Investment Management

During my working years in Singapore, my employer did not have a pension plan. To take care of the financial needs of my family i decided to create a retirement corpus.

My investment objective is to build a well diversified retirement corpus that can provide a source of income (aka dividends) to take care of the financial needs of the family.

Towards the above objective, during my working years, i made investments across geographies. I did this to diversify my sources of Income thereby reducing the risk.

All Investment decisions were/are made with the objective of enhancing dividends for cash flow reasons along with achieving capital growth.

I am an investor as defined in The Intelligent Investor book.

I strongly believe in the value investment principles advocated in the above book and look for a margin of safety when making investments.

Most of my investments are contrarian bets. My investments are made when either the sector as a whole or the individual company face headwinds causing the valuation to become attractive. I have also made investments when Mr. Market had been in a panic stricken mood.

My portfolio is diversified by sector, geography, currency and asset class. I was quite fortunate by circumstance in the initial days of my investing to achieve this level of diversification.

To summarise, I strongly agree with the Seven Immutable Laws of Investing¹ as defined by James Montier.

1. Always insist on a margin of safety
2. This time is never different
3. Be patient and wait for the fat pitch
4. Be contrarian
5. Risk is the permanent loss of capital, never a number
6. Be leery of leverage
7. Never invest in something you don’t understand

I began my investments with Poems, an online portal of Phillip Securities Pte Ltd, Singapore. Later shifted to iOCBC, online trading portal of OCBC Securities, a subsidiary of OCBC Bank .

My initial Indian investments were through IciciBank's investing arm ICICIDirect, but later shifted to Zerodha.

I always pay attention to see how far is the market from 52 Week highs and lows. The following publicly available information is quite useful to understand the state of markets.

• S&P sector tracker
• NSE Indices
• stockwatch

The stockwatch listed above is a personalized watchlist created by me. It shows major world markets and some stocks in a single view.

When markets are at near 52 week highs, basically nothing further to do. Continue to read something in the reading list.

Waiting for the entire market to hit 52 week low is like chasing chimera. It happens quite rarely and even if it happens, it might most often be digesting recent gains i.e correction. So instead of looking at market as a whole, looking at sectors is more meaningful. Most of the time, some sector will be gaining and some will be losing and most will be in the middle i.e reflecting broader market index levels.

When an individual sector nears it's 52 week low, check if the sector is digesting gains made in the near term i.e past year. If so nothing do to further. If not, proceed to check the longer term returns i.e how was the return in the past 3/5/10 year returns. If the sector is really hitting multi-year lows, then we have something to do. Read up on the sector to understand the fears of the market i.e reasons for it being out of favour. Probably it's time to make contrarian investments.

Among the various parameters i look at in a stock/sector, dividend is one important factor. Even though dividend is taxed at individual tax slab rate, it gives regular cash flow to me. This allows me to decide on where to deploy this. Sometimes, I've invested in the same stock using DRIP or manually.

Depending on the market level, many a times, the money may be kept away as reserve waiting for deployment. When opportunity arises, this reserve is used to buy stocks at attractive prices.