TM and AXIATA -Profit Taking Ahead of Festive Season

Higher work commitment this year has hampered a lot of my stock tracking activities. Not that I complain as I actually love my work very much and delving into stocks is just a side hobby, giving me something to talk about,whining, whingeing and generally amuse myself as well as creating wealth with a roller-coaster surge of adrenalin. You do need this kind of inflation and deflation of your mood to get the old brain working normally!

Yes, sorry for the digression. As some of my regular blog readers would have known, I like TM stock very much and have invested heavily in it for so many years well before the separation of its international component that now has become Axiata. I must say I have gained the most from this stock and have followed it quite religiously. I sold off all my shares prior to the capital repayment exercise on July 27 this year and made good profit. Following the 30 sen per share capital repayment, the share,  which had appreciated from RM3.60 in Jan 2011 to well above RM6.00 starting in June 2012 before the ex-date of CR, fell around an expected value of about RM5.70. After waiting for more than a week, instead of declining further, it continued to rise! Now, here is when most of us, small time  investors got caught.

Gaming with sharks

The great fund managers, many of them local and foreign, were waiting for the bait to be taken. As the minnows went in, including yours truly, the shares went up wildly, reaching the dizzying price of  RM6.30 in October and in less than 10 days, the sharks moved in to devour the teeming fish and there TM shares crashes to around RM5.60 by 9 Nov. Remember, the festive season is coming, in fact once it is nearing 4 November, small investors should already guard themselves against this selling off ( of any large foreign-held stock for that matter). So, you see Axiata, another favourite foreign-held telco, suffers the same fate over the same narrow window period ( I sold off all my shares at 5.46 last June 2012 to buy MAXIS). Axiata also went up to around 6.30 in October 2012, for which I was rather upset for missing the rally... honestly. And now,  Axiata on 9 Nov 2012 has tumbled down to RM 5.74, is it still going down? And what about TM?

TM STOCK- Beware the 4th of November

Now, I re-purchased my TM shares at RM5.73 in August 2012 and so on paper I am making some losses though I have actually made so much over the years but am still  whingeing over this small losses! The issue is how low will TM go and how long will this take? I am waiting so that I can dollar cost average it!

Are the foreign fund managers (who have a penchant for Malaysian telcos),  still waiting for retail investors to go in again and try to reposition their share holdings in TM? See, this hide and seek game, while exciting, could consume your mental energy and make that part of your brain awake and ready for action. But you really can do this if you have all the time in the world in front of that daily live monitor!

AXIATA STOCK - Suffers a similar fate 

This buy and hold strategy (Warren Buffet's Gangnam style!), actually works best for unit trusts with multi-stock portfolios but not really for individual stocks in general. Having acknowledged and despite that,  I am still lovingly holding on to my TM shares and watching closely the frenzy profit taking playing up right in front of me.

What are the lessons here? I would say, be aware of opportune times of profit taking and beat the fund managers at their their own games.... hmmm... but if everyone knows this trick than the market will wise up to it and later this effect will no longer be there:  Haha... then you, smart investors, have to observe a different pattern, I guess.