We will be launching this soon.
Still ironing out some of the kinks but I’m testing this vigorously and I’m finding some things that I really like.
Basically we will allow investors to take advantage of borrowing at a currency with ultra low interest like CHF or JPY, to buy stocks in USD or SGD for much cheaper interest!
That’s one of the best best setups that no other broker is offering!
Now we just need a nicer UI to reflect this market leading facility.
So I posted about Liberation Day, April 2nd coined by Donald Trump sending out tariff to rest of the world and kickstarting the Tariff Wars.
He basically announced tariffs on the whole damn world ( even Singapore got 10%!).
So the following days the markets tanked badly.
By last Thursday the US markets fell 5%.
Yesterday night, it fell another 6%.
There is so much fear in the markets and this time really feels different. All the Mag7 stocks are so hit by the tariffs our iPhones will probably cost $5,000 soon and as the world slows, people will use Amazon less, advertise less on FB/IG. No one is buying Tesla anymore. Who needs anymore AI chips, yet AI is decreasing Google searches.
I fear the world is realizing it all this weekend. Or is it just me that sky appears to be falling?
Worried about my already trimmed portfolios and the amount of extra hurt coming my way.
Singapore is in for a very tough time ahead.
I need to think about better pivots.
Maybe an opportunity is on the horizon.
Stay safe and huat ah!
Did an event with Polestar recently.
Polestar is distributed by Wearnes here in Singapore.
Previously only the Polestar 2 was available but now both the 3 and 4 are launched and the Polestar 4 is first to be made available here.
It is such a beautiful car and as a PSNY shareholder, I wholeheartedly approve.
On to greater heights for PSNY please!
It’s been a rough two weeks for stocks and many investment portfolios.
The markets dropped significantly and even the VIX hit 40!
Just hoping to tide through this rough period with my portfolios.
Holding cash is still great so keep it there and build the war chest!
PSNY continues to bleed and taking a toll on my overall portfolio.
Market feels toppish so I’ve actually reverted to a little more cash. Took profits where I could.
I have this bad habit of letting my losers run for years and that’s what I’m still doing.
Crypto is on a tear and basically more than 2x for me already. Think I’ll need to take some profits before April’s halving.
Cash is king now and UOBOne and OCBC360 combo is super awesome. Up and coming is Trust which could be my third liquid cash pillar once I max the earlier two out.
No berserker rages yet this year! This is a really big achievement for me and hope to keep that going. All my little punts are smaller and more rational, resulting in a higher win rate even if at small amounts.
Also shorted XAUUSD to earn really good and sticky carry.
Huat ah!
Feb early signs point to spending more money.
PSNY’s drop is unrelenting. Not sure what to make of it.
Everything else is going good.
The NASDAQ is just powering up and up and up.
All else being equal, basically not taking more risks than necessary this month and let everything cruise.
Crypto is powering up and up and up too! It’s definitely printing :)
2024’s tilt is towards a bullish stance.
Bar some type of major war on a global scale (I know there are worrying pockets all over the world right now), it looks like the global economy can chug along nicely.
Interest rates in the US are sufficiently high, with no increases in the horizon, means we are either going to see expected rate cuts or a surprise of zero cuts. In between the expected three cuts vs zero cuts, my personal stance is one cut this year and maximum two cuts.
Main reason for this is that inflation is going to be sticky. And we’re seeing exactly why the stock markets are heading up. Inflation also causes the stock market to go up.
So here’s my own hypothesis below and I am ONLY TALKING TO MYSELF SO THIS IS NOT ADVICE IN ANY SORT OF WAY.
This is bad of course because at some point, people will not be able to afford (people are cutting back heavily on spending since start of the year, layoffs in tech and finance is crazy high) >> consumer purchases will come down drastically >> companies cannot keep up with their overly inflated sales numbers >> flushed institutional liquidity has to invest to keep up with inflation and expectations >> PE will skyrocket >> bubble territory and ATHs.
We are in ATH territory already but is this a bubble yet? My opinion is that we are not even close yet. PE multiples are still not at euphoric zones and you have stocks like the magnificent seven (GOOG, META, AAPL, MSFT, NVDA, TSLA, AMZN) that’s powering into this year with overwhelming strength.
I also think it is a good time to load up on the magnificent seven but to be very nimble and be ready to sell when we are possibly at the top of the bubble. Of course we will never be able to time where this bubble is so chances are is I will end up buying at the high or selling too early. I am already DCA-ing regularly into a few of the seven, that’s at least my own strategy.
Meanwhile, resist the attempt to short the US markets all through Q1-Q3. Review again in Q4 and see where we are then.
Meanwhile, keep other portfolios separate!
Dividend portfolio should be kept separate. High interest rate environment has not been kind to it last year but this year it is already recovering and providing some token passive income so I’m glad that I stayed the course. Looking to grow it further as interest rates come down.
Cash portfolio is also growing stronger and this will serve as potential war chest or emergency funds if other portfolios do not perform well. Just save a bit here and there where possible and resist always replying everything into the markets.
Crypto portfolio is STRONG. Just stay for the ride, no expectations but this should 2x or 3x if everyone says BTC and ETH and where it’s supposed to go. Going into the new year up 30% is already a big yay.
Gambling portfolio stopped altogether in 2024 to save money. Lots of money to be saved here if I resist gambling at all and so far so good this year! Just resist losing money to stupid bets.
Hope to huat big big this year!!!
One big perk about travelling is that I do not have time or bandwidth to monitor the markets.
That’s a good thing.
I have always been prone to overtrading and just stopping all this for almost a whole month is actually doing wonders to my total portfolio.
Less obsession with daily PnL and more obsession with the snow of Hokkaido.
The longer term portfolio also needs little monitoring.
The cash portfolio continues to compound.
It’s also been helpful that there is little volume in the markets as more people travel during the holidays, so stock markets just slowly chug up.
Maybe I should do this more often?
October’s been a great month on the investment front.
The market isn’t going so well and my shorts are printing brrrrrrrrr.
Sometimes I think the best thing is to just set myself up, set my SL and TP, go into the trade, then set and forget, once you know your upside and downside, STOP obsessing about your position! And maybe that’s the best advice I need to stick to right now.
Many a times our trade hunches, when properly thought out, and correct. It’s just the anxiety of seeing losses or early profits that cause us to cut earlier than planned.
The migration from stocks to more cash also continues, so that is great. Just gonna max out OCBC360, UOBOne accounts, whack some more T Bills and SSBs. At least this part of the portfolio maintains the saneness of ultra low risk with very good returns.
PSNY as a sidekick is slowly coming back up…but very slow. As long as the business continues to prosper, then I believe the technicals will eventually catch up with the fundamentals.
IREIT is still down a lot, but as long as the guru says hold, buy or sell, I will just follow on that.
Initiated a short position on Gold. It’s not looking so good at the moment but I think it will play out over time. Hopefully I have the patience to hold it for a long time.
This is the third consecutive hike of the Fed Funds Rate by 75bp, bring rates to 3% now.
Singapore will soon follow.
With the dot plot predicting the Fed Funds Rate to be around 4-4.5%, we should expect more rate hikes in the next two quarters.
Where does that leave us?
The stock market is tanking really badly, USD is so strong against everything, meaning bye bye gold and crypto.
Best bets are treasuries and fixed deposits.
Clear whatever loan you can too.
Small DCAs into equity portfolios.
Save cash next six months so that you can:
A) further pay up any loans where interest rates are going up too quickly
B) place into fixed deposits yielding >4%
C) buy equities on the cheap
The S&P 500 is testing the June 2022 lows near 3600. From its all time high in Jan 2022 of 4800, that has been a huge nine month drop. Once 3600 breaks, we could even see 2900 and below.
Will it rebound?
Not likely as the fundamentals have not changed. Interest rates are still rising, inflation is still too high, there is quantitative tightening going on, and the economy has not felt the full brunt of many of the recent measures yet.
Stay safe out there.
We had our SaxoWealthCare launch event in the office.
I was one of the speakers.
I remember how anxious I was, having to struggle with my gout recovery, and not feeling very prepared to host the event, nor talk through my presentation piece.
In the end it all came through pretty okay. Definitely not my best moment, but nothing so terrible that people really complained about (maybe they were just being nice!)
Here're some shots of me talking in front of a large audience.
Saxo Markets in Singapore recently launched the latest robo-advisory wealth management solution, called SaxoWealthCare.
This is touted as the 5th generation of robo-advisors, with state-of-the-art algorithmic automation in construction and rebalancing of your portfolios.
The main draws of SaxoWealthCare are as follows:
1) Entirely personalized and bespoke, based on your individual goals.
Users basically select their journey and input their regular or one-off contributions, and the portfolio engine does the rest of the work! Thereafter, you put in your individual goals, and the rebalancing algorithms then factor these goals in to rebalance accordingly so you attain your financial goals in the most realistic ways possible!
2) Active rebalancing
The use of the word Active cannot be said enough. SaxoWealthCare portfolios are rebalanced daily, while most others are done only half yearly or yearly. This means your asset allocation will always be in line with your risk tolerance.
3) Portfolio protection
For the more risk averse, an added option is the use of Portfolio Protector. This is an advanced balancing mechanism that constantly monitors your risk tolerance and rebalances between equity v fixed income to ensure you do not lose more than what you can tolerate.
Hence, compared to many other robo-advisors out there, SaxoWealthCare stands out as one of the most advanced of its kind. It is really one of the most complete robo-advisors for retirement planning.
Costs are very competitive, with no added fees for the ultra frequent rebalancing mechanism.
In this current poor stock market environment, now is a great chance to pursue a dollar cost averaging strategy using SaxoWealthCare, as you would be capturing the market prices low and, as you constantly make manageable regular contributions, will continue to capture the market performance through out this volatile period. By the time the market heads up again, you’d be in a great position to realize your goals.
Here are some recent public reviews of SaxoWealthCare:
So the past six weeks have been quite surreal in the markets.
The Fed has announced QT (Quantitative Tightening) and it starts this month starting at a reduction in Treasury Bill holdings of $50B, rising steadily up until September where it will reduce by $95B monthly. Traders are also betting the Fed is hiking interest rates by at least 250bp this year.
Now back to the past six weeks, the market (especially in the US) has had some time to digest this and clearly it DOES NOT LIKE IT. The market has been tanking since ATH and in the last six weeks have fallen almost 20%!
Last Friday night’s session, the S&P500 index actually touched this 20% mark, which signals an official bear market or recession, but bounced of from there to close still above those technical levels.
Yet the will be more carnage to come as interest rates rise and QT takes funds out of the markets,
QT alone will shrink the market, meaning while in the past, retailers could bank on QE funds to flow in, and cause a meteoric rise in stock markets (and many other correlated asset classes), those in the know will expect the opposite to happen this time around, with a similar opposite scenario playing out.
To make matters worse for the stock markets, as interest rates increase, less market participants can rely on leverage as it gets more and more expensive. Loans become more expensive. Cash becomes more expensive. This will surely further exacerbate the tanking of the stock markets.
What is this going to mean for the retail investor?
IMHO ONLY! DYODD!
Firstly, don’t even think about buying the dip. The pain has only just begun, so no point getting more cash trapped (buy and hold long term liao).
Secondly, consider dollar cost averaging. DCA a small, manageable amount monthly, quarterly, annually. This will help you catch the lows. Yet low can always go lower, maybe even three years of lower lows! So make sure you are comfortable doing this.
Thirdly, watch your loans. As interbank interest rates go up, interest rates on loans will go up. This will impact your loan repayments and thereby your cashflows. Conversely, rates of Fixed Deposits and newly issued Bonds will go up too, so it is a good time to review past commitments and consider some diversification into these asset classes.
Lastly, cash is king. We are heading into a new world order. One where the younger generation may not have seen before. The above global monetary policies PLUS geopolitical uncertainty (Ukraine war, runaway inflation) are bound to continue hurting the markets. Having more cash in hand gives one better peace of mind in times of crisis, and furthermore allows astute investors to deploy cash on the real life changing investment opportunities to come.
Consider this. The last real crash was in 2008’s Global Financial Crisis, and before then was 2000’s Dot-com bubble crash. If you came into the workforce in 2009, you’re a Gen Z and all you’d have ever seen was a bull market. Every time the markets dipped, you just BTFD (buy the dip) and things would go up and you’d make money. 14 years of such optimism. Well as Boomers and Gen X will tell you, you’re in for a rough ride.
Hang on to your hats in 2022. It will be quite a volatile ride.
What a crummy year 2021 has been on this front.
My biggest losses since inception of these statistics in 2016.
Ended the year down $43.5K what a joke.
Hopefully I make it all back in 2022.
I also haven't been very disciplined with blogging on this blog.
So moving forward I think I'll just stop these monthly posts, since they're very similar content and I'm always late to post anyway.
Anyways.
Here's my more profitable trades and my biggest losses. Just look at how big my losses were.
Then here's a breakdown of all my losses by asset class AND over the course of the year haha. Everything I touch also loses money. Geez.
And here are my final stats overall.
September was no better.
I dabbled a little in CFD Indices and lost yet again.
It always ends in a loss.
:'(
In the end, the USDSGD gains on my NORTHPOLE PE holdings ended up helping me with the extensive gains.
August wasn't terrible.
In fact I had hardly any trading activity aside from the Polestar Private Equity investment.
Problem was the USDSGD rate deteriorated and caused a loss.
Sad.
Yeah so I skipped two months of reporting.
You can see my poor performance from below nonetheless.
May simply got worse and worse because I went back to playing with CFD Indices as well as Crypto trading.
I kept losing money shorting the NASDAQ and the volatility of Crypto trading.
In June I kinda picked things up a bit by reducing my gambling streak by basically NOT GAMBLING AT ALL.
End up making a little bit of money which was great.
July continued in the same vein, but due to my investment into Polestar, my first foray into private equity, the fees were charged as a trading loss.
Not sure why that is but nothing much I can do about it.
Yet considering the net charges off Polestar was $12.7K, and my published loss was $11.6K, it actually means that I was in the green of around $1.1K.
Not bad in light of things.
Hopefully my trading continues to improve from here.
April's turned out pretty good for me with a GREEN number finally.
Sadly I'm not really in much mood since I'm blogging this April positive numbers on the back on knowing my May figures are the worst for the year.
Stay tuned for the May update bah.
:(
March was a really poor month for me yet again.
The early month gambling on indices basically got me into a hole I couldn't get out of.
That said, the rest of the month turned out rather OK IMHO.
I'm trying to be more disciplined not and follow my subscription sifu's trades.
Hopefully that pays off much better in the longer term.
To a good April!
HUAT AH
February was a good month for me.
I managed to claw a little bit of green back.
That said, it was still very speculative in nature and very luck-based.
I really have to stop all this speculative bullshit because I am only losing money because of this.
Take a look at March numbers.
Booooooooooooo!
