Welcome to the latest edition of top stock market highlights.
HDB resale prices
HDB resale prices have continued climbing, demonstrating their resilience in an economy marked by high inflation and surging interest rates.
Prices inched up 1.4% in January compared with December last year, based on flash estimates released by StreetSine Technology Group (SRX) and 99.co.
Though this quantum may seem low, it was still higher than the 0.2% month-on-month increase in December and the 0.6% month-on-month increase logged in November.
More HDB flats also transacted above the S$1 million mark last month, coming in at 40 compared with 28 in December.
Transaction volumes have also climbed, with 2,575 resale flats changing hands, up 14.9% year on year.
On a year-on-year basis, prices rose 8.7% while transaction volumes increased by 5.4%.
These numbers were surprising, considering the government had imposed new property cooling measures back in September last year.
Private homeowners who sell their flats need to wait for 15 months before they can purchase an HDB resale flat.
One possible reason for this resilience is that HDB upgraders who find private condominiums too expensive and are looking for larger spaces may go for HDB resale flats instead.
It remains to be seen if these numbers can hold up for the remainder of this year.
But if they do, real estate brokerages APAC Realty (SGX: CLN) and PropNex (SGX: OYY) could see healthy business volumes for 2023.
Temasek Holdings
Meanwhile, Temasek Holdings is raising funds through the issuance of bonds.
The investment firm is issuing two tranches of bonds comprising four and 10-year Euro-denominated bonds through its wholly-owned subsidiary Temasek Financial (I).
Aptly named T2027-EUR and T2033-EUR, these bonds will be issued under Temasek subsidiary’s US$25 billion guaranteed global medium note programme.
Temasek has been assigned a corporate credit rating of Aaa by Moody’s and AAA by S&P Global Ratings, a testament to the firm’s high credit standing.
These bonds will be listed on Singapore Exchange Limited (SGX: S68) and the net proceeds will be used to fund ordinary business activities.
The four-year bond offers a coupon rate of 3.25% per annum and the 10-year bond is priced at 3.5% per annum.
Listing for both bonds is expected to take place on 16 February.
Investors who wish to diversify their portfolio holdings away from shares can consider buying these bonds from the market.
Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT)
Software giant Microsoft is bullish on incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into its search engine
CEO Satya Nadella gushed about AI-powered search in a recent interview with the news channel CNBC.
According to him, such enhanced search capabilities are the biggest thing to happen to Microsoft in the last 15 years since cloud infrastructure was first pioneered.
The Redmond-based company is incorporating AI into its Bing search engine and Edge browser, and Nadella commented that this enhancement represents a “big opportunity” for Microsoft as search is a “very profitable” business.
Last month, Microsoft announced a multi-billion-dollar deal to invest in ChatGPT’s maker OpenAI.
This new investment phase, its third, looks set to accelerate the development of AI and help to commercialise more advanced technologies.
ChatGPT took the world by storm as one of the largest and most powerful language-processing AI models to date.
Powered by a large language model (LLM), it is programmed to data mine a huge amount of data to generate coherent responses to human questions and statements.
Bing, however, sits in a distant second place to Google, a division of technology titan Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL).
Google has also announced an AI-powered chatbot called Bard that will be rolled out more extensively in the coming weeks.
Bard is powered by Google’s internally-developed LLM called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
It seems that these two technology behemoths will square against each other in the coming months to see which AI-enabled search engine gains the upper hand.
These advancements also promise to usher in a new era for search and communications powered by AI, and investors could see more updates soon as both companies compete to be the best in their industry.
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Disclosure: Royston Yang owns shares of Singapore Exchange Limited and Alphabet.
