Jun 11, 2021

Cory Diary : Sustainability of Dividend Income

In this post I like to blog about how I try to rise and maintain my conviction in dividend investing. When we talk about dividend investing, the play is about total returns of the stocks. Therefore, DPU + Capital Gain/Loss. What this mean is the measure of shareholder total returns in any of this forms.

Realized gain is actually not so fruitful exercise other than incidental situation to rebalance the portfolio or when there is fundamental change in the company. If one does not have the main mindset of continuing run the dividend business through compounding the portfolio growth with long term skin in the game, this strategy will be painful to your Health. haha. So the first mindset is, we don't realised capital gain or cut loss unless specific condition as mentioned is needed.

Quality Companies come with a price. Reits performance are usually ties to Sponsor, Credibility, Capability and Business. A good sponsor provides support of low funding cost when Reits borrows from the bank. The Reit/Sponsor Credibility is the most important however but as long it satisfies enough returns in a Win-Win situation, investors will be willing to push up prices. Management capability play a big part too. Another key area is the business type. I won't be interested in Ship Business as their depreciation is real and heavy whereas investment in properties are much more robust and can even grow with inflation. 

Yield is tricky. Forward yield is more relevant than current yield when comes to long term investment. It helps to support price and if it doesn't, an opportunity to average down for higher dividend returns in the future with lower cost. Current yield can spikes due to decrease in stock price. So one must do their home work to understand the mechanics on price decrease reasons. If a Reit is sold down without good justification, is a gem to get them. However if we are anticipating consistent poor performance or ticking time bomb ie. First Reit sustainability of contract, high yield can also be a Warning to avoid. When a yield keeps going lower but DPU maintains well, this likely due to increase in stock price. That's mean the Reits are probably doing it right and if this can last over a long time it will look more expensive. There could be situation where the DPU drops with increasing stock price. The Market may feel good about the future but one has to make sure stock price can be sustained.

Business Risk comes in many form. Short Lease, Depreciating Currency, Poor Future Contract, Poor Cycles, High Borrowing Cost, High depreciation, High maintenance cost, High Perpetual Cost, High Gearing, Bad acquisition/Sales, High Taxes, ... . If we feel a specific event could change the dynamics significantly, we may need to re-balance or cut loss. This has nothing to do with whether I still make money from the current investment or not.

Diversification to me helps to mitigate my wrong choice. ie. Retail Reits. For example I use to have CICT mainly. But today FCT is more but I still retain some CICT. In-addition I have MCT on accumulation path for months. Many decision needs not be 1 or 0. Of course to maximize profit, we may have to do that and this are probably for Experts. Am I ? It also depends one's risk appetite. Between counters I may do within sector rebalance as needed with changing market situation. There is also need to look at broader and deeper diversification such as Industrial Reits due to Covid.

This result a Portfolio of Reits where we can play around the allocation with specific needs. If we do this right, we will see compounding growth in Value and sustainable Dividend over many years. After learning for many years, maintaining a dozen stocks of Reits are not really hard because the business usually are not difficult to understand unless one try to be picky say between 1.1 or 1.2 performance differences. And I could be wrong and still be ok and will not be left far behind. Will there be a day we will see a large fall in our portfolio. You Bet ! A 1M size on large crash say 50% drop, is 500k capital loss. A big test on you. Will you Hold, Buy or Sell ?


Thinking ....

Cory
2021-0611

Articles in this Blog is personal take and educational purposes only. Reader should seek their own professional help when making financial decision and be responsible for their decision.

Jun 7, 2021

Cory Diary : Weighted Average Cost of Capital ( WACC)

"Low-interest rates may also lead to NLT’s regulatory weighted average cost of capital (WACC) for the next review period (Jan 2023-Dec 2027) to be revised down from 7% currently, adversely impacting distributions potentially. In addition, there is no visibility on any acquisition by NLT which could be positive catalyst in the long term."

Bumped today on how people is concern with WACC. So I started to do some research into it. Basically this can helps to determine how regulator managed regulated companies.

" A high weighted average cost of capital, or WACC, is typically a signal of the higher risk associated with a firm's operations. Investors tend to require an additional return to neutralize the additional risk. ... In theory, WACC represents the expense of raising one additional dollar of money. "


The WACC formula is as such



Basically is the weighted amount of Equity Cost and Debt Cost.

Cost of Debt

2.87% of 509,120k and 1.2% 155,587k
= Weighted will be (14,612k + 1,867k ) /664707k
= 2.48%

Cost of Debt Variables

Gross debt 666M
Market Cap 3683M
Tax rate 17%


CAPM

CAPM model to estimate cost of equity.

Cost of Equity

Let's say Risk free rate 1.53% per Singapore Saving Bond
Expected Rate of return say 8.3%. ( 5.34% yield + 3% growth )
Cost of Equity = 1.53% + 0.3 x ( 8.34% - 1.53% ) = 3.573% ( 8.34% for Beta = 1 )

The calculation of Beta is tricky. Who should we use as reference for NLT ? Should we use STI Index ? Since NLT listed in Year 2017, their stock price has raised more than 21% compared to STI -1.3%. Yahoo put NLT beta as 0.3. Some other put 0.5. This one need another article to think about and compute !

If we assume Beta = 0.3,  plug in all this data into the model, we have

WACC = Weighted ( Cost of Equity + Cost of Debt )
= 3683M x 3.573%/(666M+3683M) + 666M x 2.48% x (1 - 17%) / (666M + 3683M)
= 131.59M/4349M + 16.52M x 0.83/4349M
= 0.03 + 0.00315
= 0.03315 or 3.315% ( or 7.3% for Beta = 1 )


Below is NLT model. There are other moving wheels such as Depreciation and Opex for Rev determination.




Interesting Exercise. However this is my First pass. Please DYODD.


Cory
2021-0606

Articles in this Blog is personal take and educational purposes only. Reader should seek their own professional help when making financial decision and be responsible for their decision.

Jun 4, 2021

Cory Diary : Net Worth Updates

Seems a long time that I last did my Net Worth report. Some time ago I do some revamp on my Chart to make it even more easier to manage with lesser time. During this period I learned how to use macro in Excel to do VBA. Quite excited about it as this add a layer of automation to my learning. It is much simpler than I thought it would be. Maybe I can start to learn to do some tool for my colleagues as automation is sorely lacking even though we have some power tools using VBA, BI and Power BI.


I added a trend line in my chart just for fun. Though it might gives the impression of exponential type of feel into my net worth growth, seriously I doubt it can last. I am going 52 and looking forward to age 55 as a milestone which I could ask for retirement. Frankly I am not sure I would when time arrives. Nevertheless is something I look forward to in the aging process as an option which is favorable by then.

Back of my mind is I could be "retired" before 55 but this seems less likely for now as the company business is doing well. They even give a special bonus to boost Work-From-Home Morale. When you are at my age, we are earning a much higher salary that is near the peak of our career. The cost of retirement would be costly. So there is always the motivation or to some fear factor in play.

I am thinking should I do a comparison against my previous net worth report but is quite a hassle when I want to go sleep asap. I am nodding off.... . Instead I would focus on a particular highlight in the chart and talk about it which is the securities + MMF line in the chart. Is getting more steeper which basically is the result of my action to optimize wealth generation. Therefore channeling idle fund to more active use. There is still some gap to fill except that sizeable amounts allocated for War Chest needs. So the easy picking is reduced.


Cory

2021-0603


Articles in this Blog is personal take and educational purposes only. Reader should seek their own professional help when making financial decision and be responsible for their decision.