By: Derek Lim It's been a hectic few days, shopping for new year goodies, doing spring cleaning and trying to finish reading Peter Lynch's book. Till now, my stock picking strategy has been based on gut feeling. Heck, I should not have even call it a strategy. One of the major pitfalls of this "gung ho" approach is that when the market tumble (as what happens during this month), so does my confidence because I have no concrete facts and figures to substantiate my investments. Hence, I decide that it is time to learn about the various investment strategies that best suits my investments needs. I finally settled on "One Up on Wall Street" by Peter Lynch which tells you how to pick winning stocks as effectively as professionals without having to crunch through complex numbers or research, more of it in another post. Fortunately or unfortunately for me, I did not sell any of my stocks and instead bought a new STI index stock, Yangzijiang (YZJ) - as you may already have guessed, based on gut feeling that YZJ will be the next CoscoCorp. January 2008 Portfolio First REIT (Vested since 11 December, 2007) Buy Price: $0.780 Market Price (4 Feb ‘08): $0.710 Return on Investment: -2.23% Rate of Return: -1.9% First REIT announced a dividend of $0.01742. Full year results are out and it looks good on paper - actual results outperforms the forecast. However the stock has still not recovered and it presents an interesting opportunity. A Director bought in some shares via Open Market Purchase today - another indicator that the stock may be under-valued. Hong Leong Finance (Vested since 3 January, 2007) Buy Price: $3.92 (average) Market Price (4 Feb ‘08): $3.63 Return on Investment: 1.47% Rate of Return: 1.4% Hong Leong Finance Limited will be announcing its financial results for the full year ended 31 December 2007 on 15 February 2008. I expect a solid report and I would like to know their plans on their increasing cash stockpile. Ascendas India Trust (Vested since 1 August, 2007) Buy Price: $1.39 Market Price (4 Feb ‘08): $1.15 Return on Investment: -16.99% Rate of Return: -30.5% On quick glance, results have been spectacular - a 423% increase in net profit but property income only increases by 60% and management fees went up by 114%. The main rise is due to fair value gains on investment property. Such valuations are very subjective but this has not stop institutional investors like JTC and Great Eastern from buying in. Cambridge REIT (Vested since 1 August, 2007) Buy Price: $0.70 Market Price (4 Feb ‘08): $0.645 Return on Investment: -8.91% Rate of Return: -46.8% Cambridge REIT announced a dividend of $0.01258 (less 18% tax). It has executed a S$100M revolving credit Facility and completed 2 more acquisitions. While not as impressive as Ascendas India Trust and First REIT, 4Q results is still pretty positive. At it's current price, it's easily the highest yielding stock. Yangzijiang (Vested since 18 January, 2008) Buy Price: $1.48 Market Price (4 Feb ‘08): $1.32 Return on Investment: -14.26% Rate of Return: -96.3% A yo yo stock. Lots of negative news from the resignation of its CFO to the selling of its stock by institutional investors. The one positive that caught my eye is the proposed share buy-back. However, I wonder if YZJ will actually do so even if shareholders approve it. A potential multi-bagger but very difficult to analyze. Conclusion My overall portfolio is at -4.2%. Quite an achievement considering that the STI has declined by 14.37%. However, I boil down this due to luck. If my portfolio consists of more stocks like YZJ, I would have suffered sleepless nights. As mentioned earlier, I have dropped my "gung ho" approach and will be adopting a sound investing strategy.