Portfolio update June 2026

Hi! Welcome to a subscriber-only edition of Asian Century Stocks – a newsletter about Asian value stocks. For a complete list of all previous posts, check out the Table of Contents.

Disclaimer: This article constitutes the author’s personal views and is for entertainment and educational purposes only. It is not to be construed as financial advice in any shape or form. Please do your own research and seek your own advice from a qualified financial advisor. From time to time, the author holds positions in the stocks mentioned below consistent with the views and opinions expressed in this article. This is a disclosure, not a recommendation to buy or sell stocks.

Market commentary

Last month, there was a decline in the MSCI All Country Asia-Pacific:

In a talk with Max from Monetary Matters, I argued that speculative activity in South Korea and Taiwan might be nearing a crescendo. Naver search queries for stocks ("주식") are at a higher level since 2021:

Technicals are now deteriorating, and smart newsletter writers (Citrini, Cluseau) are having second thoughts about their exposures to memory chip stocks.

The biggest surprise over the past month has been the strength in Thai equities:

There's been an equity market rally following the Bhumjaithai Party's win in February's General Election. Marc Faber started buying Thai equities mid-last year, with exposure to interest-rate-sensitive sectors like homebuilding.

In mid-June, I wrote a post on what constitutes a great business model. I argued that the best businesses can be compared with toll bridges, benefiting from flows of demand.

I've had some losses in companies selling commodity products (notably in Malaysian glove maker Hartalega), and I'm now trying my best to move towards toll bridge-like near-monopolies. My focus on Asian credit bureaus is part of this theme.

In early June, I returned to Hong Kong to attend Swen Lorenz's Weird Shit Investing conference. It felt like optimism had returned to the city, with talent from Mainland China flowing in. Property prices have started rising again, too. I continue to think that Hong Kong's death has been exaggerated.

MSCI China has come off quite a bit since October last year. It seems to have been driven by investors moving away from China's tech platforms to AI-related tech hardware. The PRC government's crackdown on Trip.com and the higher gaming taxes have not helped either.

Indonesia remains the black sheep of Asian equity markets. Indonesia-focused fund managers are now visibly under pressure. In late June, ex-education minister Nadiem Makarim was sentenced to 10 years in prison, along with an IDR 1 trillion fine. I've had multiple people tell me he's clean and that the anti-corruption case has no merit. One Twitter user noted that Nadiem will probably be unable to pay the fine, and that the government will take his Gojek shares instead. If so, the verdict could simply be akin to a dirty, hostile takeover of Gojek by the people in charge.

So the headlines about Indonesian equities continue to be nothing but doom and gloom. That said, our friends at Variant Perception recently experienced total capitulation in MSCI Indonesia with LPPL exhaustion signals across intraday, daily and weekly timeframes.

However, models like these are not always accurate and should perhaps only serve as a tentative indicator of potential crowding.

Portfolio update

June was a weak month for the portfolio. The portfolio declined by -1.5% month-on-month. Since the portfolio's inception in October 2021, the portfolio's value has increased by +73.6%, equivalent to a +12.4% compound annual growth rate:

Japanese SaaS company Freee declined due to a deceleration in revenue growth. Malaysia's Hartalega also came down due to glove ASP pressures. Asian currencies such as the Japanese Yen and the Korean Won have also been weak.

Here's what my Asia-focused portfolio looked like as of 30 June 2026: