Food Empire Café Phố Ground Report & FSMOne Odd Lots

I’m back from Vietnam!

It was an amazing experience, and I’ll share a full recap once I’ve sorted through the pictures, videos, and my thoughts. For today, I want to touch briefly on two recent developments:

• Missing the recent price dip in Food Empire (F03)
• My first experience selling odd lots online via FSMOne

Food Empire: A Ground Report from Vietnam

A subplot of this trip was checking out Vietnam’s famous coffee culture and seeing how Food Empire’s flagship brand, Café Phố, is positioned on the ground.

While good coffee is highly accessible in Vietnam, the quality varies wildly. I experienced everything from rich, deeply roasted brews to rather bland, tasteless cups—though fortunately, more of the former than the latter.

I also cleared up a misconception.

Based on previous corporate sharing from Food Empire, I was under the impression that Vietnamese consumers exclusively drank their coffee cold. However, this wasn’t obvious from my observations, and our local tour guide shared that it highly depends on the season.

Doing a bit of online digging yesterday revealed the missing context: the iced coffee culture is dominant in South Vietnam, which enjoys hot weather year-round.

Meanwhile, the regions I visited—Hanoi and Sa Pa in the North—experience distinct seasonal changes. Naturally, having a hot coffee makes perfect sense during a chilly Northern winter or up on Mount Fansipan.

This regional nuance explains why I didn’t see as much Café Phố in the North. Instead, the 3-in-1 instant coffee market there is still heavily dominated by Trung Nguyên Legend’s G7 Coffee.

I tried a complimentary G7 sachet at our hotel, but found it a bit too light. While Café Phố is sweeter, it boasts a much stronger roasted fragrance that appeals more to my palate.

Since both my spouse and daughter love coffee with condensed milk, we picked up a few boxes of Café Phố from a WinMart next to our hotel.

At roughly S$0.33 per sachet, it was a steal compared to the S$0.53 it commands on Shopee back home—a near 40% discount!

A Missed Market Opportunity

Of course, as an investor, I was ultimately more interested in purchasing the stock than the coffee itself.

Following its recent 1-for-5 bonus issue, Food Empire’s stock price had drifted below its theoretical ex-bonus (XB) price of ~S$2.50. With the shares trading near S$2.30 last week, I was highly tempted to add to my position.

Unfortunately, that buying window lasted only a week.

Exhausted by our daily tour itinerary, I lacked the mental bandwidth to act. By the time I realised yesterday that I still have some CPFIS balance to deploy, the price had already shot back up to the S$2.50 mark!

Oh well, that’s the stock market for you. I shall remain patient for the next entry point.

Testing FSMOne’s Online Odd Lots Trading

While I missed the Food Empire dip, the process led me to a pleasant discovery: I can now easily trade odd lots online via FSMOne.

I knew this feature had been rolled out early last year, but I previously struggled to navigate the interface to find it. Yesterday, however, it was prominently displayed as a dedicated tab right next to the “Full Lots” button.

It could be a recent interface update, or more likely, I simply missed it before!

The Fees Hurt!?

I couldn’t wait to test it to finally clean up the loose, awkward odd lots of AEM (AWX) and OCBC (O39) sitting in my portfolio.

The execution itself was seamless, but looking at the contract notes, the fees definitely hurt. Because odd lot values are so small, the minimum brokerage fees eat up a disproportionate percentage of the trade.

For my AEM odd lot, the fee devoured 2% of the transaction value, and for OCBC, it swallowed nearly 4%!

Moving forward, the strategic play to mitigate this fee drag is to amalgamate the trades—buying or selling the odd lots together with my main board lots to dilute the fixed cost.

A Market Plot Twist

But here is the fascinating plot twist: if I had successfully figured out the interface and liquidated these odd lots a few months ago, I would have technically saved on the percentage fee drag, but I actually would have ended up with less money overall.

Because the stock prices have marched higher since then, the capital gains completely eclipsed the painful fee percentage:

• AEM: S$10.27 now vs. S$3.32 a few months back
• OCBC: S$24.58 now vs. S$21.60 a few months back

It’s a great reminder that in an inherently uncertain market environment, there is really no need to over-optimise your execution strategy. Sometimes, a delayed execution accidentally works out in your favour!