Invest Positively

Whether by stealth or by design, trades by algos - the new breed of investors who trade using superfast computers and complicated mathematical programs - now make up a big portion of the trading activities on the stock market. Data furnished by the Singapore Exchange shows that on an average trading day in the second half of last year, algos were involved in as much as 34 per cent of the daily stock turnover. A further breakdown shows roughly two-thirds of these trades performed by algos were with institutional investors, while the rest were with retail investors. It is also interesting to note that unlike huge markets such as New York, where a big proportion of trades is executed by computers competing against other computers, direct trades between algos are relatively insignificant here - accounting for only about 4 per cent of trading activity. In particular, some of them offer other investors an opportunity to get in and out of stocks easily with their continual...

The Singapore Exchange (SGX) and the Securities Association of Singapore (SAS) on Thursday sent brokers a Guidance Note which outlined the type of investment advice that trading representatives (TRs) are allowed to offer their clients, thus clarifying a grey area that has existed ever since the rules were tightened in the wake of 2008's US subprime crisis. "TRs are allowed to give ERA (execution-related advice)/recommendations on listed-excluded investment products (EIPs) to clients provided they state the rationale for their ERA ," said SGX and SAS. "This could be based on technical or fundamental analysis conducted by the TRs, reports issued by other research analysts, or market developments/performance/events," the note added. On June 29 last year, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) issued a consultation paper on proposed changes to the Financial Advisers Act that dealt with exempting ERA for EIPs, these being financial instruments that ...

EX-DBS Vickers trader Dennis Tey Thean Yang was sentenced to 16 weeks in prison on Wednesday for spoofing the securities market in the first case brought jointly by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and white-collar crime police. Tey was granted bail of S$80,000 by District Judge Jasvender Kaur pending an appeal against his sentence. Tey, 33, pleaded guilty earlier this month to eight of the 23 charges he faced related to his attempt to artificially move prices through fraudulent securities orders. A broker at DBS Vickers Securities (Singapore) when the offences were committed in late 2012 and 2013, he was also charged with misusing other people's trading accounts without consent. He could have been jailed for up to seven years and fined up to S$250,000 for each charge, or both. Spoofing refers to the practice of price manipulation by entering and cancelling large buy or sell orders in the market to give a false impression of market conditions. According to...

A tough economy can force companies to reassess the value that they had attached to their assets and businesses, and sometimes that reassessment results in a write-off or an impairment. But as the write-offs and impairments pile up, regulators and investors must be extra vigilant against listed companies that claim an irreversible loss on an asset's value but fail to properly explain why that loss had to be incurred. In particular, social shopping network platform YuuZoo Corp and investment services firm ISR Capital are two recent examples where clarity from the companies is sorely needed. The need for those explanations exists on a few levels. Most fundamentally, when a company says that it is not actually worth what was previously declared, shareholders need to understand why the discrepancy existed. From a prudential perspective, shareholders also need to guard against possible shenanigans, because write-offs and impairments could be the result of over-aggressive reve...

A former trader at DBS Group Holdings Ltd's brokerage unit on Friday was convicted by a Singapore court for spoofing the securities market in the city's first such criminal case.

ISR Capital's largest shareholder David Rigoll on March 7 sold another 17.9 million shares in the company for S$804,030, or S$0.0448 per share.

Shares of ISR Capital extended their losses on Thursday, a day after the company disclosed that David Rigoll, its largest shareholder, has not only resigned as an executive director but breached a moratorium by offloading some of his stake in the open market.