My Investing Muse

Supply Chain is well said to be the blood of the economy.  To bring goods and services to the customers, this has to go through some supply chain services. For this to be appreciated, let us look at the import, export and balance of trade (export less import) for the USA. For June 2023, exports total $247.483B For June 2023, total import is $312.98B thus, the balance of trade for the month ending June 2023 stands at -$65.497B (negative). This implies that the value of imports is more than the value of exports. For Aug 2023, the PMI are 51.00, 47.00 and 50.40 for services, manufacturing and composite respectively. Composite PMI refers to the combination of both services and manufacturing PMI. This implies that the manufacturing sector is contracting whereas the services sector expands. From the LMI index and its detailed explanation, there is no "urgency" to hire for the coming peak season. This could imply either there are sufficient resources, a lack of demand or both . The ...

VinFast hit the news with a 700% stock value surge. VinFast became the world's 3rd most valuable automated after listing and what do we know about VinFast? (The financial information is taken from their SEC submissions.) From the above, I have a few observations (in USD$) for 3 months ending 31 March 2023: Total revenue is $65.11M. Note that there is a drop in revenue of almost 50% from the same quarter 1 year ago. Total Cost of Sales is $222M Gross loss is $161M The total loss for the period is $598M Thus, the company has yet to achieve break even. V Coming to the balance sheet, here are the observations: Current liabilities ($3.5M) are much more than Current assets ($1.8M) - thus, raising some short-term liquidity concerns. The accumulated losses stand at $5.9M Total assets are valued at $5.08B but total liabilities stand at about $7.2B There is also an increase in the inventories on hand compared Q1 between 2022 and 2023. This is an item to look out for. It could turn into red f...

In my latest preview of the week article, I have covered the company NIO whose earnings will be released this week.  Can a business beat the earnings and be doing worse?  This can be done via earnings estimate management and some “creative” accounting. The following is an extract from my recent article about NIO Performance of NIO Personally, I have already sold out my positions in NIO years back. Despite rising annual revenue, there has been no operating profit as the company has suffered losses since 2016. Losses in 2022 have surged to over $2.243B from the region of $706 in 2020 and 2021. As such, I prefer to monitor the business and hope to see them achieving profits soon. NIO has fallen by over 45% from a year ago. The last price of $10.83 (as of 25 Aug 2023) is above the 52-week low of 7 but remains a distance from the 52-week high of 22.74. For the coming earnings, Investing has a forecast of -2.96 and 9.16B for its EPS and revenue respectively. We should note that Inve...