Why I Started Murasaki ts

I have mainly been an employee for most part of my life in the financial industry. There were a couple of times I went into business ventures with partners. One nearly got listed on ACE back in 2000 but suddenly the rules changed and caused the company to be shuttered. For the past few years I have had the pleasure of not being "employed" but still allowed to do whatever I wanted. I have had opportunities to start some business ventures but they never really caught my passion as making money for money's sake seems too frivolous. I rather spend my time on something that actually will make money, and something people really needed. Then its also important that the business must be easily leveraged, i.e. you can replicate in other markets with minimal capital investment.

I looked at what I am supposedly "good" at, I may not be good but I like the markets a lot. When I was in my late 20s, I played the markets like everyone else and lost more money than I could afford. People nowadays lose 30% of the capital and they scream bloody murder...  Pussies! Have you ever lost more than your capital with no way of repaying back? Thanks to the go-go 90s, you can do that, you can get RM100,000 or RM200,000 limits with your remisiers with actually zero deposits. Suffice to say, you don't just have one account with one remisier, so technically I was able to buy up to RM500,000 with almost less than RM50,000 deposit, and I did back then, just like almost everyone else.

To do that, basically you can only go contra, i.e. 7 days holding period, you sometimes may be able to contango some of it and go another 7 days but thats pretty much the end of story. So, when you have wiped out your RM50,000 (so easily) and find yourself owing still another RM70,000 when you are not even 30, and your monthly salary was a wonderful RM7,500 then, you know you are in deep trouble.

I decided that I better get better at this or just go do something else altogether.

For the next 5-6 years, I studied diligently on what cause prices to breakout from a slumber. What were the patterns that caused share prices to move out of their "range". Over the years I have tested and retested many formulas, looking at various moving averages, standard deviations based on volume, volume velocity etc... I believe I managed to isolate some very good early indicators that would help me do that. 

However, I still did not feel that was sufficient, I needed to know about the fundamentals, I needed to know whether money was moving in or out of a stock as well. So I took what was widely available and tweaked those other factors to come up with 3 pillars solid information to aid my investing decisions. 

The fourth pillar is the only one technical indicator that I firmly believe in, breaking out of the 52 week highs. However the systems out there only advocate a buy when a stock break out convincingly. I thought that was myopic and silly, you would watch a stock move up 20%-30% towards its 52 week high and do nothing until it breaks the high, then jump in ??!! The 4th pillar helps me to track stocks moving towards the breaking high, we can buy when the uptrend is confirmed with just less than 10%-15% to its 52 week high, if it fails to break - sell, if it breaks, then double up. Seems like a no brainer to me.

Armed with the 4 pillars, I spent the last 7 years talking to various tech nerds and programmers to get this onto a web based solution. All said it was very difficult, you can do that easily with end of day prices, which I blatantly refused as that is so inferior. The system needed to be live to extract the earlier info in the quickest manner.

Two years ago I met my business partner for this venture, he was the original chief software architect for Tong Kooi Onn, and he basically created Phileo Allied's internet banking and internet broking systems single handedly back in the early 90s (not plug and play stuff). Needless to say, it looked like a no brainer to him.

For far too long, the markets have only favoured the few with the better information flow, the better networking. Murasaki equalises the platform for everyone, with it you don't even need to hear from the horses' mouth, you don't have to kiss anyone's derrier to get the extra information.

I am very excited that after 10 odd years from ideas germination to fruition, I have something which I believe will be a big game changer for investors. My team of 6 will be going around the country in the coming weeks and months to broking halls and holding information sessions on our product. You have nothing to lose, you can even sign up for a free 5 day trial, no obligations. 

As always when I mention my business plan to people, the unvoiced hurdle in their minds would be "something like this coming out of Malaysia or by a Malaysian, sounds ludicrous". Maybe I should migrate to Switzerland, and set up this company and let it be called a Swiss product, what do you think? (Off on a tangent, the recent jv announced by Vincent Tan's MOL with Soft Space is a good example. Soft Space is founded and run by a Malaysian, his mobile payment system is a huge game changer and there are only 3 companies in the world that can do what his system is doing. The one based in Switzerland is already worth more than $3bn. Its like a mobile charger to your handphone, only it is not, it can accept your credit card as transactions and you can sign your signature on the phone. It revolutionises payment systems. Now, hawkers at night markets can accept credit cards, people doing insurance sales or MLMs can accept credit cards ...). Malaysia Boleh, but its not from shouting stupid slogans. Go and find something you like passionately, try and find things people would need, or improve on the status quo ...

What about back testing? In my mind for the past ten years I have been using the same system but because I am not a computer, I miss out on many things. I can only gather maybe less than 30% of the required database to make my decisions, something a live web based system would help eradicate. Now that its all uploaded, I am confident it will improve anyone's investing decision making by a huge quantum. My staff of 6 were just as skeptical, but for the past 2 months, they have been back testing and most of them were novices in the stock market. Now all of them are buying one or two shares a week and hitting the spot. Just talk to my staff on Saturday, they bought Scomi at 29 sen, Golsta at below 80 sen and Great Wall Plastic at 93-94 sen. When they told me they were going to buy Scomi, naturally I scoffed because I know the company, they said it matched all the rules of thumb I have set, so I said you go ahead and buy (I didn't) ... they bought, they now laughed at me. Sigh, its funny cause sometimes we are "crippled" by the old knowledge we have.

The official launch is this Saturday but some smart people noticed the website and started signing up already for the free trial. I would like to remind all users that we are still doing some patching work every now and then till Friday so the service may be slightly interrupted now and then. Do note that we will be launching for Singapore market in January/February 2013 and Jakarta market in June/July 2013.

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