BDI continues to plummet

This only interests me because I’ve been waiting and waiting for the right time to purchase PSL shares, but other than a brief few month spell 2 years ago they haven’t deserved a position within the portfolio, not b/c they are rubbish operators but more because the industry just looks crap in general. Overcapacity expansion resulted from the 2009-2010 rates and since then combined with a decrease of commodity demand from China has hurt everyone. Once the industry has shaken itself up after a few bankruptcies, remove some supply, I’ll happily look into PSL yet again, but who knows long this will take…

Thailand’s border trade

We’ve been talking about this since 200…6? That once Thailand’s neighbours begin to grow then Thailand is perfectly positioned to benefit (as always this is one lucky country b/c of its location). From a bloomberg article they state “In the first eight months of 2015, Thai sales to Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos jumped 8.1 percent to $14.5 billion. That accounted for 10 percent of Thailand’s total exports. Mae Sot is setting the pace, with cross-border trade in 2014 close to $2 billion, a 250 percent increase over three years earlier…. 

Myanmar will grow at 8.5 percent this year, according to the World Bank. That’s faster than even China or India. Equally significant, Mae Sot is located almost precisely midway between Bangkok and Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, formerly known as Rangoon. It also straddles a planned east-west rail and road corridor linking the Vietnamese port of Danang with the Indian subcontinent via Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar.”

Now which companies will benefit? Public co wise there aren’t that many, perhaps some logistic co’s, hotels, airlines, consumer names but none specific that I can find just yet, Here’s looking forward to trip up North soon to find something while sitting on a bike.

MSCI AP ex Japan…what about MSCI AP ex China?

This is an absolutely pointless random thought but hasn’t anyone wondered why the MSCI AP indices are always ex. Japan? It seems that its a function of pure marketing because japan’s equity indices hadn’t been attractive, up until 2 years ago, and were known as “widow-makers” in financial circles, so that the only way to sell the Asia-Pac was to remove Japan from all equity indices. Now with investors accepting Japan more as a result of Abe’s policies, will we see an AP indices from MSCI including Japan, but perhaps removing China if their equity markets don’t improve transparency or performance? Who knows, it’s up the powers that be if they can sell it or not.

Source(s): Bloomberg