Pinehill Pacific – a terrible performance over the past 2 decades.

According to Professor Damodaran, when you analyse cyclical companies, you have to look at the performance over the cycle. This is because the performance at any one time depends on where they in the cycle. Extrapolating from the current performance will lead to a misleading picture.

The palm oil sector is cyclical. As such when I look at the performance of plantation companies, I look at the past decade or more results to get the cyclical picture.

A good example is Pinehill Pacific, a Bursa plantation company. You can see from the chart that over the past 2 decades there was only one year with positive ROE.