Is Citi a buy?

From what I gathered ..
1) The share issue will mean index ETF need to buy C to reweight it correctly in the index - (So means selling will be supported hopefully)
2) The book value(if you trust the numbers) before the share issue was around $4+. So, after the X% dilution, you just deduct accordingly (assuming no change in book value). Probably around the share issue price of $3.+ after dilution.
3) John Paulson believes in Financials - Read why from http://thewealthjourney.blogspot.com/200...-citi.html (He might have bought early but like Buffet, he believes it will turn out alright 3-4yrs later).

So, I believe it's a knee jerk reaction and if you are a trader, you trade the news. If you are 3-5yrs investor, you accumulate when C shares start turning up (look at the chart after it bounced off its support line).

But most important of all, just keep your money management plan in place (appropriate position size and exit plan) and you should be alright.

Let your profits run and Cut your Losses

"Another fallacy - Exit when you make an 'above-average' profit ie 50% gain in 3 months."

Yes, I choose to let my profits run and cut my losses using trailing cut loss of 25% (but very troublesome, have to update my excel sheet daily with the highest closing price since i purchase the stock).. A bit wide but it will not force me out easily with whiplash on the stock prices (When i feel the biz fundamentals are still good for me). The 25% is still manageable with my position sizing. I believed traders used 8-10% as an appropriate cut loss strategy.

For me, I select stocks based on FA and reference to macro cycle, and then let the trailing cut loss take me out. Don't think too much - Sometime stock prices fall too much for no reason known to you.. it must means someone else knows something you don't.

Maybe not a very good example to illustrate this.. but Suntec Reit was giving excellent yield even though its gearing was not too much and its business fundamentals seem unchanged. The share price was depressed (under bk value) and now we know why... a rights issue.. (things that are beyond our control and only known to insiders)

Exposing Fallacies in Investment

Business Times - 09 Dec 2009

Exposing fallacies in investment

That's the mission of Boston University professor Zvi Bodie, who is enraged at financial advisers' 'misinformation', reports GENEVIEVE CUA

A US-BASED professor yesterday slammed the financial industry for perpetuating investment 'fallacies' that do little to educate retail investors about risk and return.

These fallacies include the oft- repeated maxim that diversification reduces risk, and that risky assets such as stocks become safer as the holding period gets longer.

According to Zvi Bodie, Norman and Adele Barron Professor of Management at Boston University: 'In the US, there is a movement towards consumer (financial) literacy which is completely misdirected. The idea is to make consumers capable of deciding how much to save for retirement over time, and how to invest money. But the professionals don't even know how to do that.

'It's silly and counter-productive and disingenuous. It's a kind of fraud, an excuse for transferring risk from the corporate sector to the consumer sector.'

Prof Bodie singled out 'target date' retirement funds in particular as flawed instruments that only further the fallacies and ultimately do little to provide investors with a secure stream of income in retirement. He was speaking at a public lecture organised jointly by the Centre for Asset Management Research & Investments (Camri) and the Singapore Centre for Applied and Policy Economics. He is a visiting professor at Camri at NUS Business School.

Target-date funds, also called life-cycle retirement funds, are designed to mature at a point in time that should coincide with one's retirement age. Asset allocation and rebalancing are done automatically, so the allocation to equities reduces with age. In the US, such funds are a default option in retirement accounts.

They have, however, come under scrutiny since the financial crisis last year. Citing Morningstar data, Bloomberg has reported that target-date funds labelled 2000 to 2010 lost an average 23 per cent last year, with some dropping as much as 41 per cent. The average 2050 fund declined 39 per cent in 2008, while the Standard & Poor's 500 Index fell 38 per cent. There are a number of target-date funds here, including those managed by Fidelity and UOB Asset Management.

Prof Bodie says target-date funds are a misnomer and misleading. This is because they are mutual funds, and some allocate money to other mutual funds, which do not have a maturity date. This is unlike bonds, which pay income regularly and at maturity will deliver an investor's capital.

'What consumers want and deserve is a pension, where they make contributions and the contributions can vary,' he said. 'The end result at retirement should be a secure lifetime income that lasts as long as they live, with inflation protection.'

Prof Bodie contends that the technology exists to create such a product, but it will require active government involvement, and not just the private sector. 'We have the technology to do the right thing to satisfy the requirement for at least some minimum level of guaranteed inflation-protected income at that stage in people's lives when they are most vulnerable to risk,' he said.

Prof Bodie cited three common investment fallacies. One is that saving is for the short run and investing for the long run. But according to financial economics, saving means income minus consumption. Investment means selecting a portfolio of assets.

A second fallacy is that the only way to reduce risk is to diversify. In finance, however, the way to reduce risk is to hedge, insure or hold safe assets.

The third fallacy is that stocks become safe in the long run due to 'time diversification'. But if this were true, stocks would not carry a risk premium, says Prof Bodie.

An indication of how risky stocks are, the longer the horizon, can be gleaned from the pricing of put options. The price of such protection rises with the time horizon - a put option that matures in 25 years costs five times as much as a one-year option, says Prof Bodie.

He argues that conventional advice based on the mistaken principle of time diversification leads to portfolios that are riskier than consumers realise.

The starting point for a retirement portfolio should be 100 per cent inflation-proof guaranteed annuities, he reckons. This, however, is a big challenge in Singapore, where there are no inflation-linked bonds. Even CPF Life, the CPF's new annuity scheme, fails to provide any inflation protection.

Even with US Treasury Inflation Protected Securities (TIPS), the real yield has dropped; on 10-year TIPS, it stands at about 1.3 per cent.

Prof Bodie has written a book titled Worry Free Investing: A Safe Approach to Achieving your Lifetime Financial Goals. In the WFI toolkit, risk is defined as the possibility of earning less than the risk-free interest rate, and reward as the possibility of earning more.

The instruments are a set of default-free bonds of all desired maturities and a market index fund. The investor hedges essential cash flow requirements with bonds, and buys mutual funds to gain exposure to the market index.

That's my dilemma as well. Do I really need to take all the market risks when I can generate enough from bonds alone.

My conclusion was that it was well worth taking the risks if we are invested in well-capitalized blue-chips companies that have been consistently paying dividends, provided you have set aside an appropriate amount to generate the minimal income required from bonds. Diversification does not take away the market risk(systematic risk), but it does minimize company-specific risk(non-systematic risk).

But I agreed that time diversification (ie stocks will be safer over the long run) is a fallacy. If you have boom/bust cycle, the longer you hold your stocks, the more market(systematic) risks you are exposing your portfolio to, unless as he rightly points out, you hedge your portfolio. If you can't hedge, you take money off the table (that is my hedge). Even if it means I might have taken only half out of the market before it's too late, you would still be less devastated than having all your money in the market when bear comes.

Sorry for sounding like a market timer.. but... I like to think of it as know when to jump out of the way when you see an incoming train approaching.

Writing your own Investment Policy

The most important thing when starting out is to know your investment temperament(trader or investor) and lay out your Investment Policy. This is my initial draft investment policy if you are interested to peruse, but you could always find a lot of suggestions from books of proven gurus.

http://docs.google.com/fileview?id=0B6Um2mxsWCQRMmRmMWIxNGQtOWU4ZC00ZGY2LTlhNjQtYmRjZmNmM2UyYmIw&hl=en

As for the number of stocks to hold, you have to understand yourself. Some proven investors like concentration, others like diversification. Buffett once said something along the line of "The worst group of investors out there are the one who thinks they know but in fact, they don't know they don't know". So, to err on the safe side, I choose diversification as I find that unless you are an insider or with adequate industry knowledge, it is better to reduce the concentration risk thru diversification but not necessarily reducing the returns. Tweedy Browne have been an advocate of diversification with value investing and have outperformed the US indexes for decades.

Portfolio Update November 2009

2009 Year to date (YTD) Return Portfolio 19.40% Equity(Include Funds)  82.59% Direct Shareholding 169.53% Dividend/Coupon/Interest received for 2009 $96,103 Cumulative Return Since Nov 2007 Portfolio 5.26% Equity(Include Funds) 14.36% Direct shareholding 19.89%