HEADLINES [click on headline to view story]:

Family Money

Personal Directions

The Doctor's Consultation by Dr. Iain Corness

Agony Column

Camera Class by Snapshot

Dr Byte's Computer Conundrums 

Family Money:Modern Myths about Stocks - Part 1

By Leslie Wright,
Managing director of Westminster Portfolio Services (Thailand) Ltd.

The past three years have taught prudent investors to treat stock markets with caution, but the recent rally has investors plunging back into the markets, crying: “the rally has come!”. Sadly, many private investors still have dangerous illusions about the best ways to identify cheap shares and the most successful investment styles. These ‘investment illusions’ are dangerous to your financial health.

1. Great Companies Will Remain Great

Many high-profile investors - including Warren Buffett - base their investment approach on buying a handful of great companies, and holding on to the shares for the long term. The argument is that great businesses - which benefit from strong brands and generate superb returns - will prove stock market winners in the long run.

Unfortunately, great firms don’t always remain great. Just ask shareholders in Marks & Spencers, Rentokil, Gillette and MacDonalds. Investors should never be complacent about the businesses in their portfolio. No company is guaranteed success, no matter how strong its brands or market share. As the respected US fund manager Peter Lynch says, “Companies are dynamic, and prospects change. There simply isn’t a stock you can own that you can afford to ignore.”

2. The shares trade at a discount to net assets so they must be good value

Recent bids in the retail sector for Selfridges and Allders have highlighted how a company trading at a discount to its net asset value (NAV) can prove attractive to a predator. But a discount to NAV doesn’t always signify value. Selfridges’ NAV consists mainly of its Oxford Street store. It’s clear that any bidder should be able to crystallise value from this asset, either by selling or mortgaging the property. Furthermore, the store hasn’t been revalued recently, so the figure on the balance sheet probably doesn’t represent its full value.

Selfridges, however, is a rare case. Most firms’ assets consist mainly of stock, debtors, or fixed assets of dubious value, rather than freehold property.

Many groups trade at a large discount to their NAV because they generate such poor returns on their asset base. For example, the stock market is unlikely to value a business with a NAV of 100p a share at a premium to that level if the company consistently generates a return on equity of only around 5%. That’s less than the firm’s cost of equity, and suggests it is destroying value - so a discount to NAV is applied by the market.

But a discount to NAV doesn’t always signal that a company’s shares are cheap. Investors looking for bargains should make sure those assets are worth something and/or check that the company consistently generates returns on its equity base superior to its cost of equity (usually in the region of 7-10%). In most cases, neither will be true.

3. Buy after a profit warning

Many retail investors and company managements are startled by the impact a profit warning has on a firm’s share price. They argue that as the warning relates to only one year’s profits - after which management often reassures the business will be back on track - the share price fall represents an excellent buying opportunity.

Unfortunately, this rarely proves to be the case. The market’s savage reaction to most profit warnings is entirely rational. That’s because any asset - including a company - is worth the net present value (‘NPV’) of its discounted cash flows. In the event of a profit warning, analysts will usually lower their estimates of sales trends at a firm, which in turn will lower the cash flow forecasts. That means even a modest undershoot in one year’s profits can translate into a large loss of value.

There’s also an old stock market adage that “profit warnings come in threes”, which means that after the first, you should always be wary. History has proved time and again that when a group issues a profit warning, it’s rarely a one-off occurrence.

4. Focus on earnings per share

Investors are still fixated by earnings per share (EPS) and the ubiquitous price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio. They’re still the most common measures used to identify attractively-priced groups. The City’s obsession with EPS sometimes leads to ridiculous situations - for example, analysts’ favourable views of ‘earnings-enhancing’ acquisitions. These are deals which boost a company’s EPS. But just because a deal is earnings-enhancing, it doesn’t mean it is creating value. Any business on a high P/E multiple, for example, can boost its EPS merely by using its highly rated shares to acquire a firm on a lower P/E rating. That doesn’t mean any value has been created. Investors should focus instead on the return made on the capital outlay.

EPS rarely provides much insight into whether a company is attractively priced: not only can earnings be manipulated, they also rarely translate into cash flow. Also, a company’s EPS and its P/E multiple give no indication of the return a business is generating on its capital base. And it is returns that are the real sign of value creation.

EPS, therefore, should never be used in isolation. Investors should always check other investment parameters, such as cash flow return on capital, when assessing a firm’s performance. As Collins Stewart’s chief executive, Terry Smith, never tires of pointing out, a group can generate any rate of earnings growth if it has no restriction on the amount of capital employed, and the return it must generate on this capital.

5. Take profits on winners; hold onto losers

One of the most common mistakes made by investors is to hold on to shares that have slumped in value in the hope of an eventual turnaround, while quickly banking profits on any that have risen in value. There’s no reason to sell shares that have risen in value if the company’s prospects remain sound and it’s still modestly valued. And the most pernicious example of failing to cut losses is when investors ‘average down’. This is the practice of buying more shares that have fallen in value to lower the average purchase price. This rarely proves a wise move. When a group’s shares fall in value, the market is sending a clear message that its prospects are worsening. Perhaps the worst justification for buying lemons is “it’s gone so low it can’t go any lower”. Unfortunately, it often can.

(To be continued next week...)

Personal Directions: The tip of the iceberg

By Christina Dodd,
founder and managing director of Asia Training Associates

Unfortunately, most people don’t realize that they are first and foremost individuals – above all else. And as individuals they have tremendous ability which is mostly untapped and under-utilized.

You could say that we can compare our capabilities and potential to that of an iceberg! From the surface we can really only see about five percent of the iceberg – we can only see the tip of it. And this is about as much ability as we use. Human beings only use about five percent of their total capabilities. The rest of our capabilities lay hidden, just like the rest of the iceberg lays submerged.

Inside each and every person there is enormous ability just waiting to come out and to be used. So why can’t we use our ninety-five percent worth of capabilities that lay hidden? What is it that prevents us from drawing on these powerful resources? Why can’t we or don’t we use these strengths?

Basically it’s because we build barriers and put up walls and obstacles to progressing and to moving ahead. We tend to convince ourselves more of the things that we can’t do than the things that we can do. We surround ourselves with attitudes of negativity, of impossibilities. We tell ourselves that we’re not good enough, not qualified enough, not clever enough, not strong enough, not confident enough. We continue to say we’re not ready, we’re not sure. We continue to be afraid to act maybe because of things that happened in the past. We continue to live with our past failures and relive them like we watch re-runs on television.

The more we think, speak and behave negatively and surround ourselves with our failures, the more suppressed our abilities and our potential become. The deeper they go inside us, and the harder it is to bring them out.

But there is a solution to all of this. There is a way out. There is a way to break down the walls we build that stop us from using our potential to the full. And it all has to do with three fundamental steps, three key steps!

The first step is to give every single ounce of effort that you have to achieving your goals. Put your blood, sweat and tears into it. Don’t just give sixty, eighty, ninety, ninety-nine percent effort – give 100 percent of your effort into reaching your goals. If you give less than 100 percent then you give room for failure and is that what you really want – failure? Of course not - so work towards your goals with every bit of your heart and commit totally to it. When you put this much into it then you will find yourself drawing on strengths and abilities that you never realized you had and that had been “hidden” all this time, just waiting to be put to good use.

“The average person puts only twenty-five percent of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than fifty percent of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote one hundred percent.”

- Andrew Carnegie

Secondly, never ever give up in working to achieve your goal! Try, try, try, and never stop trying! The more you try the more your abilities will surface and help you along the way. There is so much power in trying and continuing to try. You know this yourself just with simple tasks. The more you persevere and don’t give up, the more likely you are to succeed because you are not going to give in and in adopting this attitude, you find strength and determination and the will to get through. The “success” literature is filled with stories of people who made it because they never gave up! Because they never gave up they were able to find ways to overcome obstacles. They were able to draw on their capabilities and reach their goals.

And the third step and probably the most important step is to use positive speech. Always use positive speech in whatever you undertake in life, in the way you live your life. Using positive speech has a power all of its own that enables you to fight adversity, discouragement, despair and all of the obstacles that will come to you in life. Just by speaking in a positive, encouraging, hopeful, optimistic, cheerful and well-meaning way you will be capable of doing so much more than you ever thought before. Being positive is about the best natural medicine you could possibly use to get through life and all its problems.

It’s not just that you are speaking positively, it’s what happens to you when you speak positively. You begin to gain strength from within yourself and look at things in a different light. You find a source of new energy to drive you. Your mind opens and your imagination begins to work overtime. You find that you can think more and create more. When all of these come into play you are more able to fight for what you want in life and in doing so draw on the talents, the gifts, the capabilities and potential you have inside you!

Turn negatives into positives. Turn minuses into pluses. Turn failure into success!

Have a great week, and to leave you on a thought-provoking note:

“We become what we think about most of the time. The greatest revolution in our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives”.

- William James (1842 – 1910)

If you would like more information on our training programs, please don’t hesitate to contact me at Christina.dodd@atasiam.com

Whether you are interested in management and business, teambuilding or communications, we have a range of programs to suit your particular needs and which can be specifically tailored to meet your individual requirements.

The Doctor's Consultation by Dr. Iain Corness:Tripping down the stairway to heaven

Or a night in the ICU Part 2

by Dr. Iain Corness

Last week I was being trundled into the ICU for 24 hours of observation. When I arrived I was shuffled off the trolley and onto the electric bed. Quicker than Gypsy Rose Lee’s my clothes disappeared and I was re-dressed in the hospital gown. I was also plugged into the monitor via a blood pressure cuff on my right arm and several adhesive electrode pads across my chest to give the ECG (EKG if you are American) readouts. A natty little Plethysmograph reader was slipped on my left middle finger, and I already had the Intra-Venous drip into the back of my left hand. There were so many leads, tubes and wires attaching me to the monitors, there was no possible chance of my escaping. Not that I was in any condition to do a runner!

Dr. Alongkorn visited me and explained again that with my head injury it really was necessary for me to remain in for at least the next 24 hours. (I agreed to stay in till the morning!)

Now with all the recordings scooting across the monitor it was time for the nursing staff to monitor my progress. Under the circumstances, my BP decided it might go up, but this was considered to be a reaction to the pain messages I was getting from my neck, the left side of my head, both elbows, back, right hip, knee and ankle. As I said last week, I must have descended the stairs very quickly and most inelegantly! However, to be sure, they had one of the cardiologists, Dr. Ularn, to confirm that concept. He did and very shortly afterwards I received a shot of Pethidine in the right shoulder.

Ah, the wonders of Pethidine. A damn fine painkiller, as it takes you and floats you gently 100 m.m. above the bed. Well, that’s what it feels like. I can remember telephoning Peter Malhotra at the Pattaya Mail to tell him about the accident, but since I was well away with the faeries by that stage, goodness knows what sort of garbled nonsense he got from me! But at least the pain settled. As did my BP.

When you are not really lining up for the ferry ride across the River Styx, Intensive Care Units can be somewhat boring. That’s an understatement. I managed to beat some of the boredom by seeing what I could do with the graphs running across the monitor. If I held my breath, I could ‘flat-line’ the respiratory monitor, but if I took sharp little in and out gasps I could produce some wonderful zig-zag, saw-tooth patterns. Pulse could be altered by breath-holding too, but the BP cuff was hard to fool. I did try by flexing my arm as it automatically inflated, but it didn’t do anything. (Bernoulli’s Theory beat me for all students of Physics.)

So day dragged into night and into morning. The self inflating BP cuff and its damn pump made sure you didn’t miss any of your ICU hours by needless sleeping. The food was passable, if not quite to Miss Terry Diner’s “Highly Recommended” standards. The nurses cheerful, but none more cheerful than me when Dr. Alongkorn gave me my parole that morning. Mind you, I was required to go home for further custody for the next 24 hours.

So that’s the rewards of clumsiness. Multiple bruises, concussion and a night in ICU. Try to avoid them all!

Agony Column

Camera Class:How to shoot a cat! Or other animals.

by Harry Flashman

I have a couple of photographic friends. Howard Green shoots horses and Ernie Kuehnelt shoots cats and dogs. They are heroes in my book.

Why? Well take horses to start with. They are strange cumbersome beasts with big barrel bellies and spindly legs, one at each corner. They won’t stand still as soon as you approach them and spit all over you if you get too close. They also have a very powerful kick, to be avoided at all costs, and have most unsocial habits like peeing on your foot or leaving large deposits for you to stand in. Mind you, the droppings are nothing compared to elephants, but that’s another story.

Photo by Ernie Kuehnelt

Cats? If ever there was an ‘ornery’ creature, it’s a cat. A cat is never your pet. It allows you to be its human food provider, and heaven help you if you give it something it doesn’t like. Cats have been known to pee on your TV set, just to get even. Cats will not come when called, will not “sit” or “stay” like a dog and their tolerance towards photographers is not the stuff of which legends are made. Cat photography is difficult. Very.

Cameras and horses came together in the late 1800’s when there was controversy as to whether a horse had all four hooves in the air while galloping, at some point. Money changed hands when some high-speed photographer solved the conundrum at f8 and 1/60th of a second. I hope he was well paid. Oh I almost forgot, horses smell too.

Now take a look at the photo with this week’s column. It really is a beautiful animal shot, all Ernie’s work (and the cat’s of course). There is no getting away from it, this shot is visually attractive, with the sweep of the edge of the large container drawing your eyes into the picture. Note that the sweep runs from left to right - a small thing to remember, but our eyes are used to reading from left to right, so photos work best when going left to right as well.

What else can you see in the shot? It is taken with natural light, in fact Ernie says that he once took some shots of a kitten with flash and now the cat runs every time it sees a camera! Flash is not the ideal light source for cat pix!

Looking at the ears of the cat, you can see that the ambient light is coming from above and slightly behind the animal’s head, backlighting the ears and almost making them translucent. Looks good. There is also enough light in front of the cat to get some catch light reflections in the cat’s eyes, to make it look alive. Even a white board beside the camera can be enough to do that for you.

So what is the secret of getting your cat in the plant pot and going click? Again according to Ernie (as I don’t shoot cats) it is a matter of extreme patience, being ready at all times and being aware of the photographic opportunities in the cat’s favourite haunts.

Ernie uses a variety of lenses, but all of them are short to medium telephotos. Around 100 mm being a favourite. This gets you physically far enough away from the animal that it can tolerate your presence, and the lens is long enough that you can frame up the cat’s face and crop in the camera, a much better concept than cropping later.

Sharp focus is just as important with animal pictures as it is for human portraits, and Ernie focuses on the eyes. The depth of field is such that there is sharp focus from the nose and whiskers right through to the back of the head, and then the body of the cat just starts to go slightly hazy, keeping the attention on the cat’s face.

So there you have it. How to shoot your neighbourhood cats, and not get arrested. Lots of luck!

Dr Byte's Computer Conundrums

This week, some questions from readers about Search Engines (SE’s) and Internet connections. Just what has been happening and what is going to happen.

Most of us take SE’s for granted. We just click on Google.com and suddenly we can search on hundreds of thousands of related links. But what is happening with all the other Directories and Search Engines? What about Lycos, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Dog Pile, DMOZ and Excite to name just a few old favorites? Surely Google is not the only SE around now.

There have been many changes on the SE front over the last 18 months. Google continues to lead and the others follow as best they can. In fact, many have set up agreements with Google to provide data to their Search Engine from the Google databases. Yahoo is one such, but I think that Yahoo has some future plans in hand to redress this situation.

My own practical experience with Search Engines is that sometimes the response I get has no relationship to the keywords I entered. For example what on earth has Chiangmai Realty got to do with keywords “Computers Chiangmai” (well done Google). Likewise, as someone who spent a great deal of time optimizing web sites for many customers, I quickly discovered that all the SE’s regularly move the goal posts and also move the football field too. So although you could describe me as a SE user, I am not necessarily a happy user.

Q. Dear Dr Byte

I saw in the news last weekend (weekend of 10th July) that Yahoo was going to take over Google. What does this mean for the Search Engine market of the future? I mean Yahoo just doesn’t compare to Google at all. Does this mean that I will not be able to use Google in the future?

A little confused

Mae Rim family

A: Yahoo announced that it plans to acquire Overture in a stock and cash deal worth US$1.6 billion. So don’t worry, Google is not going to be taken over by a company like Yahoo just yet. Overture is not Google and I doubt that Google would be for sale at the moment.

However, the Yahoo/Overture deal requires regulatory and shareholder approval but could be completed by the fourth quarter, the companies said. This deal reshapes the search engines market. Yahoo is now clearly setting itself up as a rival to Google and the relationship between MSN (Microsoft’s search engine) and Overture is likely to end with this deal.

MSN is Overture’s biggest partner, delivering as much as one-third of Overture’s revenue this year. Some analysts say that it is only a matter of time before MSN looks for alternatives, including replacing Overture with Google’s paid listings on its web sites. Microsoft might also respond by bidding for a second-tier search company such as FindWhat.com, LookSmart or AskJeeves. LookSmart’s stock price rose nearly 25 percent yesterday.

“Microsoft has hired top scientists in its quest for search algorithms that will allow it to compete directly with Google. Microsoft is actively working on new search algorithms it will use to power its own search engine and enter into competition with Google,” according to the head of the company’s Theory Group.

Yahoo already owns the paid inclusion search service Inktomi, and Overture recently acquired two other search engines, AltaVista and FAST Search & Transfer. For Yahoo, the acquisition means that it now gains total control of its search services, from algorithmic to paid search to paid inclusion.

As a result, Yahoo is likely to drop Google as its provider for the normal search results in the near future.

For web masters and designers, this deal might provoke changes in search engine optimization strategies. Now that Yahoo will become more important, they should consider optimizing web pages not only for Google but for Inktomi, AllTheWeb and AltaVista as well.

No one knows which of the three search engines Yahoo will use (maybe all three at once?) but higher rankings on them can only bring more traffic to web sites. Optimizing web pages for Inktomi, AllTheWeb and AltaVista means that web pages will be well prepared if Google loses market share in the nearer future.

You can read the official Yahoo press release at http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release1102.html

Q. Dear Dr Byte

I hope you can help me with a problem I’m experiencing with connecting to the Internet.

My problem is that almost 80% of the time, I click on the connect icon for my ISP and by now I have tried almost all of them, and the modem dials, chats, checks my user name and password and connects. Two minutes later everything seems to freeze.

I go and have some lunch or breakfast if I am up early enough, or a beer if its that late in the day, come back and the two little Monitor icons that usually flash away sit as silent and blank as when I left the room.

Is there anything I can do about this? I have complained to everyone I can think of but almost never get a reply. My PC is a recent model, with lots of RAM, a newish 56K internal modem. Is there something I have missed in its set up?

Night Owl

Udon Thani

A. Well I have to admit some of the same experiences and often see the same thing when I visit customers around Chiang Mai.

My experience can be summed up as follows:

* Loxinfo: Usually low connection speeds even though it says 4600 connections. After connecting, often nothing happens. The two little screen icons in the tray don’t flash; no data transfer. Frequent disconnections. I rate Loxinfo 70-75%.

* Inet: Same as Loxinfo but occasionally a bit better. I rate Inet 80%

* TOT 1222: Same as Loxinfo and Inet, but even more annoying is that your paying 3 baht per two hour session usually to be cut off after a few minutes.

There are various messages you may see:

* The computer you dialled is not answering, try again later.

* You have been disconnected from the computer you are dialling.

* The computer that you’re dialling in to cannot establish a dial-up network connection. Check your password and then try again.

* The line is busy, try again later.

* The line was busy.

* Dial-Up Networking could not negotiate a compatible set of network protocols you specified in the Server Type settings. Check your network configuration in the Control Panel then try the connection again.

* The computer you dialled did not answer.

The excuses listed are actually all valid ones and I get most of them over time.

Complaints to all three ISPs rarely get an answering email. CSLoxinfo do usually reply but usually days later. Calls to service centers can be frustrating of you don’t speak Thai. Surely they can’t all give a poor service, or is the phone company not being honest? Quite often the service centers say that it’s the phone line. So what is true, what is actually happening and what can we do?

I have to admit that I have no easy answer. For people living outside Chiang Mai, I can say that it’s usually the quality of the phone line. The older lines are very noisy electronically. You can usually tell if this is the problem when you pickup the telephone and hear lots of noise, static and so on.

The simple solution for most of these problems is to slow the modem down. Instead of trying to blitz the internet and get nowhere, the story of the Hare and the Hound applies. Slow your modem down to 33k or so, and I guarantee a better connection and almost no drop out.

For the rest of us, problems could be resolved by moving to Satellite (except when it rains), ISDN or ADSL but these are expensive alternatives and ISDN and ADSL are not available everywhere. Try slowing your modem down and see whether that improves your connection.

That’s it for this week. If you have any tips or tricks that you’d like to share, or any questions about your internet or pc experience, contact me: Dr Byte, Chiangmai Mail.

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