Singapore Stocks

General
1

Hi, I recently did a study to see if the conditions that Ben Graham gives in "the intelligent investor" for the enterprising investor still works and because there were fewer than 10 stocks in the US that met all the 7 rules, I used stockanalysis.com to find other countries that had at least 20 stocks that fit all the rules the results are in the attached spreadsheet, Singapore seems to me to have outperformed the benchmark the best, my question is, is there a way to backtest Singapore stocks to see if this actually worked in the past or if it's just a lucky win?
Graham study latest results (3).xlsx (30.9 KB)

2

The rules used are

  1. P/E lower than 10
  2. Current ratio over 1.499
  3. Dividend yield more than 0
  4. Price to tangible book value under 1.2
  5. Earnings of 2024 more than earnings of 2020
  6. Earnings in each of the past 5 years
  7. total debt not more than 110% of working capital
3

Here is a public screen with the rules you listed: Singapore Stocks

But no stocks pass the screen today and only a few passed in the last 20 years if I include a liquidity and price filters. We only cover the US, Canada and Europe exchanges and so the liquidity is low for the ADRs for those stocks. Once we complete the Asia project then you could switch the universe in this screen to the Asian exchanges and it should find more stocks that pass the liquidity filter. I turned off the liquidity rule for now and it returned 45% in the 05/02/2025 - 08/15/2025 shown on your spreadsheet. But those are not realistic if the stocks were illiquid. I dont know if the source you used included any liquidity rules.

4

A good number of Singapore stocks, complete with fundamentals, are in this universe: https://www.portfolio123.com/app/universe/summary/316604?mt=7 These are Singapore stocks that can trade on German exchanges (though the liquidity on those exchanges is almost nil). Most of them are rather large companies. You can run your test on them and see what you come up with.

5

Probably worth mentioning that having tested this data a bit more (tough to wait for proper Asian data), some of the recent price trends for a lot of these Asian DE-listed stocks don't properly match up to the primary exchange (was just looking at Exedy Corp - 64M:DEU vs 7278 on the proper Tokyo exchange as an example) so it probably isn't safe to rely on any backtest data with them.

6

Good point. But for fundamentals, the data that FactSet gives us is the same as the data they have for the Singapore issue. Take a look a these two snapshot pages: https://www.portfolio123.com/app/stock/snapshot/0R2V:GBR and https://www.portfolio123.com/app/stock/snapshot/AAPL%3AUSA. The prices are clearly somewhat different, but all the fundamental data is basically the same. The analyst estimates are missing for the foreign primary, but yaakro was asking for fundamentals.

7

Thanks all, I did not include any liquidity filter in the original screen, however using $3,000 MIN LIQ, there are at least 10 currently, here is the link (This only includes 4 filters the other 3 I had to do manually) Free Stock Screener - Search, Filter and Analyze Stocks