End year window dressing

The KLCI ended 2012 at yet another all-time high of 1,688 points, up 10 points from the opening. Some window dressing, but not as much as the previous year whereby the KLCI went up 20 points on 30 Dec 2011. However since 2008, the market performance on the last trading day of the year has been a bit on and off.. 

Date	KLCI		Gain/Loss
	Open	Close
31/12/2012	1678	1688	10
30/12/2011	1510	1530	20
30/12/2010	1527	1518	-9
31/12/2009	1271	1272	1
31/12/2008	883	870	-13

Perhaps the fund managers were really sleeping on the job in 2011 and had an oh shit moment on the last day and decided to prop up the KLCI to make the year's performance a bit more impressive.. 

Our opinions do not matter..

Zhuangzi (庄子) was a 4th century BCE Chinese philosopher. In the the Taoist book Zhuangzi (why did he confuse people by using his name as the title of the book) he writes:

Quote
I, by the name of Zhuang Zhou, once dreamed that I was a butterfly, fluttering happily here and there. I was so pleased that I forgot I was Zhuang Zhou. When I suddenly woke up, I was astonished to find that I was a matter of fact Zhuang Zhou. Did Zhuang Zhou dream of the butterfly or did the butterfly dream of Zhuang Zhou?

End Quote

Sounds a bit like an LSD trip to me. Anyway I totally agree with his opinion that opinions don't matter. But wait, what about that opinion? Does it matter? Looks like my laptop is having trouble computing that..

Pyramid Scheme

Just some lyrics I wrote for my band's song on Pyramid Schemes. Yes, must be the first song in the world to espouse on the evils of ponzi schemes..

Pyramid Scheme (to be sung in progressive metal style)

The spring flows, flows with wealth and gold

But the thief

Poisons the well with

Greed hate lies

He conquers our minds

Our minds filled

With empty promises

And in dreams we drown in wealth

We are all in this together

This scheme of

This scheme of pyramids

We are all thieves together

The thieves of

Thieves of pyramids

Our minds burn, burn with desire

But we let

The thieves deceive us

Amaze us with

Tales of gold and riches

Our souls filled

With empty elation

And in dreams we drown in joy

They all fall, fall down pyramids

Burdened by

Their own weight of lies

The thieves are

Incarcerated

Their souls filled

With empty atonement

And in dreams they drown in sorrow

The enigmatic palm oil industry

The KLCI closed at a record high of 1681 points last Friday, with plantation stocks among the top performers. However, the plantation sector has been underperforming the rest of the market the last few months, just like how QPR has been underperforming this season in the Premier League despite having spent millions of our airfare tickets on overpaid players..

The Plantation sector headed for a performance nosedive since July this year compared with the KLCI (red indicates KLCI, green indicates plantation)

This is mainly blamed to the oversupply of palm oil and weak global demand. The listing of FGV didn't help either. Its shares have plunged by 79 sen (around 15%) at the time of writing since it was listed. This apparently pissed off enough Felda settlers that they decided to take to the streets to protest against the group's chairman last Friday. I'm not sure but this must be the first time in Malaysia we've seen shareholders taking it to the streets to protest against an underperforming company. 

Scores of police separate an anti-ANAK group from the ANAK rally participants at the Felda headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, December 28, 2012. — Picture by Choo Choy May

With the new year approaching perhaps there is some brief light at the end of the shady oil palm plantation? Tax cuts on Malaysia crude palm oil exports from the current 22-23% to 4.5-8.5% are set to take place on 1 Jan 2013.. There could be some short term gain to capitalise here. However, any upside will probably be limited unless macroeconomic conditions improve significantly. 

Above is a a chart of the KLSE Plantation index from year 2003. Since the 2008 economic crisis, the plantation sector has been climbing.. a small upside may be seen in January but a larger correction might take place in 2013

No Plastic bag day

 Let's go green they say. The Hulk is not happy.

Recently.. ok, maybe not so recently.. state governments and city councils around Malaysia have been promoting against the use of plastic bags and encouraging supermarkets and grocery stores to stop handing plastic bags for free to customers. A good gesture towards protecting the environmental? Bullshit, i say!

The environment doesn't care if you're gonna use plastic bags or not. What about reducing fossil fuel consumption? Open burning? Forrest fires? Plastic bags only cause problems when not disposed of properly and when they end in the sea, consumed by sea creatures who later mutate to become giant flesh eating amphibous zombies. Ok, maybe not. But if we have proper landfills, the whole issue of disposing and storing non biodegradable materials shouldn't arise. 

Personally, I think its a conspiracy between supermarket owners to reduce costs and increase profits. Previously they gave out plastic bags for free. Now, they charge for them. They also don't need to purchase as many plastic bags as before because their turnover rates should be lower. But is that reflected in a decrease in the price of their goods? 

New Year's Eve (Slumber) Party

The past few days, I've been getting a few text messages promoting New Year's Eve parties by restaurants, bars, libraries.. eh? oh.. its bar called Library.. altho I'm pretty sure they're not in the business of lending beers .. just hangovers.. and they're probably not too bothered if you don't return them. 

Anyhow it got me thinking.. why do people revel in alcohol on last day of the year? To forget all the resolutions and plans for the year that were never achieved? To have one last drink because you never know if all computers in the world would be able to register the new year in their system and cause a global catastrophe?

Here's an alternative to all that partying and drinking as you await the new year and all the hopes and expectations and it brings: Sleep. Yes. Nothing is better than sleep. It brings as much joy (if not more) than alcohol and doesn't cause a dime. Also what's better than having had a good night's rest while laughing at the rest of the world with their hangovers the next morning?

Well some of you might feel left out if you didn't go for a night out to welcome the new year. Here's a solution to allow us to both have a blast and get some shut eye - bring the time forward. Yes, all you need is a clock. And some imagination. Just ask Mr Bean's friends..

Just move the time forward to midnight and..

 Taa da!! Its the new year!! Auld lang syne and all!

Did you know that Mr Bean was the originator of Oppa Gangnam style before it became popular? Too bad it didn't catch on with his friends..

Yeah, that's right kid.. should've moved the clock forward instead

Less is more, More is less

Humans are illogical creatures. Logic and reasoning are pretty useful to the mad scientist conducting his 823rd experiment on resurecting corpses before he unleashes another zombie apocalypse but is it really useful on our daily lives? Perhaps doing the illogical could be the best when faced with decisions?

Who would've thought of forgiving his/her enemies? 

That having less aspirations leads to more contentment?
And more wealth leads to less happiness?
Or the more cheeseburgers a guy has, the less chicks he gets? (ok, this one makes sense).

Logically, people tell us that hard work leads to success. But what about this thought: The harder you try at something, the harder you fall. Because in our single-minded strive for success, our minds just blind our eyes  from seeing the shortcuts that lie along the way. Eveyone uses the example of Thomas Edison as a testament to persevering despite encountering failure. But I'm more of a Tesla guy. When Edison died in 1931, Nikola Tesla contributed the only negative opinion to the New York Times, buried in an extensive coverage of Edison's life:

He had no hobby, cared for no sort of amusement of any kind and lived in utter disregard of the most elementary rules of hygiene  ... His method was inefficient in the extreme, for an immense ground had to be covered to get anything at all unless blind chance intervened and, at first, I was almost a sorry witness of his doings, knowing that just a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor. But he had a veritable contempt for book learning and mathematical knowledge, trusting himself entirely to his inventor's instinct and practical American sense. 

Also, here's a great quote from Bruce Lee. Guy could beat up anyone but lost his life to a little painkiller. How illogical is that?
Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

• Bruce Lee: A Warrior's Journey (2000)

So instead of making more resolutions this coming year, lets do the illogically opposite and make resolutions for less. Less work. Less expectations. Less KPop to invade our airwaves.

RSawit.. making a comeback?

RSawit shares made quite a significant jump today. Significant enough to interest me to acquire some for my own. End of year window dressing by retailers? Positive sentiment on palm oil stocks due to tax cuts in Jan 2013? 

RSawit is still one of the cheapest plantation stocks in KLSE with a market cap above RM1m.. It'll probably be a challenging year for plantation counters next year but I suppose big brother would take measures to make it less of a challenge.. Palm oil is a major industry in our country.. wait, that's like saying the sky is blue.. do you see anything apart from palm oil tress when you drive in highways around Malaysia? No, only trees wishing to chopped down to make way for more palm oil trees. Or another high rise fancy condo that the public doesn't need but buys anyway.. but that's another industry with its own challenges next year. 

Vegetarians and bowels

If vegetables were good for us then why are they good for bowel movement as well? I mean shouldn't our bodies be conditioned NOT to get rid of the good stuff we eat? Shouldn't meat and other fatty foods be the cure to constipation? No? Guess humans haven't reached that stage of evolution yet..

Seriously though, meat is bad. So bad that its causing global warming. And cancer. And I won't go further. Just ask John Robbins, once heir of the Baskin-Robbins empire. He wrote a whole book about it - The Food Revolution.  Baskin Robbins Empire? Revolution? No, its not about triple scoop ice cream cones taking arms and causing the downfall of the evil sausage empire. But a good read anyhow.

All this preaching and typing is tiring.. now for good ol' bacon ham salami egg and cheese sandwich..

What is Final Absolution?

Its a Belgian beer, brewed by Dragonmead. Trippel ale, apparently. Haven't tried it myself but are there any bad Belgian beers? No? Thought so. And therefore worth promoting..

Seriously though, its a just a phrase I thought of when I was around 16.. or 18.. I can't remember. I just knew I had more pimples than skin on my face back then and I was a big fan of Muse's album Absolution (which is pretty sick album and way better than whatever dance pop tunes they've wrote since but i digress...) And the phrase just stuck with me.. until I decided to start a blog.. and realised some other beer company stole my phrase!

So what the hell is Final Absolution? I'm not sure what the guys at Dragonmead were thinking.. is it the last beer you drink before you beg for forgiveness from your brain the next day for that nasty hangover you have? To me, the concept of absolution is a tricky one.. as I believe that there shouldn't be a need for any absolution.. the concepts of right and wrong, sin and virtue are all man-made ideas.. Is there really any true wrong or right in this world? How dark does the shade of grey need to be before its considered black? Hence the FINAL absolution. I don't need to say sorry for whatever crap I write here cos I don't force anyone to read it. If you enjoy it, then great, if you hate it, well go watch some K-Pop or funny cat videos on Youtube to make yourself feel better then. And if you find anything good please pass me the link. Except for K-Pop or funny cat videos. Not a fan of those.