The recent Supreme Court ruling ordering the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to look into the extent of foreign ownership in PLDT raises a very important question: Did the telecommunications giant violate the Philippine Constitution with regard to the maximum 40% foreign equity rule?
In layman’s terms, the Supreme Court is basically asking the SEC: is PLDT owned by Filipinos or by foreigners?
The battle for low housing loan rates in the Philippines is on. In the previous months, we’ve seen a variety of advertisements by local banks aggressively promoting their discounted home loan rates.
Here is a list of housing loan rates offered by Philippine banks.
(Update October 2014: Compare New Housing Loan Interest Rates in the Philippines)
Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco is the rightful owner of the contested 20% shares of San Miguel Corporation (SMC), the Philippine Supreme Court ruled with finality today.
The Supreme Court (SC) struck down the appeal of the government, represented by the Philippine Commission on Good Governance (PCGG), saying the petitioner failed to substantiate its claim that the SMC shares were part of Cojuangco’s ill-gotten wealth allegedly acquired during the reign of ex-President Ferdinand Marcos.
Bad customer service can take a company down. Sadly, this basic marketing tenet seems to have been lost to Gordion Hotel (a Vigan-based hotel) and group buying website Ensogo.
It’s been one month now and my problem with a voucher I bought from Ensogo is still not solved. (For details on how this all started, read the other post Problem with group buying site Ensogo.)
Recently there is talk again that the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) plans to extend the trading hours. Stock trading in the Philippines is one of the shortest in the world, with trading in the PSE lasting only for two and a half hours, from 9:30 am until 12 noon.
Members of the PSE board are reportedly mulling the approval of this trading extension proposal. According to an Inquirer report, “in a meeting on Wednesday, members of the board arrived at a consensus to reactivate the policy on afternoon trading to ‘align’ local markets with the rest of the world.”
The current proposal is to extend trading for 2 more hours, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. There will be a trading break after the current closing time at noon.
Back in 2007, we wrote about the revised criteria of the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) with regard to companies that will be included in the Philippine Stock Exchange Index (PSEi) or Philippine Composite Index.
The PSEi, formerly known as the Phisix, is composed of 30 publicly-listed Philippine stocks selected to represent general movement of market prices and is generally regarded as one of the indicators of the general state of the Philippine economy.
For most of us, it’s a given that the Catholic Church is rich. Obvious proof of that are their sprawling acres of land, large Church-owned structures and buildings, and millions of pesos of cash collected from mass goers every week.
What a lot of people do not know, though, is that part of the Church’s wealth is its multi-billion peso investments in several Philippine companies. In fact, reports submitted to the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) show that the Church and affiliate Catholic groups are top stockholders in companies such as the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), Philex Mining Corporation (PX), San Miguel Corporation (SMC), Ayala Corporation (AC), and Phinma Corporation (PHN), among others.
Philippine Church invested in banks, mining, construction, etc.
The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Manila, for example, owns more than 300 million shares of BPI and is the bank’s 4th largest owner.
How much are these shares worth? As of May 2011, this is valued at more than P17 billion. Yes, that’s seventeen billion pesos, with a B.
Those interested to trade stocks in the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) can choose to employ a live broker or an online stock brokerage firm. Either method has its own advantages and disadvantages and will be the subject of a separate article in the future.
For now, we’ll focus on online stock trading platforms. A list of available online stockbrokers in the Philippines can be found in this link.
Two of the most popular online stock trading platform providers are CitisecOnline (COL) and BPITrade. We have previously explained how to open a Citisec stock trading account. In this article, we will discuss how to open a BPITrade account.
