Category: Investing

BPI in a hurry to switch its clients to the new online and/or mobile platforms

November 5, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I received an email from BPI today detailing how their old platforms, for mobile and online. will stop working by the following timelines:

Current (old) Platforms Current (old) platforms no longer accessible by
BPI Mobile app December 1, 2018
BPI Online Banking January 11, 2019

The new platforms may have some more security features, that’s why? But why rush your clients when STILL, you can’t do investing transactions in the new platforms? Are they even aware of that? That there’s no way you can add to your Mutual Fund or UITF accounts using the new platforms? At least that’s STILL my observation when using the new BPI online platform.

COL Financial and Bank Charges

September 15, 2016 / / 0 Comments

This is disappointing news for COL Financial subscribers/account holders. It appears that when you transfer funds to your COL Financial account via bank transfers, bank charges will now apply.

This is because transferring funds to COL Financial for your further stock transactions are treated like bills payment, thus the fee. And starting this year, COL Financial refused to subsidize them. See notice below:

COL Financial Bank Charges notice.

COL Financial Bank Charges notice.

 

With the stiff competition in the stock brokerage business, I don’t think this is a good move by COL Financial. They better offer more value added services in order to stop account holders from moving elsewhere.

Philippine Banks Catching Up with Technology

June 7, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Banks should be at the forefront of technology, especially in this internet age, delivering real-time data about their customers and their accounts.

The Philippine banks may not be as nimble in adapting the latest technologies in rendering their services as that of banks from other countries, but at least we know that the effort is there in trying to catch up.

Internet Banking

Disclaimer: I currently own Metrobank, BPI and Security Bank accounts, although I used to own PNB, BDO, EastWest and even Equitable-PCI (before their merger with BDO) bank accounts.

From my experience, the first to offer the most reliable (in terms of security, uptime, utility, and convenience) internet banking service was Metrobank. I have to admit, though, that BPI was able to catch up and in my own opinion (sans the downtimes that recently plagued their online banking) offer the best internet banking experience, especially when coupled with the convenience in managing your investment accounts via BPI Express Online.

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Nickel Asia $NIKL reports higher volume but lower Peso revenue in 3Q-2015

October 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Nickel Asia Corporation (PSE: NIKL, RIC: NIKL.PS, BBG: NIKL.PM) reports 12% increase in sales volume for the nine-month period ended September 30, 2015 on a year-on-year basis, but that peso revenue slumped by as much as 40% for that same period YOY. We’ve seen soft metal prices, particularly LME Nickel price and nickel ore prices, in the last year or so, thus a huge drop in NIKL’s and similar mining companies’ revenue.

I’m attaching the press release in full below, but the main points can be summarized in the graphs that follow:

NIKL-Total Volume September YOY 2015 vs. 2014

NIKL-Total Volume September YOY 2015 vs. 2014

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Remembering the payphone, again!

December 11, 2014 / / 0 Comments

As per Scott Fearon, CFA, on Bad Connection: What Today’s Investors Can Learn from the Death of the Pay Phone

Back in the late 1990s, I received a steady stream of research reports from prestigious Wall Street brokerages recommending the stocks of, you guessed it, publicly traded pay phone companies. There were four of them still in business at the time, and as the reports pointed out, they were all attractively “cheap” by traditional valuation measures, such as their price-to-earnings multiples or market capitalization-to-revenues ratios. Not only that, but recently enacted deregulation was allowing pay phone operators to boost the prices they could charge for local calls, leading to predictions of new “windfalls” on Wall Street and in the financial media. Of course, in hindsight, we can see that those forecasts were wildly off the mark and that there was a clear reason those stocks were such bargains: They were well on their way to oblivion. The widespread adoption of cellular phones had already started, and it wasn’t going to stop. But at the time, many investors dropped their coins into the slots of these classic value traps and never got them back.

This, of course, reminds me of my earlier post about the Payphone: Continue reading

ETF’s coming soon to the Philippine Market?

July 11, 2012 / / 0 Comments

BusinessWorld reports ‘SEC completes draft measure for exchange-traded funds‘. SEC is then moving to solicit public comments before finalizing the measure.

I have always welcomed the idea of ETF’s (Exchange Traded Funds) in the local bourse. Think about it, no more minimum holding periods nor sales load to worry about when buying and selling ETF stocks in the local stock exchange, except of course for the usual minimal fees and taxes.

In my opinion, this is a more liquid type of investment than regular mutual funds or UITF’s in a sense that you can sell your shares anytime without worrying about minimum holding periods and their corresponding charges. Besides, this is still a managed fund, thus you need not devote any more time in research for stocks to pick.

You might also want to read the 5 Things You Need to Know About Exchange Traded Funds.

Comparing Mutual Fund Returns

July 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

There are a lot of resources, particularly blogs, that compare returns from different types of Mutual Funds, and even UITF’s (Unit Investment Trust Funds), over different time periods. For example, try reading ‘The Best Performing Mutual Funds In The Last 3-5 Years‘.

Reviewing these numbers before investing to a new fund is a good exercise for it will give you better perspective at which fund you want to bet your money on. These return numbers are a “look back” at how the funds were managed, and thus performed, in the last 3 or 5 years. Continue reading