Wall Street Banks and Hedge Funds

Bloomberg’s Stephanie Ruhle interviews Stan Druckenmiller, an American hedge fund manager and founder of Duquesne Capital Management LLC.

Topic of the interview was pretty wide but I lol'd on their specific discussion about hedge funds and banks, excerpts below:

Stephanie: You have these big banks that are now doing business where they look more like utilities, I don’t know how are these guys going to make a ton of money going forward, maybe there does need to be more consolidation?

Stan: I’d like to see them operate more like utilities, I couldn't care less whether they make money, unless I own their equities, but if we're talking about as a United States citizen, I have no problem with banks being

How to be a successful trader

I've read a lot of  stuffs on how to become a successful trader and investor in the stock market and perhaps this is one of the best.

I think Faceless Trader nailed it on this one.

More than studying the charts or the company’s fundamental positions, the more important thing that trading entails is the aspect of knowing yourself and complementing that personality to the unique trading system that you’ll eventually use to enable yourself to be a better and consistent trader. - Faceless Trader

Know your self. Find a strategy that works and makes sense to you. Stick with it.

Investment Thesis: A Call on COL

I've been looking at COL for some time now and as you might already know, COL Financial Group Inc, the leading online stockbroker in the Philippines is actually listed in the PSE. I personally trade with them and I like their trading platform. Having this said, I really had the interest on investing on this company not only because I like it's service and products but also because of the type of business it is in. Since COL is a stock broker, they make money from brokerage commissions. Every time you and I buy or sell stocks they make money.

I have been closely monitoring how much money they make on a daily basis from their online brokerage operations since Nov last year to present, and when I saw this news below it really came to me that COL is really on a very sweet spot in it's brokerage business and it's position in the Equity capital markets in the Philippines.

Security Name	COL Financial Group, Inc.
Date	03/05/2013
Headline	DCL #1976: Press release: "COL's operating performance rebounds..." - 1
Source
Content
Operating profits of leading online stockbroker COL Financial Group Inc. (COL) rebounded during the fourth quarter of 2012. During the last three months of 2012, COL's operating profits jumped by 16.1% to Php50.1 Mil. This brought operating income for the whole of 2012 to Php339.2 Mil. Although still lower by 15.6% compared to the 2011 total of Php401.7 Mil, the drop was much slower than the 19.4% decline registered during the first nine months of the year. Consolidated net income for the full year fell 8.6% to Php305.9 Mil. Profits rebounded as COL benefited from the recovery of trading activity by local investors in the PSE.

The key takeaway of the above news is that COL's operating profit rebounded in the 4th quarter last year. Noting this, when I checked my gathered data since Nov 5, 2012 to Dec 31, 2012 (2/3rds of the 4th quarter) the average commission they get is about PHP 1.6MM per day (I computed the daily commission by multiplying the daily value turnover under COL x 0.25%). As per the article, this was achieved mainly on the increase in trading activity in the 4th quarter accompanied by COL's increase in number of clients amounting to about 46,536 as of end 2012 from only 27,704 last 2011.

My 2nd Online Stock Broker - BPI Trade

It was about 3 years ago when I opened my first online trading account with COL Financial, they were referred to as CitisecOnline then, but it's been quite a while that I've been contemplating on signing up for a 2nd broker because I want to have a 2nd account to track the performance for my different portfolio constructed using a different strategy other than my personal calls. Hence the idea of opening an account either with FirstmetroSec or BPI Trade.

But it was EkkayTrader who convinced me to just go with BPI Trade as a 2nd online broker since as she pointed out, there was a major improvement on BPI Trade's trading platform, not to mention it was pretty easy to open an account with them. So yeah, thanks to E! haha

COL and BPI Trade

Though BPI Trade has improved, I personally think that COL is the superior broker in terms of functionality, ease of use, research and built in functions. For the COL account owners I think the extra value you get with opening a 2nd trading account with BPI Trade are as follows: