Affin – seeking fresh perception

Affin banking group has improved much since the days of high NPLs. The onus is now on the bank to shake off its poor market impression.
A STIGMA is often hard to wash away. And that's in spite of the evidence to show that past perceptions don't hold water anymore.
That is somewhat the quandary the Affin banking group finds itself in.

It has transformed its chequered past of high non-performing or impaired loans where ratios had easily hit double digit to one where its balance sheet today is far more healthy than its previous reputation suggests.

However, that improvement is not reflected in the share price of its holding company Affin Holdings Bhd which continues to be dogged by poor market perception that the banking group is still carrying these legacy loans when the opposite is true.

Apart from the market perception, the holding company's shares also suffers from lack of market liquidity.

“Our recovery efforts as well as the writing off of impaired loans had brought down the loan book to RM16bil, which we subsequently grew to RM30bil through the creation of quality credits,” Affin Bank managing director Datuk Zulkiflee Abbas Abdul Hamid tells StarBizWeek.

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JCY likely to maintain strong earnings in Q2

HUGE SURGE: Net profit rose by more than twentyfold to RM162 million in first quarter from RM7 million previously

JCY International Bhd's second-quarter earnings could be as strong as its first-quarter figures.

Southeast Asia's largest technology company is expected to release its second-quarter earnings by the middle of next month.

"Our production output should be on target," said JCY finance director, James Wong, in an interview with Business Times recently.

He added that the company has been doing well in the current quarter (second quarter), subject to external factors such as fluctuations in the currency markets.
In the first quarter ended December 31 2011, JCY's net profit surged more than twentyfold to RM162 million from RM7 million in the same period a year ago.

The huge surge was attributed to the flash floods in Thailand which had caused havoc to hard disk-drive (HDD) component manufacturers based in the kingdom.

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How To Become A Day Trader

During the heyday of the tech bubble in the late 1990s, day traders made easy money buying and selling Internet stocks. It didn't take much skill to succeed in those days. In just a 17-month period, from October 1998 to March 2000, the Nasdaq Composite Index skyrocketed from roughly 1,344 to an all-time high of around 5,132. All you had to do was ride that tidal wave to rake in the profits. Many of those traders made just as much shorting the index on its way down to a low of about 1,108 in October 2002, losing 78% of its value in 31 months.

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