Wednesday, September 09, 2015

Portfolio as of 31 Aug 20

It has been a long time since we last updated - 1.5 years and some.

Summary of portfolio performance:


Portfolio has largely outperformed STI because 85% of portfolio is in US-based assets. The rest are SG. The strengthening of USD to SGD has given a big boost to our portfolio when converted back to SGD. We started about 7 years ago and at that time, USD/SGD was $1.42, today it is back to almost the same. This is not something I have ever imagine possible - a pleasant surprise for me.

The following shows the breakdown of performance by US & SG based assets.



We hold about 15% cash as of end August 2015.

Our biggest contribution in the past 1.5 years came from Valeant Pharmaceuticals. We have since closed our position on VRX, selling at various prices - as high as $247 with our last sale and closing of our position. On average, we have made about double our investment.

Our bets in pharma has largely turned out quite above our expectations. We also own things like CELG and GILD. We started investing in CELG last year at $72, and then added twice more, the most recent addition was during the recent crash, two or three weeks ago at $94. GILD's cost is also below today, some of it are up 46%, some of which we added more recently are up 10%.

We continue to hold both Mastercard and Visa, though we have reduced the stake but still a significant one. Both have continued to serve us well, MA is up over 10% while V over 27% since end 2013.

Our 6 largest bets consist of 51% of our portfolio, 60% of all our stock holdings.


Our "pharma" bet consists of 5 different drugs stocks - CELG, GILD, AGN, AMGN & BIIB. We view this in total as a bet on the sector, though CELG is the largest position in the bet - about 1/3 of the bet.

Goggle is our latest addition. We started with a small bet late last year at mid-$500s and kept adding all the way through till it bottomed out at $490s. We have since sold some of it but still it remains a strategic position. We are up high teens level for our remaining stake. It should continue to do well.

LMCA is a stock we have invested in since 2013. There is nothing to shout about on the performance - up 3%ish. That is for the current LMCA portion. But, there is the portion of LBRDA which was spun off from LMCA some time ago. LBRDA's portion is up in the low 20%.

Discovery is a mistake we made by betting too early by being too optimistic. We were wrong. We were wrong on underestimating the nature of the industry's dynamics. Good news is we managed to catch our mistake early by selling. Bad news is for some unexplainable reason except attributable to psychology, we retain a portion. But still, we managed to sell a significant portion of our bet earlier, some we made a gain, some a loss. For those we sold, we made a gain on average - about mid single digit. For those we are hanging on to, we are down significantly - > 30% . We are not going to sell at current prices though, we think a lot has been de-risked. It should shine at current valuation. But we will be mindful on the dynamics of the industry.

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