After careful consideration, MAS has decided to issue revised proposals aimed at enhancing the safeguards for retail customers covering a wider range of investment products that applies to both listed and unlisted investment products.
Under the revised proposals, financial advisers and brokers will be required to formally assess a retail customer’s investment knowledge or experience before selling investment products to them. Customers who do not have the relevant knowledge or experience in specific unlisted investment products must be given financial advice before being able to purchase the product.
In the case of listed investment products, additional safeguards will be required when brokers approve trading accounts for customers who are assessed not to possess the relevant knowledge or experience in derivatives. These new obligations will apply for all investment products other than a list of products which are already established in the market and generally understandable by retail investors.
The excluded products are:
• Shares
• Depositary receipts
• Subscription rights pursuant to rights issues
• Company warrants
• Units in business trusts
• Units in real estate investment trusts
• Plain vanilla bonds (including convertible bonds)
• Money market instruments
• Life insurance policies (other than investment-linked policies)
• Structured deposits (including dual-currency investments)
MAS invites interested parties to give their views and comments on the proposals contained in the Consultation Paper. The consultation period will end on 12 March 2010.
In the aftermath of the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti on 12th January 2010, resources are now being mobilized around the world to help recovery efforts in Haiti.
If you would like to do your part for the earthquake victims, you might do so by making a donation to UNICEF or CARE at this special page set up by Google. The list of other organisations which are accepting funds for Haiti relief are also listed on the site.
Last Friday, DBS introduced a “money safe” guarantee to give its Internet banking (iBanking) customers added protection and greater peace of mind.
With the “money safe” guarantee, DBS’ iBanking customers will be automatically protected when transacting online, with the bank reimbursing them in the unlikely event of unauthorised transactions on their iBanking account. Customers will still need to continue to do their part by keeping their login PINs, identity and tokens secure, to minimise the risk of unauthorised transactions.
“We believe that Internet banking is becoming an increasingly important aspect of banking of the future. Although the industry follows a set of high security standards, many still have concerns over transacting on the Internet. As the bank with the largest number of online users, we want to take the lead to give our customers greater peace of mind and assurance when they transact online with us,” said Mr Rajan Raju, Group Executive, Consumer Banking Group, DBS.
I consider this a pretty insignificant guarantee as I don’t think the bank will take liability if the customer is clearly at fault in losing his pin, etc.
For the case where the internet banking account is compromised through no fault of the customer, it would be seen as very bad PR if they try to make the customer liable anyway.
These are quotations made by Warren Buffett in the past which turned out to be correct and will probably hold true in the future.
It is the nature of capitalism to periodically have recessions. People overshoot.
We’ve got a wonderful economy… There’s never been anything like that in the history of the world. We live seven times better than the people did a century ago on average… We’ve had problems all along. If you look at the last century, we had that Great Depression and World War Two, we had the Cold War, we had the atomic bomb, but the country does well.
I made by far the best buys I’ve ever made in my lifetime in 1974. And that was a time of great pessimism and the oil shock and stagflation and all those sort of things. But stocks were cheap.
What’s nice about investing is you don’t have to swing at pitches. You can watch pitches come in one inch above or one inch below your navel, and you don’t have to swing. No umpire is going to call you out.
You’re neither right nor wrong because other people agree with you. You’re right because your facts are right and your reasoning is right—and that’s the only thing that makes you right. And if your facts and reasoning are right, you don’t have to worry about anybody else.
If they reduce the price of hamburgers at McDonald’s today I feel terrific. Now I don’t go back and think, gee, I paid a little more yesterday. I think I’m going to be buying them cheaper today. Anything you’re going to be buying in the future, you want to have get cheaper.
They know that overstaying the festivities – that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future – will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.
The world went mad. What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.
These are some of the attributes that I think would make a successful investor:
Independent thinking and avoiding the herd instinct
Patience – both in buying and selling
Decisiveness to think when the market calls for it
Last week, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were at the Columbia Business School at a special CNBC event to answer questions from their students. The areas covered:
Capitalism
How greed and fear contributed to last year’s crisis
Goldman Sachs
Appropriate role of government
The industry that will produce the next Bill Gates
Buffett’s railroad exposure
Whether the stock market rally is real
Advice for those who are still unclear about what to do in life
How to allocate capital today
Watch the video here:
The full transcripts of the session can be obtained here:
After careful consideration, MAS has decided to issue revised proposals aimed at enhancing the safeguards for retail customers covering a wider range of investment products that applies to both listed and unlisted investment products.
We’ve got a wonderful economy… There’s never been anything like that in the history of the world. We live seven times better than the people did a century ago on average… We’ve had problems all along. If you look at the last century, we had that Great Depression and World War Two, we had the Cold War, we had the atomic bomb, but the country does well.