TM - Buy and Hold for Regular Dividend

TM is the stock dearest to my heart. I have made much gain from it throughout the years of my investing history. I first bought it before it split into two entities, the other one being Axiata, its international portion. Last year just before the capital repayment of 30 sen per share, I cleared all my position as my calculation showed that I would have made a lot more if I sold at the all time high of 6.30 per share. And of course I had planned to repurchase it after the capital repayment at a lower price.

The price post-capital repayment was indeed lower and I was waiting for it to be still lower but unfortunately it hanged around 5.70 to 5.75 for some weeks. I was beginning to think that the price might even increase if I had not started to buy and so, out of "sheer anxiety" I repurchased the shares at 5.73 and as luck would have it, a couple of months after that the price began to fall.

 Some smart guy later predicted that TM's revenue would decline as the age of mandatory retirement of its staff had been raised to 60 and so TM would not be able to rid of some of its staff to reduce its recurrent expenditures. This prediction brought the share price lower still  and early this year it went down to even 5.25 at which I should have dollar cost averaged but had not!

So you can see that my paper losses was enormous then, but now at the current price of 5.47-5.49, it is not as bad. My overall gain is still much higher though so I am keeping my TM stock for its regular dividend. Tomorrow 27 May 2013 I should receive a dividend of 12.2 sen per share (tax exempted) in my bank account and this gives me something to look forward to, an amount enough for both of us to go on a week holiday in my favourite destination.

Next September, there should be another dividend (hopefully) of 9 to 10 sen per share and I plan on using the proceed  to top up my AMB Value Trust following the declaration of its annual dividend. I might do this through Fundsupermart an online fund distributor, as the sales charge is at 2% instead of 3%-6.5%. Thanks to my fellow blogger My Investor for bringing this to my attention.

Actually if I were not that in love with TM, I should have sold all the shares and bought more Maxis shares instead at an annual 40 sen dividend per share. It is strange how attached we are with a particular stock! The behaviour is inexplicable.

By the way, I  will only buy and hold stocks with high-paying dividends in companies with strong fundamentals and consistently positive financial results. I am not savvy about parameters like PE ratios or EPS though my two close relatives who are both Chartered Accountants have been explaining them to me ;).

That is why stocks such as SKPetro which has yet to issue dividends is not worth keeping at this stage. I have cleared another 50% of my SKPetro at 3.99 last week just before it fell to 3.89. There seems to be a lot of volatility and speculation on this stock which I am not happy with. Its stock price is increasing but its earning for the first quarter of this year was less than last year. I have to ask Tasha or Zana to analyse its balance sheet!

In the meantime, TM is here to stay till its next capital repayment!

Fruit and Drug Interactions

A recent study by a Canadian group has shown that taking certain prescription drugs with grapefruit juice can lead to adverse reactions due to high levels of the drug in the body as a result their metabolising enzyme in our body being deactivated by chemicals found in the fruit known as furanocoumarins. 

Without the enzyme, more of the ingested drugs will be available to our body making it toxic. It is said that taking one tablet of such a drug with grape juice is equivqlent to taking 10 tablets with plain water. An anti-hypertensive drug, felodipine, was reported to have increased its level to three times after patients had a glass of grapejuice compared with a glass of water.

Grapefruit juice can alter action of certain drugs in the body

So it is important to ask your doctors or pharmacists to help check for you which foods you are taking that might interact with your present medications. From my patients' experiences I came to know of some herbs which also interfere with antihypertensive medications causing dangerously low blood pressure (due to resultant drug overdose) with accompanying dizziness and possible collapse.

The Stuff of Primary Care and A Duty of Care

Nearly 90% of patients who visit Primary Care clinics or General Practitioners suffer from respiratory conditions. While many of these are due to viral infections and therefore do not warrant an antibiotic therapy, a small proportion of others are due to allergic reactions giving rise to an asthma.

It is therefore important for a doctor especially at this point of contact to examine the respiratory system especially listening to breath sounds to determine a diagnosis which ensures a proper treatment for the patient.  Sadly many doctors, possibly due to the heavy attendances or simply negligent, have not conducted this step satisfactorily.

I have recently attended to a 10 year old boy who has been coming to the clinic since August 2012 for recurrent coughs. The first time he came he was given the usual anti-cough mixture, the second time it was the same, the third time the doctor ordered a sputum for AFB ( Acid-Fast Bacilli) for suspected TB (tuberculosis) and given a double antibiotic regime as he thought the child could have pneumonia despite not having any fever. The recurrent coughs had never stopped and the father kept bringing the child and another two sputum AFB were ordered and I noted only one test came back without any report as the samples were said to be not satisfactory. I also could not find the chest x-ray ordered by the third doctor and so reluctantly have to order a new one which I was not happy about.

There is no continuity of care for this child who is rather quiet. He was seen by four different doctors before coming to me. It didn't help that the child kept denying that he had breathing difficulties especially after physical exercise. I took his blood sample to see whether his hemoglobin level is normal as though he has no pallor, his father insisted that he has not been eating well. The boy's Hb level was good at 13.4g/dL.

I did a full examination of his respiratory system and listen intently for his lung sounds and detected the mild wheezes. I made a diagnosis of asthma and treated the child accordingly and the coughs have since been reduced and the father is very happy to at last be told of the diagnosis and how to deal with the condition.

It is very important to make a firm diagnosis in this case and relieve the family of the anxiety about their son's intractable condition. Listening to the chest properly and defining the sound relating to which part of the respiratory tree that is causing the sound is therefore critical in this case.

Needless to say, the best confirmatory test for the diagnosis of asthma is to perform the respiratory function test namely spirometry on this 10-year old child for which the father has to take him to the hospital as unfortunately the facility is yet to be made available at our clinic level. This test will also determine the severity of his asthma.

Breastfeeding and Childhood Allergy

A two-year old child was brought to the clinic by her anxious aunt recently. The complaint was:  for the last three days the child's eyes were swollen and watery. She refused to open them especially when there was sunlight and she had been rubbing her eyes. I asked her aunt whether the eyes were red and exude yellowish secretion and she replied in the negative. The child had no recent throat or chest infection. There was no family history of asthma.

Upon examination, the child's eyes were swollen and she was not cooperative and kept her eyes closed but I managed to see her left eye to confirm that it was not red. Her chest was clear and there was no nasal discharge.

I then proceeded to ask about her meals so as to identify any food which could have caused this allergic reaction (periorbital angioedema). There appeared to be no newly introduced foods in her daily intake. Then the aunt mentioned that the child was still breastfeeding and that just before the appearance of the signs and symptoms, the mother had a meal of crabs (seafood) which has been known to cause allergy in some people.

Crab salad

The child was treated for allergy.

I am not very sure of the connection as I cannot find any studies on this hypothesis that an allergy can be passed through breastfeeding. But if certain medications can pass through breast milk to child, I do not see why chemical complexes in the body cannot do the same. Of course my contention appears to be anecdotal as I don't have the data to support this finding. The association with the mother's meal could well be spurious. More cases need to be observed.

Juicy and sweet Rambutan

I have also come across a mother of a three-month old exclusively breastfed baby who was previously normal with no prodromal signs and symptoms but the very  next day was restless with cough and watery nasal congestion not associated with fever. And the mother admitted to eating "rambutan" in large numbers the day before. An interesting observation indeed.

 Rambutan is a seasonal fruit which is very juicy and sweet and known to irritate throat mucosa. I am waiting to see if there are other such cases so that I can advise breast feeding mothers to be careful on what they eat.

 Some allergy can be short-lived while others may be lifelong depending on the type of immune reactions causing it in the first place.

BSDReit - My Forgotten Stock

I have been so happy with the annual 7 to 9% return on this stock that I forget to review its wealth-making status. I bought 50k  BSDReit shares at 1.04 costing me about 52k in late 2008 and have been receiving 3k to 4.5k annually and have been quite complacent all these years. In my busy practice, I have totally forgotten that the price has historically gone up to even 2.00 and I failed to capitalise on it! I only came to realise my folly when I was checking on the KLCC Reit and doing the simple yield calculations. Last week's BSDReit's price was 1.86  and that is 82 sen rise in value for each share.

Been sleeping on my REIT stock

My! if I were to liquidate it then  I would have realised approximately 93K and  the time has come to dispose it all as the price has  become somewhat static for the last one year!!! Forget about putting it back into the market, had I put the whole of this amount in a PNB unit trust at 6.5 sen dividend, I would have received 6k consistently, a much higher yield than at  the current BSD Reit's annual dividend rate, purely on price upside.

I have this penchant for buying and holding my stock. Most of the time I find this practice is beneficial for me. For example I bought SKPetro shares  at 2.16 last year when it was relisted and only sold some last week at 3.59. Whereas my better half had sold his early this year at 3.15 because his strategy is buy and sell at a certain percentage of unit price rise. My strategy is more risky and therefore more gains and of course sometimes more losess.

High Risk-> High Gain

That's the disadvantage of self-managing your own fund while having a full professional practice. The tendency  not to check regularly in details is always there. In this case I had been so happy with the relatively higher dividend than ordinary stock and the higher yield at 8.5 when the price was at 1.04 that I hardly even thought of it. The wealth generating status has since altered following the Reit's price uptrend. It is more profitable to re-assign the fund's position.

And so this Monday, I am going to clear my position on BSDReit after nearly five years of holding it and maximise my money through another stock which is of course dear old MAXIS.

KLCC REIT versus MAXIS (or PNB Unit Trust?)

I am back in a dilemma. I have just sold 50% of my SKPetro shares when it peaked at 3.59 last Thursday 9 May 2013 and now I want to plough back the profit into the market. I was looking at the Reits and noticed that most of their prices have kind of stabilised over the last six months.

Then came this old market player, albeit in a different package, KLCC Reit which was relisted last Thursday as well. The reference price was 7.25 and it went up to 7.70  before closing at 7.64 on Friday. It was a fine debut alright. The prospects look good with the intended inclusion of more high-end properties and the fact that its current properties are all fully-tenanted. Moreover the CEO indicated that they are going to distribute 90% of their annual profit as dividend which sound attractive. By 2015 it seems the dividend can go up to 35%. The name of Petronas, the National Petroleum Company as the backer of  this Reit is also comforting.

I am disappointed though that the price is very high. In fact the price of this Reit, the biggest of the lot in terms of capitalisation, sticks like a sore thumb. All the others except for AxReit (@3.82) are priced below 2.00. Looks like this Reit is for the wealthy to be wealthier as ordinary retail investor would be hard pressed trying to own it. It doesn't look good on this government-linked company (GLC) to deprive the small investors of the shares of the wealth. Though we must realise that the foreign fund managers would have snapped this Reit had the price been much lower. Still I believe the Malaysian investors would have loved to  possess this stock and ride with the company.

A  good dividend-paying stock

KLCC REIT- Currently  lower yield than MAXIS

Now back to my dilemma. Shall I purchase KLCC Reit or MAXIS? Let's do some simple calculation. If I were to get 30k KLCC Reit shares at the price of 7.52, I would have to come up with about 227k inclusive of transaction cost. If the annual dividend is at 35% then I would get 9k after subtracting the 10% tax. That would be a yield of 4.16%.

The last price of KLCC property was 7.25 before it was suspended to repackage it  into a Reit and so unless my evaluation is wrong, I don't think the Reit's unit price  is going to get any higher than 8.00 before the year ends. Even if it uptrends, the value would be slightly higher than  MAXIS FV of 7.20.

Now if I were instead to choose MAXIS and buy an additional  30k shares at the current price of  6.99 pre-dividend ex-date on 14 May, or better still wait for it to drop slightly post-dividend, say at 6.80 then I would have to fork out only 205k and at current MAXIS annual dividend rate of 40 sen TE, I would receive  12k a yield of  5.85%. The assumption here is both stocks are changing proportionately.

But if you were conservative and risk-averse, it is better to put your 205k in a PNB unit trust with the annual dividend of 6.5 sen because you would receive about 13K and tax-free but the unit price is fixed at 1.00 and  you will have to keep that amount for 12 months to get that dividend though the advantage is you also will  have that compounding principle to embellish your annual reinvestment. Slow and steady.

But  I think for the time being  I will pick up MAXIS shares instead of the highly-touted KLCC Reit  and give PNB Unit trust a miss as I fancy a roller coaster ride. In addition, to me, MAXIS is a good defensive stock with strong fundamentals and imbued with  innovative management and good governance.

I sure hope I am  going to celebrate this decision. Here I go on an adventure ride comes 15 May 2013.

SKPetro- My Stroke of Luck

A week before the general election, I was checking on my portfolio and noticed that generally due to the lack of leads before the dissolution of parliament and the uncertainty of who was going to form the next government, my stocks have been rather static in values.

My stocks currently consist of Telcos, Entertainment, Oil and Gas, REITs and Private Healthcare.My sole  plantation stock was sold three weeks ago . All are self-managed.

I have got some shares of ASTRO through an IPO application which have been lower than the offer price of 3.00 ringgit. At one time it went down to 2.67! I have been wanting to dispose of them and when the price  went to 2.90, after much debate, I decided to sell all my shares and bought more SKPetro shares  at 3.08. My gamble paid off as after the election with the National Front being returned to power, the stock went up dizzyingly and today  it is 3.55.

The stock price rise is amazing though I am aware of the foreign fund role  post-election

Though ASTRO also rose following the election to 3.02,  it compares poorly to the rate of increase of the oil and gas company. I am glad that I reviewed my position in time and in the process gain quite substantially. I hope the stock will continue to do well before I decide to dispose it. At the moment I am loving it. How I wish I had purchased more of the stock at that price! Instead I put some more fund from the proceeds of my THPlant sale in which I made some profit buying at 1.94 and selling at 2.20 into my PNB unit trusts, safer and less risks!

Luck 1% and Effort 99% = BIG Smile

SKPetro is at the moment an attractive investment. Had I not made the regular review of my portfolio, I would not have made the gain on the stock. So the question of luck here is debatable whichever way you look at it.

It's advisable to monitor your stocks especially when market-influencing factors are in operation. This is the exciting part of doing things on your own in investment. You learn from your mistakes too.