I have just attended the PhillipCapital 4th Annual Investment Conference 2013 held at Istana Hotel on 20 July 2013.
Overall, it is a good investment conference, with topics covering stock investment, derivative investment, gold investment, etc. Speakers include famous fund managers such as Chen Fan Fai who made his name in Kenanga and now is the Chief Investment Officer of Eastspring, Ang Kok Heng the Chief Investment Officer of Phillip Capital, etc.
The maximum harvest I reaped from this conference is a booklet called Hugh Young's Ten Golden Rules of Equity Investing distributed by Aberdeen Asset Management to their audience of Bharat Joshi's talk on Golden Rules of Investing. Hugh Young is the co-founder of Singapore-based Aberdeen Asia.
The 10 Golden Rules are:
- Treatment of minority shareholders
- Remember that companies are about people not asset
- Balance sheet strength is critical
- Understand what you're buying
- Be wary of overambition
- Think long term
- Benchmarks are measuring devices not portfolio construction tools
- Take advantage of irrational behaviour
- Do your own research
- Focus on industries in which it is possible to have a sustainable competitive advantage
Most of the speakers are talking from the macro-economics viewpoint, and they are kind of bullish to the near term local and world economics.
Chen Fan Fai in his topic "How is an Asian Fund Managed?" honestly pointed out that, in the long run, most of the fund managers are underperform the market index.
