Investment Management

This is what i do besides my other interest in farming . Most of the time i either read books or articles on the computer.

Motivation

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.

Principles

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

I strongly believe in the value investment principles advocated by Benjamin Graham 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 faced headwinds causing the valuation to become attractive. I have also made some 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 to achieve this level of diversification.

Journey

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 .

Markets

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.

I have also created a personalized stockwatch↗ that tracks major world markets and some stocks.

When markets are at near 52 week highs, basically nothing further to do. Proceed to read something in To Read list.

Sectors

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 sectors 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, pay attention to the longer term returns i.e how was the return in the past 3/5/10 year returns besides last year returns. If the sector is just digesting gains of the near term past, nothing do to further. 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 .

Dividends

Among the various parameters i look at in a stock, 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, I’ve used this reserve to buy stocks at good prices.

© Prabu Anand K 2020-2026