like the report book you receive in school and show to your parents. The annual report of the companies is their report book to you. Anyone read them from page to page yet?

I know Warren Buffett does. But when I look at the annual reports, it is thick, it is heavy going. I put it off.

So far of the 4 reports that came in, I have only read one. I feel guilty and it’s like I only paid attention to one out of the 4 companies that I have some tiny holdings of.

I hope that I will have read them through this weekend and gained a clearer picture of how each of the companies have been faring.

Also received a statement from Phillip Securities about the amount I owe them for custody fees because I hold foreign stocks. So that is the downside to owning foreign holdings as this cost will be incurred unless you are a very heavy trader and go in and out of stocks quickly. I am looking at another US stock, Baxter, which deals with hospital equipment and they are going far into their research for a cure for Alzheimer's.

At the turn of the quarter, my stock holdings haven’t changed much except for the purchase of Berkshire Hathaway ‘B’ shares at the start of the year and increasing positions in the unit trust and index funds that I do dollar averaging into each month.

I guess I subscribe to Warren Buffett’s,

“For investors as a whole, returns decrease as motion (trading) increases”

Some positions are up, some are a little bit down. But the one company I am a little concerned about is Breadtalk, which has quite a bit of negative press recently over some remarks attributed to an unknown Malaysian HR staff or manager who claim that they don’t hire Singaporeans. This was reported in the evening Chinese tabloids and has spread like wildfire online with quite a few people going online to say their are boycotting Breadtalk and their associated stores.

They did make a reply, according to Temasek Review, but it seemed that the report inflamed the matter further. The title of the article there is “Breadtalk manager: We hire 70% Singaporeans/PR to 30% foreigners.”

The good thing is that I just discovered that their CEO at Breadtalk is actually the Principal who was responsible for turning Xinming Secondary from a neighbourhood school to a top school in Singapore.

If he can do that, he had better turn his energies to countering this spate of negative press by not hiding, not fudging but coming clean with exactly how many Singaporeans they have including him, their percentage in the company and what they are going to do to make their HR policies clear and non-discriminatory.

So being an investor is not easy. You have to read annual reports, stay abreast of news concerning companies, industries and places you have invested your money on top of reading books related to investing.

But hey, at least there is the kick of dividends and returns when your considered speculation becomes an astute investment :) Have a fun journey!