'ONE part skill, two parts hard work, and seven parts luck,' is what Andy Sim puts his StarMine Analyst Award down to.

For this DBS Vickers analyst, coming in fifth overall in this year's ranking came as a surprise. He was also the third most accurate earnings estimator covering retail and consumer products stocks.

Mr Sim credits his years at Asia-Pacific Breweries assisting its chief executive, prior to joining DBS Vickers, with giving him insight into the way companies are run.

The hard work, he says, lies in handling the details, data management, sieving information out of numbers, writing reports clearly and presenting his views in a coherent manner.

StarMine noted his series of good recommendations on Parkway Holdings. He held a 'buy' on the stock when its share price tumbled in the few days after the company won a hefty tender for a Novena site last February - which many then thought was a poor investment.

Mr Sim said that taking a step back, he realised that Parkway must have thought it possible to sell the medical suite. He held his 'buy' call while the stock gained 7 per cent to outperform industry peers.

He decided to downgrade the stock to a 'hold' after Parkway's dilutive rights issue. And, he cut his recommendation further to a 'sell' despite talk of healthcare being a defensive stock in the later part of the year. Charting the historical levels of private hospital admissions and GDP, he had seen a slight correlation, Mr Sim said.

StarMine also noted his 'fully-valued' call on Petra Foods, whose stock price plunged 69 per cent and underperformed its industry benchmark by 32 per cent from February to the end of last year.

'We have to continually test our assumptions??? and arguments, and ask: Am I talking in a logical coherent manner? We're trying to take facts and data, amalgamate them, sift through the information and come up with a view looking forward,' Mr Sim said.

Often, much qualitative discernment is needed. 'It's a judgment call you have to make - reading between the lines of their outlook story, observing and analysing whether all their actions are coherent - which is very hard to put down on paper,' he said.

The market's current volatility adds to the job's challenging nature, Mr Sim said. 'I think the current upswing makes it a little harder. Nobody knows the exact reason, but it's probably because of liquidity and positions being oversold.'

'It's the same for when the market tumbled. Some of the companies' fundamentals were perfectly fine, but prices kept falling, and herd instinct, sentiment - these are things we cannot control,' he said.

This article was first published in The Business Times.