Category Archives: Personal Life

News & Politics, Personal Life

Thinking of investing in REITs

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So I’ve been thinking recently about opening a stock trading account for the first time and buying some shares on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange. Granted, I already have money in various unit trust funds and insurance saving products, so I’m already indirectly invested in the markets, but I’ve never actually purchased shares for my own account before. What prompted the current interest is what looks to me like ridiculously attractive dividend yields on many of the REITs being traded here and the intense discussion this has generated on the Low Yat forums.

According to a popular blog on the subject that I’ve been folllowing on and off for the past couple of months, the average yield on the REITs based on current prices is a delicious 8.84%. One of the REITs most popular with the LYN folks, Axis, is listed as having a yield of 10.4%. Even better, Axis has a policy of redistributing 95% of its income and has recently moved to a quarterly distribution policy, meaning you get a nice fat cheque every 3 months.

In theory, investing in a REIT should be approximately similar to investing in property yourself, except that in return for a management fee, you are spared from the hassle of actually scouting for good properties, arranging to buy them and finding and managing tenants for them. Since the REITs are all at least partially funded using loans as well, this means that their yields are inflated by leverage, just as an individual investor’s yield would be in buying a property personally using a mortgage.

Being the pessimist and financial conservative that I am, however, I’m still somewhat wary of something that looks too good to be true. For one thing, the yields looks so good and the size of the REITs so small (Axis is worth by my calculations a mere RM 380 million or so, Atrium, another popular REIT is worth only around RM 120 million in total) that I don’t understand why institutional investors don’t just snap the whole thing up. I see that the Employee’s Provident Fund is already the largest shareholder of Axis, at 7.59% of total issued units, but what’s stopping the big players from just taking over such a sweet operation?

As always, I suppose there’s the risk of property prices dropping, tenants leaving or not paying rent (I understand Atrium gave everyone a scare when it announced a lawsuit against a big tenant over rent arrears earlier) and the value of the REITs dropping due to the general market sentiment, but it still looks like a stupidly good buy to me. Am I wrong? I’d appreciate it if anyone has any interesting comments on this before I pull the trigger on this.

Personal Life

Holiday in Hong Kong

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In retrospect, scheduling a holiday to Hong Kong at this time was probably not the smartest decision possible. Between the H1N1 fears and the bad weather, our experience left much to be desired, but we still managed to have an enjoyable time overall and got to know Hong Kong more. Part of this was because it was a last minute arrangement and we were originally supposed to go with a tour group including older family members to Taiwan, but it was cancelled and my wife and I had to decide where to go on our own during our scheduled holiday time. And so to Hong Kong it was, including a day trip to Macau as pictured above.

What I mostly learned about Hong Kong is that it’s one huge contiguous crowd of people! Having never been to HK or even any part of China before, the sheer number of people was staggering to me. And all of them constantly walking briskly and purposefully from one place to another too. Indeed, one evening spent in Causeway Way on the day before the Rice Dumpling Festival was nearly standing room only on the streets. We met up with a couple of friends from high school who showed us the ins and outs of living in HK. To get a restaurant table, we had to get waiting tickets from four or five different restaurants and see which queue was the shortest. At the longest queue, the number currently being served was 61 while the ticket we had was 161. Between this sort of thing and the need to constantly walk between bus and MTR stations since hardly anyone actually drives in HK, I see that Hong Kongers get much more exercise than Malaysians.

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Personal Life

WordPress.com Stats tells me humanity is hopeless

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I’ve been pretty lazy about checking my site’s statistics for a while now. As such, I’ve found the new feature that automatically shows you the most popular plug-ins for WordPress and installs them automatically if you like them to be very useful. One of these plug-ins shows me some basic statistics on how many visitors have stopped by my blog and what they’re reading right on the Dashboard. Now, I know that my blog will never grow to have much of a readership, but I do like to know at least some people are reading my stuff and I’m curious about how often people find some of my old stuff and dig them out to read.

Unfortunately, what the stats tell me is pretty depressing. Over the last two days, nearly forty percent of my traffic is to just one page: Sex Cards in The Witcher. Now I know sex sells, but this is rather more skewed than I’d expected. One thing I am glad of is that my review of Irrational Man continues to get a steady dribble of readers. It’s probably one of the best pieces I’ve ever written and I’m rather proud of it. Other than that, I seem to have hits on my reviews of the newer games. Good to know the truth I guess.

Personal Life

A word of warning about Facebook

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In case anyone’s interested, here’s a low-down on a controversy that’s been simmering over the Terms of Service (ToS) of the popular social networking tool Facebook. This started on Sunday when a post on The Consumerist publicized a change in Facebook’s ToS that most people have overlooked. According to The Consumerist:

Facebook’s terms of service (TOS) used to say that when you closed an account on their network, any rights they claimed to the original content you uploaded would expire. Not anymore.

Now, anything you upload to Facebook can be used by Facebook in any way they deem fit, forever, no matter what you do later. Want to close your account? Good for you, but Facebook still has the right to do whatever it wants with your old content. They can even sublicense it if they want.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg subsequently offered an explanation on Tuesday, saying that the change merely reflected a “fundamental reality” of how services like Facebook work. Basically he claims that Facebook is worried that if a user who has uploaded content subsequently closes his or her account, that content would still be available to the other Facebook users that the original content owner shared the content with. This change in ToS therefore serves to protect Facebook in case of legal claims from users who close their account but are unhappy that their previously uploaded content might be in the hands of other people.

A blog, Razzed, then rebutted Zuckerberg, arguing that Facebook could have used legal language similar to those of e-mail companies who only act as intermediaries to transmit content from one user to another without needing to claim any legal rights over that content at all. According to this view, Zuckerberg’s assurance that Facebook won’t do anything with its users’ content against their will amounts to an empty promise without any legal backing behind it.

My own view: the vast majority of users on sites on Facebook probably don’t care about what happens to their content once it’s uploaded. As the saying goes, once you upload something onto the net, there’s no way of taking it back. Since they don’t have any way of monetizing the content that they upload, the legal status of ownership claims over that content shouldn’t matter to them either. However, those who do have a way of monetizing their intellectual property, or plan to do so sometime in the future, should probably think carefully before trying to popularize their stuff on Facebook. This could include people like artists, musicians, writers, photographers and software programmers etc. It’s likely that uploading their stuff will be harmless for them too, but you probably don’t want to leave this to chance.

Personal Life

Away during Chinese New Year

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Obviously, I’ve been away for a while during the Chinese New Year holidays. My wife and I spent three days in Penang with my parents. This was mostly to make my mother happy because she grew up on the island and wanted to see the familiar places and sights from her childhood again. This made this more of a trip out of duty rather than pleasure for my wife and myself, but it was an okay experience overall.

My parents were particularly pleased with the Penang food though personally I could have gone without the ridiculous crowds and extremely poor service. Other than that, we did the usual rounds of meeting friends and family while in Kuala Lumpur. The only interesting thing that I did was installing a new ATI 4670 graphics card for my nieces’ gaming computer. We’re back in Kota Kinabalu now and happy to be reunited with our dog Spidey. We’d left her at a boarding school and she’s lost some weight and has shed quite a lot of fur while we were gone. I think it was more out of being miserable at being left alone than because she was treated badly, but she’s delighted to go back to our normal everyday routines now.

Personal Life

Comments were broken

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Apparently the comments system was broken by the new theme I activated last week. I’m been using the current theme Inbw for a while now, and while I still like its clean, straightforward look, I understand that it doesn’t render well at all at screen widths of less than 1280 pixels. On really wide screens, it stretches out the site so much that it can be hard to read.

So I’ve been looking for a clean, simple theme with a fixed-width and settled on Light. But I had no idea that activating it would disable comments so I’ve reactivated the old theme for now. Looks like I still have a great deal of work cut out for me if I’m to figure out how to get it working right.

EDIT: Well, it looks like I’ve been able to fix it, though I’m still not sure what the problem was. All I did was redownload the theme, going to the site of the theme’s maker, instead of WordPress, and install that version.

Personal Life, Politics

Solomon Islands Riots Photos

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I finally got around to uploading the photos that I have of the riots in the Solomon Islands in 2006, as previously promised. I didn’t have a camera handy during the 2000 riots, which was a real shame, since groups of guys toting huge guns all over Honiara would have made for more spectacular sights, and even in 2006, I wasn’t about to take any silly risks, so these are really just photos of the aftermath. You can get much better photos of the whole thing from the BBC. I also won’t really go into the specific details of the political situation since that’s been covered by much better writers than myself.

The riots in 2006 happened after general elections that eventually put Snyder Rini into the Prime Minister’s seat. Mr. Rini had a rather unsavoury reputation, particular after his earlier stint as Finance Minister, so the word on the street was that as Prime Minister, he would be susceptible to bribes from the Chinese businessmen active locally. Or more susceptible that the norm in the Solomon Islands. Anyway, a crowd had been gathering near Parliament House to hear who would be the new Prime Minister, and when they heard that it would be Snyder Rini, they turned nasty and after being turned away by the Australian-led and supported police, descended onto the nearby Chinatown.

Continue reading Solomon Islands Riots Photos →