Brokerage

Singapore has much to celebrate. Along with Hong Kong, it is regarded as one of Southeast Asia’s top financial hubs. Although these rivals match each other on many fronts, their stock exchanges do not. Singapore’s SGX is shrinking, while Hong Kong’s stock exchange continues to grow. It’s easy to see that the SGX is ailing but much harder to figure out exactly why—and how to reverse the trend.

Experienced investors know that the most lucrative returns can come in the least attractive packages. Frontier markets, the world’s pre-emerging markets, could be the new frontier for high growth—at least for those investors who can look past the higher risks. Is the frontier market worth those risks? Many investors believe it is, which is why the market is only slightly less popular than its developed and emerging counterparts.

It’s not often that Canadian oil markets require the intervention of the government to put them back on course. In fact, the last time such a scenario transpired was all the way back in 1981. But in late December, that’s just what happened in the province of Alberta, home to the country’s abundant oil-sands industry.

Apple, the producer of the iconic Mac personal computer and trendy iPhone smartphone, succeeded in reaching a milestone that most corporations only dreamt of: becoming the world’s first company to be valued at $1 trillion. A case study in both perseverance and ingenuity, considering that this was a company flirting with bankruptcy in the late 1990s, few companies can afford not to consider the lessons to be learned in Apple’s meteoritic comeback.

Following on from our recent piece, “Five Industries in Which to Invest in 2019”, we now turn our attention to some of the most promising individual stocks within those industries. Looking forward to 2019, each one of the five sectors certainly appears to have some winners.

Despite the record-breaking highs achieved by US stock markets, 2018 is ending with virtually all those gains wiped out. And it’s not just the United States that has suffered. Germany’s DAX, the United Kingdom’s FTSE 100 and Japan’s Nikkei 225 are all ending the year firmly in the red.

Emerging markets are already looking forward to 2019, glad to see 2018 nearly behind them. It turned out not to be a good year for emerging markets as a whole, after being on top of the world in 2017. Factors beyond their control—such as the monetary-tightening regime in the United States and high-flying dollar, trade wars and market corrections in developed economies—are largely to blame, but recognizing this will not erase the pain.

The last 18 months or so have seen initial coin offerings (ICOs) play a hugely disruptive role in the world of start-up financing. Companies the world over have managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars—if not billions—to fund their blockchain-based development plans

The buy side of the investment world is constantly looking for new methods to generate alpha, the metric that represents the active return on an investment versus the performance of a broader market index or benchmark.

When looking at the performance of major markets such as US equities and oil, 2018 has so far provided much for bulls to cheer. But one market that has clearly underperformed year-to-date is gold.