Fri. Jul 25th, 2025

Something is Brewing in Singapore Small Caps….


Boustead

This Boustead that no one wants is up 55%. There are news that they might be thinking of REITing the properties.

Singapore Land
Far East Orchard
Vicom

14% since April.

Delfi

16% for the Chocolate related business.

Jardine Matheson

Jardine is so unfamiliar to the group of investors today but used to be two of the biggest stocks in STI.

It is up like 36% since the low.

Parkson Retail
Venture
UMS

Up 51% from the lows, which will bring them back to the highs of 2021.

Micro-Mechanics

Has not moved yet.

Coincidentally, my friends at Fifth Person dropped this:

Lum Chang

I will kind of stop here. What would be the cause of this?

I think it might not be one factor:

  1. The weakening USD, and the outlook, made investors more uncertain and capital flowing back into SGD needing to find a home.
  2. The stocks are not too expensive historically as well.
  3. Could be the result of the non-US wave of equity markets restructuring that I have talked about. In Singapore, it would be the S$5 billion Equity Market Development Program: Commentary: Singaporeโ€™s S$5 billion bet on the stock market
  4. Part of the rules to setup more family offices here.

End of the days flows and participation does matter to the vibrancy of the market. If you encourage fund managers to participate, then that might help a bit. I am usually skeptical about a lot of these initiatives because they are usually pretty non-starting but I can see multiple prongs working.

And I wonder whether there will be a change in sentiments and vibe around the market.

Coincidentally, I got into a debate about the Singapore market which started off with this person posting the following comment:

It is kind of related to Amundiโ€™s recent launch of Amundi Singapore Straits Times AS Acc ETF.

And I guess that is the sentiments. Only 3 banks worth it.

I chuckled when people leave out the REITs, which became so dominant of the index in the 2010 to 2020 period probably because they have not been doing well.

It kind of shows me that humans

  1. Have gaps of memory losses.
  2. Perhaps are not always a student of history.

Most of all, have this idea that an index does well because of just one or two stocks, one or two sectors, one or two regions.

And totally missing the point on the critical elements that make a portfolio of diversified securities more sensible than investing in a concentrated number of individual stocks.

The more I see this behavior brewing beneath the Singapore small caps, the more I thought about this article from John Huber that I came across recently: Quiet Compounders and a Hidden Moat at an 18% FCF Yield.

John Huber of Saber Capital used to be known more of a Quality/High Profitability at a cheap/fair valuation person but recently, he reflected and got re-acquainted with the traditional value investing. Sometimes, you need to go through experiences, for you to contrast and then going back to something gives you a different perspective.

John is widely followed in the circle because his Quality/High Profitability stock take was good, and it is remarkable for folks with successful strategy to consider other perspectives.

Psychologically it is damn difficult to change a winning formula.

I think it is the case study example that John put out in the article that stuck in my mind because its the second order of traditional cheap value investing. Nowadays, this is dismissed compared to growth investing, momentum investing, market-cap index tracking approaches.

But my observation is that value investing (not the quality/high profitability one) works its just that not many people want to do it or can do it.

But that may be the ideal playing field for those interested.

Would be damn interested to see the recent Singapore Small Cap Performance these few months haha. I may shared it when the data is in soon.


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KyithKyith



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