Useful Top Personal Finance and Investment Blogs in Malaysia

If you’re looking for very useful and informative personal finance or investment blogs in Malaysia, this is the right place for you. Having said so, you won’t able to find all the personal finance or investment blogs in Malaysia here because I’m only going to list those that I follow very closely.

But please don’t get me wrong that for those blogs that are not listed here are not the good one. I’m sure there are many good personal finance and besides blogs out there in Malaysia besides that the one I listed here.

• Journey to Become Financially Independent by ChampDog - I like this blog because this is my own blog which I share everything that I think is useful to my readers towards my journey to become financially independent and achieve financial freedom.

• Personal Finance Money Tips by KC Lau – He is probably the pioneer of personal finance blogger in Malaysia because when I started to blog, he was there already until today. If you want me to vote for who is the most successful personal finance blogger in Malaysia, I probably will vote for him! He did a lot of stuff lately to increase his influence. :D

• Malaysia Personal Finance (MalPF) by Michael Tsen – This is the blog that I enjoy to read and learn a lot. Some of the articles in this blog are very interesting and the author always use an unique way of bringing up his ideas. 

• KnowThyMoney by Kris – Well, he is probably the blogger that I interact the most among all the authors listed here. I think we share a lot of common things. We both engineers who interested in not only finance or money but also girls too! lol…

• Malaysia-Finance Blogspot by Salvatore Dali – This is probably the most difficult blog to understand because my standard is not there yet. He analyses the market like a fund manager and you may not able to follow unless you have a depth investing knowledge. Thus, many fund managers are actually reading his blog too. 

• 1-million-dollar-blog – I think he means his blog worth 1 million. So if you read it, you may get 1 million! lol. I look up for a lot stock information from this blog. Hope you will find it useful too.

• Kampung Investor (link is removed due to website is down) by Kampung Boy – A very unique name and he likes to call people “Brother”. At least he is calling me that which makes me feel warm can comfortable. lol. Want to know the kampung way of achieve financial freedom? Visit his blog…. 

Well, I don’t want to list down the whole bunch of personal finance and investment blogs here because it will be too overwhelming. That may defeat the purpose for readers to find this article useful or informative. In fact, I still do read some of the blogs that I don’t listed here. Again,it doesn't mean the other blogs are not useful or informative.



P/S: I will continue to make this article up-do-date from time to time. For example, I may remove some of the links here if the bloggers are no longer active or I will add more links here if I found some noteworthy personal finance blogs especially those blogger who I interact a lot. :) Happy reading!

What are foreigners doing in China?

When I was in China, I was thinking what foreigners are up to in China. So, I search around and  found this survey from a Chinese blogger. Let’s check it out here:

Source: Yan Xishan Blog

By the way, I wonder if I am considered myself as Foreigner in China. The reason is the Chinese usually calls “Foreigner” as “Laowai” which refers to white men or western guys. However, technically speaking I’m not really a “Laowai”. So, I’m not sure if this survey includes me.

Now back to this survey, what do you think? Do you think that is the real survey or it is meant for joke or probably just a guess by the blogger’s owner?


P/S: Happy Labour's Day! Enjoy your long weekend especially you're off on Monday too! :)

Bursa Malaysia KL Stock Portfolio System

This morning I was looking an alternative ways to track my MYR stocks than my conventional excel spreadsheet and I found the “MY PORTFOLIOS” in the finance.yahoo.com.  So, what you need to do is:

1. Go to “finance.yahoo.com”.
2. Login with your Yahoo account.
3. Click “MY PORTFOLIOS” tab –> Select “Create Portfolio”.
4. Choose “Track your transaction history”
5. Follow the rest on the on-screen instructions to setup all you stock transactions.

You will see something like below to track your current positions and all the transactions:


Positions

Transactions

Well, there are few problems I don’t like about this Stock Portfolio feature from Finance Yahoo:

1. The Symbol doesn’t display the counter name (e.g. displaying GENTING instead of 3182.KL).
2. There is no currency for MYR. This is really suck.
3. It doesn’t show how much your earning from you sell transaction. Huh?

Let's Try KLStock.Com

So, I searched around again and I found www.klstock.com. It seems so far the best to suit my needs to replace my conventional stock tracking and monitoring with my excel spreadsheet.

[Update: Jan 17 2013] Apparently this KLStock.com website is no longer available and down. Thus, I"m removing the link.

1. Register an account with “www.klstock.com”
2. Go to “portfolio” tab and key-in all your stock transactions
3. For selling, you need to key-in your purchase transactions first. After that, click on the “sell” in the action column to key-in your sell transaction.

Portfolio View

 
P&L History

Well, this website seems like a new website and I hope they will continue to make improvements to this website especially on the stock portfolio feature. One immediate enhancement I would request is to add the "commission charges” for both sell & buy transactions. Currently there is no way you can track it…

Overall, I have no complaints and you do a better job than “Finance Yahoo”. Please keep up the good work!

P/S: Feel free to suggest if you have better way to monitor or track your stock portfolio specifically for Malaysian stocks.

Stock Market 101: Understand How Stocks Get Started

You buy shares from a certain stock and when the stock price goes up, you sell and earn money out of it. That is probably the main reason for all of us to invest in stock.  But do you know why stocks exist at the first place? Is it for you to invest and earn money out of it? Yeah, that’s true. But then why the company want to issue a share for your benefits? Don’t forget that economy is always win-win…


Why stocks exist at the first place?

Stocks exist at the first place because companies want to raise capital (i.e. get more cash) for their business. Why companies want to increase their capital? Because they want to make their business big and eventually make even more money! Assuming a company wants to increase its capital to $1000K, the company will issue shares that worth for $1000K for investors to buy. Let’s say 100K shares are issued, 1 share will cost $1000K/100K = $10. When investors buy all these 100K shares, the company will able raise it cash or capital to $1000K. 

You may also wonder why don’t the companies raise their capital from bank by taking loan. That is because taking loan has its limitation and you usually can borrow up to certain limit. Also, when you’re in debt you need to pay for the interest too. In order to get more money than what you can borrow from bank and most importantly without debt, the most effective way is to make your company listed  in stock exchange by issuing shares to the public or in other words make your company a public company.

When your company is listed or became public, everyone can own part of your company by just buying shares from your company. For instant let's use the example above, you buy 1000 shares, you basically own 1K/100k = 1% of the company. If you buy 10K shares, then you own 10% of the company. Cool isn’t it?


How to determine the initial stock price?

Of course, the owners of a company decide what should be the initial stock price and how many shares they want to issue. However to determine the stock price, they must look from investors perspective. Let’s assuming you own this company and the annual net earning (i.e. net income – expenses) of this company is $100K.  How much do you think your company worth? Let’s say you price your company worth for $1000K, this means that if I’m a investor and I invest $1000K. I will get back $100K annually as my return of investment – ROI which is $100/$1000K = 10% (assuming the earning is constant in the coming years). If you price your company for $500K, then the ROI from investors is 20%. The technical term for this ROI is called “Dividend”.

So do you think investors will invest for 10% ROI or 20% ROI? Of course, 20% right? But keep in mind that you only get the capital of $500K from a company perspective. What if you offer 10% ROI, do you think investors will invest? If yes, then you will get the capital of $1000K which is 2 times more than $500K. You get more money by offering 10% ROI as compared to 20% ROI. So, should you price your company $500K or $1000K? Well, that depends how good your judgement on what are the investors' need and to get the optimum capital that you want. :D

If you issue 1 share for $1000K (which is unlikely in reality because after you sell your share, your company no longer belongs to you!) , then 1 share will cost $1000K. If you issue 100K shares, then 1 share will cost $1000K/100K = $10. If you issue 1000K shares, 1 share will cost $1000K/1000K = $1.  Do you think the public or investors have enough money to buy 1 share? So the quantity of the share decide how cheap is unit price per share that affordable by majority of investors. This is up to you to make a call too, if you’re the owner of the company.

Once you have decided to price your company for $1000K and issue 100K shares, your initial stock price will be $1000K/100K = $10 per share. So you make this offer to the public which is also called “Initial Public Offering (IPO)” with $10 per share.


Summary

Well, I summarized a lot of stuff here and in reality the process is a lot more complicated than what I have explained. I think it is always important to understand the basic fundamental especially from a company and investor perspective before we start investing in stock.

This article explains how stocks gets started in the first place. Feel free to comments and provide feedback if anything is not clear and you would like to discuss further. Happy investing!

How to Embed Stocks that I am Watching?

If you're looking for a way to embed the stock charts in a website or a blog, you can now can do it through wikinvest. Here is my list of stocks that I"m watching and the chart shows 1 year history trend for that particular stock:

INTEL CORPORATION

Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart
Click here to download Flash Player now

ALTERA CORPORATION

Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart
Click here to download Flash Player now

If you have a better way to embed stock chart into a website or a blog, feel free to share. So far, I find this wikinvest is the best.

[02 April 2011]: There is a bug in the Malaysian stock chart which shows only until August 2010 and I have reported to wikinvest. This is the respond that I got from them:

Hi Champdog,
I filed a report of this issue when you wrote in a few days ago, and it's been added to our developer's work queue. I don't have a formal estimate at this time, but I'll keep you posted of our progress.
Thanks for your patience!
Wikinvest.com
Investing, Simplified.

[11 April 2011]: By the way, check it out  my latest post on Stock Portfolio System to monitor or track your stocks. I find it pretty useful! :)

LOG
[03 March 2011]: Added AIRASIA BHD

[04 April 2014]: Removed CIMB Group Holdings Berhad, PBA Holdings BHD and Airasia BHD because it is no longer working. :(

P/S: Now you can spy on me because I will continue keep this post updated for the stocks that I"m watching.

[04 April 2014]: By the way, I no longer keep this post updated for my watched stock, will be remove this link from the right panel as well.

Latest FD, EPF, Inflation, BLR and Saving Interest Rates History Trend in Malaysia

If you wonder where to get the latest FD (Fixed Deposit), saving interest, EPF (Employee Provident Fund) dividend, BLR (Base Lending Rate) and inflation rates history trend in Malaysia, this is the place for you. I wrote about a similar topic in my previous post (almost 3 years ago) and apparently it is out-dated. The latest data was only up to 2007.

I will use this post to keep track of the latest interest rates. As you can see from the graph or chart below, I put the inflation rate as reference – green line. Any interest rates above the green line is good to go and this is where you want to put your money into. However for those who are buying house, you need to look at the BLR – brown line, any investment return that higher than BLR is where you want to put your money into especially if you don’t like Flexi loan package.


[Updated: 26 April 2014] 

What can we conclude from this trend?

• Saving rates is getting lower and lower. Thus, you shouldn’t put your money in saving at all. For instance, if your monthly expenses is RM3K, you just need to make sure that you have RM4K in your saving account every month. RM1K extra is for backup.

• FD is as useless as saving but it is still better because it is higher than inflation rate in most of the years. But keep in mind that personal inflation rate is the thing that you want to look at (not the inflation rate reported by the government!)  

• As expected, EPF is the best investment vehicle (of course only compared to FD and saving) and it is catching up the BLR rate (but still below BLR). This tells you that withdrawing your EPF money to pay your house loan is the right choice. How about withdrawing your EPF for Mutual Fund? Yes, but do this only when you believe the mutual fund return could be higher than 6%.

• 6% is a important value (based on EPF dividend return and also BLR). You will use your extra money to invest (after you have enough emergency fund) and your investment return should at least more than 6%. If not, you’re making a bad investment. 

[Updated: 28 Jan 2012]: Check it out the graph in 2011, inflation rate is now catching up with FD! :)

[Updated: 26 April 2014]: Update data up to 2013, inflation has moved down (lower than FD) and EPF is till performing good!

P/S: Well, to summarize: don’t put your money in saving and use FD as emergency fund. EPF dividend rate and BLR are very important because that is the investment goal that you want to set (i.e. Any of your investment return from stock, mutual fund, and bonds should be more than 6%).

How to read buying & selling price in money changer counter?

Have you ever confused with currency exchange especially when you want to buy certain country’s currency in the money changer counter before you travel? Should you aim for lower or higher price?

There are only 4 things you should able to see from money changer counter: Date, Unit, Currency, Buying and Selling prices.  Here is the example:

		Date:	20/02/2011
Unit	Currency	We Buy	We Sell
1	US Dollar	3.015	3.035
1	Great Britain Pound	4.880	4.935
100	Chinese RMB	46.000	46.650
1000	Japanese Yen	36.250	36.700

Before you go into this, the first thing you need to know is the base currency. The base currency should be the currency based on the country where you exchange your money. For example, if you go to the money changer in Malaysia, the base currency will be in MYR – Malaysia Ringgit. If you exchange your money in China, then the base currency will be based on the Chinese RMB then.

The table above is an example that you can see from the money changer in Malaysia (the base currency is MYR). The table tells you that you need RM3.035 to exchange with 1 US dollar and RM46.650 to exchange with 100 Chinese RMB. Look at the “We Sell” column whenever you want to buy and look at the “We Buy” column whenever you want to sell.  The formula is very easy:

You want to buy foreign currency with MYR, this is how much you should get:

Money that you want to exchange in base currency(MYR) / We Sell (Buying Price) X Unit

You want to sell foreign currency and get back the MYR, this is how much you should get:

Money that you want to exchange in target currency(Foreign $) X We Buy (Selling Price) / Unit

Example 1: You want to exchange RM10K to USD. You should able to get:

RM10K/3.035 X 1 = USD 3,294.89

Example 2: You want to exchange RM10K to RMB. You should able to get:

RM10K/46.65 X 100 = RMB 21,436.23

Example 3: You want to exchange USD10K to MYR. You should able to get:

USD10K X 3.015 / 1 = RM 30,150

Example 4: You want to exchange RMB10K to MYR. You should able to get:

RMB10K X 46.00 / 100 = RM 4,600

Key Notes: The lower of the buying price (we sell) or the higher of the selling price (we buy), the more money that you will be getting back after the conversion. Thus, if you want to compare with different money changers, look at the lowest buying price (we sell) and highest selling price (we buy) that they can offer. It is a similar concept with buy low and sell high. If you want buy, look for the lowest price. If you want to sell, look for the highest price.

Happy traveling! :)

p/S: The different between the selling & buying price is where the money changer makes their money!