Live Miraculous Streak : A Joyous Hattrick as an Early X'mas Present ! {20th Dec '24}

 I had planned to sell only Hartalega, the 52nd scorer, on its 3rd ex-dividend day to secure 1,092 consecutive days in the record marathon, but a flight of fancy chance sell queue to exit wrongly-bought Kodama Chemical 児玉化学工業 in the Tokyo market was miraculously executed late in the afternoon as it soared mysteriously in a news vacuum, perhaps as a result of short sellers' frantic covering activity from sales made 4-5 days prior when it plunged 16% in 5 days! 

Great relief at having a lesson learnt without having to pay a price: Never buy purely on one chart pattern & a gut instinct!

The cherry on top of the icing was that the position was closed at the highest possible price of ¥440 as it hit the stop HIGH with about half-an-hour left to the close while the icing itself was the fact that the average traded price was over 6% cheaper at ¥413.934. Not bad for a company that, despite a bullish corporate proposal a few weeks back, has not paid a dividend since 1998 and has declined an unbelievable 96% from its all-time peak! Its recent low was also its lowest since 1968!

At the eleventh hour, I also decided to hive my Supermax holdings down to 20,813 shares as an insurance against something untoward happening during the pre-Christmas weekend, the disposal price a barely profitable $1.20 considering my $1.18886 average cost. Nonetheless, a quartet of rounds on winner #104 seals up a stock hat3rick to neatly conclude the 211st complete week in the precious, precious ongoing streak!!!

Live Miraculous Streak : Supermax Squeezes SHORTies for over a Fortnight ! {19th Dec '24}

 The day after the co. announces a bonus of 1 for 5 & free warrants to go along with it and despite the widely watched Dow Industrials index plunging 1,123.03 that night, Supermax remained steady as Ayer's Rock with only brief weakness at the open & between 3:30 & 4:00 pm as desperate short-sellers scrambled to buy back over 4 million shorted stock at an average cost of $1.183, losing an estimated $116,200 between them assuming they all covered back at the average transacted price. As prudence would dictate, I pared my 3-year-holdings [ 6,688 shares at the end of '21 increasing gradually at acquisition prices of $1.0547 down to as low as 66.46c & more between 81.27 & 99.8c, reaching 28,888 shares to maximise the 3 & 3.5c dividends paid last year before peaking at 30,648 just last week ] further to 23,813 shares with more sales at between $1.20 & $1.25, immediately committing half the sales proceeds to up my stake in lottery operator Berjaya Sports Toto to 18,098 shares at $1.47-1.48 to enhance my entitlement to the upcoming dividend.

 Ergo, 1,091 straight days in the stupendously unbelievable win streak!!!

Live Miraculous Streak : Supermax Surges & Scores Again ! {18th Dec '24}

  A holding in the glove major that peaked out at 30,648 shares [vs 400 in 2016] is pared down to 29,448 at the 2nd highest price yesterday, securing 1,190 days in a row of trading income & vindicating my relentless though gradual averaging down on shares that have already earned $2,602.21 in total dividends since 2016 and, if held for the next two or more months, will garner another 5-6,000 in bonus shares & almost 1,800 in free warrants proposed to be issued just yesterday!

And what a marvelously magical day that was, with 4 Japanese stocks in the black on paper & another sizeable dividend from Maybulk credited to add to the over $11,500 paid from its treasury last year!

Live Miraculous Streak : The Day Belongs to Ogura Clutch ! {17th Dec '24}

 An aspiration to earn from the slightly expensive but potentially profitable Japanese micro-cap Ogura Clutch was finally fulfilled about 18 months after I began stalking it & 15 months after finally pulling the trigger at ¥3,230, chasing an intraday rise to a peak of ¥3,430. Today, I decided to push the SELL button partly from resignation in the face of a general Japanese market malaise since the Aug 5th meltdown & since my entry isn't exactly rock bottom, having missed a golden opportunity to enter at below ¥ 2,800 back in June '23.  As divine luck would have it, the order was executed at  ¥3,355, ¥10 above my original sell Q, for a small but satisfying ¥3,207 net gain on top of a ¥3,885 dividend paid in July!

      This brings to NINETEEN the number of Japanese winners in 2024 & 69 is the scorer tally from those islands  since my debut there 83 months prior!

Live Miraculous Streak : APM scores twice in '24, SIX years of the last 8, including the last 5 in a row ! {16th Dec '24}

Winner N°87 APM Automotive is hived to below a hundred shares on Monday, bagging 1,088 in a row for a 625th straight record!

It thus earns in '17,'20,'21,'22,'23 & '24 skipping only 2018 & 2019 in the last eight years.

Live Miraculous Streak : Sungei Bagan extends the Record Run a 17th time {13th Dec '24}

Total earnings for 2024 from this erstwhile 'value trap' surpass $3,000 and the total since my first involvement with it in 2013 sails past the $8,000 mark on a fluctuating capital-at-risk that never exceeded $20,000 at its peak & averaged at below $12,000 for most of that time! This sale leaves me with just 634 shares remaining in 2 different accounts.

 

Supermax SHORTies die on Friday the 13th!

   Short-sellers in glove stocks in general can't seem to catch a break, as they are bludgeoned for most of the last fortnight : if they didn't buy back their sold shares within a day at the very latest, they were likely forced to cover back with losses, especially since Dec the 6th! The short-covering desperation was very palpable especially after 4pm with a massive 121 buy transactions in a row that took out well over 2 million shares queuing to sell at $1.09, as well eventually as all of the 2.5 million at $1.10.

  Outstanding shorted shares shrank from several million to less than 100k as of yesterday, but doubtless there were many intra-day shorts who likely tried to capitalize on what they figured was a probable Friday drop that has been almost become customary for the local market overall for months now. 

   Fitting redemption for me, the owner of over 30,000 shares averaged down into the high $1.10 range, with the paper loss on that investment narrowing significantly in December!!!👍👍👍

                                 

 

Live Miraculous Streak : 2024 Kickoff stock Sungei Bagan rides a 16th time {12th Dec '24}

    If one had told me that Sungei Bagan would score more than ten times in 2024 at the end of  last year after two years of disappointing & gradual decline, I would have suspected that that person had 'loose marbles' so to speak! 

   And yet, here it is with the trading year on the brink of closing out, the 3rd most prolific scorer with $2,853.21 in profits in the bag, double its earnings in 2021, scoring a sixteenth time on the 12th thanks to a corporate asset exchange exercise with sister Kuchai & a takeover bid by banking major OCBC for a key insurance asset in the form of storied Great Eastern, which is on the brink of going off public quotation for the first time in over six decades!

                                       

Live Miraculous Streak : Lysaght Wins for the First Time since 1997! {11th Dec '24}

 This is a stock that last scored TWENTY-SEVEN years ago! Months before the memorably dastardly Asian Financial Crisis erupted in South-east Asia when the 'Second Board' bubble was still in the early days of a long, spectacular deflation. If memory serves me, I bought 1,000 Lysaght Galvanised Steel shares in the low $8 range & sold it shortly in the low $9 range in July of that year while temping in the NUS S'pore University Health Service clinic.

Fast forward 27 Earth revolutions around the Sun later, a 2022 purchase just to attend the first physical shareholder meeting post-pandemic is unwound after 5 dividends totaling 55c, bagging the 105th scorer, for a 47.3% capital gain to propel the record to 1,085 days successively!

Live Miraculous Streak : N°99 TSH Bows Out ! {10th Dec '24}

Indonesian & Borneo plantation player TSH Resources exits after a short sojourn in my portfolio & subsequent to paying the latest 2.5c dividend, thus scoring twice in '24 after an absence of 2 years, advancing the record to 1,084 consecutive days! 

 

Live Miraculous Streak : Supermax Debuts for the First Time since Apr '21! {9th Dec '24}

 Two glove majors in a row manifests Monday 9th Dec with a partial sale of Supermax Holdings: a hard-won victory as a relentless averaging down since late 2021 seemed to be in vain with the stock lagging rival glovemakers badly amid controlling family squabbles. Finally, a break above the $1 round number fueled by speculation about the newly-minted US facility's contribution to earnings enhanced by Trump tariffs provides a much-needed motivational fillip to my investing journey, with the lesson learned to boot!

Live Miraculous Streak : Hartalega Propogates the Streak Solo {6th Dec '24}

 Hartalega delivers two days consecutively on the 6th with another sale of 300 shares at $3.70 & $3.75 to attain 1,082 days without a loss for the 209th successive complete week!

Coincidentally, also 620 straight days beyond the old record of 462-in-a-row from Jan 10th 2017 till Nov 28th 2018 that lasted almost 4 years!!!

Yet Another Miraculous Escape is About the Happen Next Week!!!

 

Live Miraculous Streak : Hartalega & CelcomDIGI do a Double Act {5th Dec '24}

 

The 52nd & 85th winners of '24 deliver together on the 5th, the former, a glove major, sold down to just 503 shares to take insurance against a possible double top formation after its first paring by 1,000 shares at $3.705 on 16th May.

 At the open, telco CelcomDIGI, a numerous occasion capital gains & dividend contributor since its debut via a well-timed exit at $5.55 in Sep '15, was pared by 40% on ex-dividend day after a timely re-entry a month prior not far from the year's low made after the company was bypassed for the award of the 5G network. More than 4/10ths of the funds released were immediately re-directed to long-absent Iris & also some shares in Hartalega's fellow glove manufacturer Supermax, lowering the latter's cost & reaching 30,648 shares in total. It presciently bought back 2,888,000 shares after the poor quarterly report days ago. 

Reverse Head & Shoulders Likely Confirmed in S'pore's Straits Trading

 

Live Miraculous Streak : Wee Hur Exits with a Hat3rick {4th Dec '24}

Albeit a tad too early today, Wee Hur remains a case of miraculous escape, Houdini-like, from a long position that is literally that! 3 months short of the decade mark, I bid a fond adieu to a company that has paid me fourteen dividends in the interim at 48c while at the same time declining 63% from my cost at its worst & reaching 3 full turns of a circle in degrees for the scoring marathon!

 

Live Miraculous Streak : Sungei Bagan Delivers x15! {3rd Dec '24}

 This was the day Sungei Bagan share entitlements to Kuchai holders came on the market & mercifully, despite the obvious selling pressure, the price did not crash back to anywhere near the lower levels early in the year but I fortuitously pared some odd lots for an average of $5.62, higher than the ordinary market range of $5.48 - $5.60 & a 15th round on this maiden winner of the year! Scorer #97 Wee Hur of S'pore rose enough to just cover commissions on my last 300 shares and is likely to be the one chosen to propagate the win streak to 1,080 tomorrow!   

  

 

Live Miraculous Streak : Pintaras Jaya, absent a Quarter Century, Bags 1,078 In A Row! {2nd Dec '24}

 The last time this piling contractor scored for me was way back in  May 1999, when my investment career was only 54 months old[ it's now 362 months long in the tooth!] !

So it's thrilling to have won twice in the same calendar year within 6 months as stock #60 bags a thousand & seventy-eight market days of trading gains with no gaps! 

 

Today I decided to finally muster the courage to 'catch a falling knife' in Japan called Shiseido after having watched it for a few months dropping from ¥7,160 in Jun '23, then falling through ¥6,000 in Aug '23, ¥5,000 & ¥4,000 in Oct & Dec the same yr, rebound back to ¥5,272 on 6.6.24, crash back to ¥3,055 in Aug, rebound back to back to ¥4,050 in Sep, fall even lower to ¥2,710 in Nov after poor quarterly results & a forecast of a 72% drop in FY 2024 profit. Today it dropped another 7% after the unveiling of a 2025/26 Action Plan with a lower 3% growth forecast than the market expectation & I finally decided it was an unmissable opportunity. My reasons to finally buy are:

 1. Resistance-turned-support of '07 high & '15-'16 consolidation zone, when revenue was lower & EPS comparable & ROE slightly higher

 2. Possible 2025/26 recovery in consumer sentiment in major mkt China via purchases by JPN tourists taking advantage of cheap yen

3. Dividend of ¥30 upcoming ex- Dec 27 

4. Norwegian SWF, which has a reputation for investment savvy, has built its stake to 2.72% from negligible in the past few yrs. 

5 Short-term RSI divergence that has produced 17% & 32% rebounds in Dec '23 & Sep '24. 

I also dug up Shiseido's financials going back to 1976 by buying old company handbooks from JPN & the US & it seems to be cheap relative to book, revenue, EPS & div yield compared to the lows from those decades. The peak of ¥9,250 in Jun '18 was sandwiched by its highest ever EPS of ¥153.7 in FY'18 & ¥184.2 in FY'19. As usual, I'm always prepared for any stock I buy to drop a further 10-30% like my Yamaha did 1 day after entry on 'Black Monday 2024'.

The co. has also made losses back in both FY '01 & '02 as well as FY '05,'13 & '20 so this time is likely far from the most dire that the company has experienced.

At the same time, I am testing the viability of trading rebounds off intermediate lows to perpetuate my precious winning run with an estimated +/- 20% error margin.