I arrived at Yellowstone National Park, United States yesterday and took this amazing shot today.
Yellowstone National Park
Living in a lodge amidst all this nature, it offers a sense of quietness that I find beneficial to value investing. Given the advancement of technology, we are constantly connected to the constant flow of financial news and information where it reaches a point that it becomes noise. This definitely can be seen in recent markets where it becomes a little crazy with indexes fluctuating approximately 2% each day.
Perhaps given how busy I have been over the last month setting up the new company (more on that later) and meeting investors just for chats, I have not been able to introspect. Hence, being here offers a respite from all that. With regards to value investing I find being able to find some peace and reflect on past mistakes or investment decisions crucial to the learning process. How many a times have we actually reflected back on our past investment mistakes? Reviewing our portfolio, analysing each individual stock with respect to our initial investment thesis and discussing why it has gone down has always been a crucial process for us.
Since inception in 2012 till the first half of 2015, we have achieved a cumulative return of 55.2%. This compares favourably with the STI and Vanguard FTSE Pacific index, which achieved a cumulative return of 24.2% and 25.8% respectively. That would mean an initial investment of $10,000 would have yielded $15,518 by the end of July 2015. While there is much to be improved, we are still satisfied with our performance. However, we have decided to move on to the next stage and have decided to set up a private family office to manage our investments.
Our investment mandate is still the same where we only look for opportunities within the Asian markets – Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. While we are not restricted to these 4 countries, we believe that for now these are the few Asian markets that offers the best risk reward ratios. To end it off, as we shift to managing this company, we will no longer be able to provide readers with portfolio updates. There is little upside to revealing our investments in specific, publicly traded companies. On the contrary, there is significant downside in telegraphing our methods and trade secrets that will ultimately hamper our ability to act discretely and quickly. Hence, we will thus refrain from discussing specific investment ideas outside of regulatory requirements.
However, we will still share our audited results where we talk about case studies that we deem beneficial to the learning of our readers. Asides from that, our blog will still be active in sharing our investment journey.
