On The Money « The Straits Times Blogs

22 Mar 2011

Quantitative easing three?

Goh Eng Yeow examines the impact of the support which the BOJ purportedly gave to the battered Japanese stock market

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

Like other market watchers, I spend a lot of time trying to track the flow of money in and out of regional markets.

This beats all the interviews which the media try to squeeze out of fund managers and sophisticated investors on what they plan to do, since the trail of money does not lie.

So last week as the Nikkei-225 Index plunged a dizzying 10.55 per cent on Tuesday, and then recovered part of its losses the next day, it had me wondering about what really happened.

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17 Mar 2011

BOJ's mighty intervention

Goh Eng Yeow examines the calming effect which Bank of Japan's $546 billion intervention has on the financial markets

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

In three days, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) has poured enough money into the financial system to make the printer trigger-happy US central bank blush.

Between Monday and Wednesday, BOJ injected a triggering 28 trillion yen ($466 billion) to stop Japanese banks and insurers from crushing under the impact of last Friday’s devastating earthquake and tsunami.

And as panic spreads over Tokyo over the possibility of radiation contamination from the earthquake-struck nuclear reactors in nearby Fukushima, the BOJ swung into further action this morning.

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15 Mar 2011

Nikkei-225 cracking

Goh Eng Yeow examines the financial tremors jolting Asian markets as Nikkei tumbles

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

My friends said I was very lucky. As of today, I am exactly back from Japan for a month.

Just four weeks ago, I was happily in the now disaster-struck Sendai region, bathing in the hot springs and enjoying the excellent food served up by the inns there.

It must be a huge nightmare now, seeing the ongoing update given by the various TV stations on the impact of the earthquake and the subsequent tsunami on Sendai and the surrounding region.

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08 Mar 2011

Corporate accountability

Goh Eng Yeow examines the wider implications of an independent director getting a jail sentence for his role in misleading investors

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

SOME readers have asked me for my views on the punishment being meted out to lawyer Peter Madhavan who is the first independent director in Singapore to be given a jail sentence over a misleading statement.

Just to recap first for those who have not followed the story closely, Madhavan was on the board of a then SGX-listed company, Airocean, and the statement was related to the company's former chief executive Thomas Tay who was the subject of a criminal probe.

There are two points that I want to highlight:

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02 Mar 2011

Knowns and Unknowns

Goh Eng Yeow sums up the difficulties faced by investors in assessing investment risks

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

FORMER US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has an amazingly simple way of describing risks.

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns, he declared in his recent memoir which was aptly named Known and Unknown.

Now, Libya is an unknown unknown. It is quite difficult to predict at this point in time how the increasingly bloody uprising against its leader Colonel Gaddafi, is going to pan out.

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24 Feb 2011

The Libyan question

Goh Eng Yeow weighs the impact of Libyan uprising on financial markets.

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

FOR two straight days, Wall Street’s widely watched Dow Jones Industrial Index fell by a triple-digit number.

It brought to an end an astounding seven-week rally, as traders reacted to the unfolding events in Libya whose embattled strongman – Colonel Gaddafi – is reportedly trying to cling on to power.

Over here, an uneasy calm appears to have descended on the local market, with the benchmark Straits Times Index holding precariously to the 3,000-point support level.

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22 Feb 2011

Libyan pall

Goh Eng Yeow on the need for investors to stay on their toes as they watch the unfolding Libyan crisis

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

REGIONAL stock markets have been experiencing their most serious correction since the start of the year, as investors’ risk appetites get spooked by the unrest in the Middle East.

One remisier sent me a note this morning to say that he got a few calls from clients asking if it was time to start picking up shares again.

It is an indication that investors view the correction as an opportunity to enter the market at a more attractive level, and not simply the start of another bear market where they will merely be throwing good money after bad.

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19 Jan 2011

Actively-managed funds or ETFs?

Goh Eng Yeow explains why fund managers sometimes underperform the stock indexes.

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

MY COLLEAGUE Gabriel Chen recently wrote an article highlighting that exchange-traded funds (ETF) had outperformed actively-managed funds like unit trusts by a wide margin last year.

Exchange-traded funds are pools of money raised from investors which aim to invest in baskets of stocks which track widely-watched market indexes, or precious metals like gold which require cumbersome security measures and storage space.

It may come as a surprise that highly-paid professional fund managers, who spend all their time poring over stocks, should underperform the stock indexes.

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05 Jan 2011

Good year ahead for investors?

Goh Eng Yeow observes the buoyant mood among investors

By Goh Eng Yeow
Markets Correspondent
engyeow1@sph.com.sg

In the past five years, the first week of trading had always been a good guide on how the market will behave for the rest of the year.

Thus, in 2007, when a tidal wave of foreign money swept across Asia in the first week of January, regional markets went on to experience record high levels for that year, even though August that year marked the start of the Asian financial crisis.

And the start of trading in 2008 was dampened by a huge fall in stock prices. Markets ended that year with its biggest drop in percentage terms

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15 Dec 2010

Branding wars

Gabriel Chen on the branding war in airline space between DBS Group Holdings and OCBC Bank

By Gabriel Chen
Reporter
gabrielc@sph.com.sg

A BRANDING war in the airline space is brewing between DBS Group Holdings and OCBC Bank.

OCBC fired the first salvo earlier this year when its newly acquired private banking unit Bank of Singapore, started to partner with carriers like Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines, to get its name out to well-heeled travellers.

This is how it works. You recline in your airline seat and when you switch on the in-flight entertainment system, out pops a short clip extolling the virtues of the Bank of Singapore.

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