What a brutal month ever since the Fed Powell's speech at the Jackson Hole event! My portfolio had been not been spared despite of my heavy shorts on several of my holdings. Yes, you heard it right; I short my own holdings pretty aggressively! Having said that, my portfolio was still badly hit; so either I have not done the shorting correctly or I need a better strategy going forward. In any case, I think there's lots of lessons to be learnt from this; I need some time to reflect on this and will share via a new post later. Stay tuned. Besides shorting, I also took the opportunity to d ..read more

Time flies indeed, we are on the month of Sep now. The last few weeks of Aug was pretty volatile especially after the Fed Powell's speech at the Jackson Hole event. My portfolio had not been spared as I had already lifted most of my hedging then; what a bad timing. Nevertheless, I took the opportunity to do some re-balancing of my growth portfolio.  For the sales - I sold half of my SEA (NASDAQ: SEA) after the disappointing earnings but decided to keep some of it as my original investment thesis in this company is still intact. I had also sold half of my PayPal (NASD ..read more

I used to be a big time dividend investor; more than 90% of my portfolio were allocated to dividend stocks. Two of the biggest holdings were SPH (SGX: T39) & Singtel (SGX: Z74) which I had accumulated them heavily during the US subprime crisis back in 2008 - 2009. I was such a big fan that I had been consistently reinvested all my dividends back into the companies.  To be fair, this strategy worked out really well for me in the initial few years and the satisfaction of getting paid through dividends was priceless. In fact, I seriously thought that I could be really well off in no ti ..read more

Whenever I share this story with my friends, they often think that I am just cracking another joke but this is indeed a true story. For those who know me, I like to shop online and have a habit of discarding most of my physical credit cards after digitising them on my phone. Pet bunny owner will understand that their demand for hay is high and we have to top up their supplies regularly. I was trying to purchase my usual bunnies' supplies online one day and to my surprise, the credit card that I often use was not accepted by the merchant. It was then I discovered that my card had expired and ..read more

First of all, please don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting anyone to go out and buy the bulls. In fact, I have already stopped buying and closed all my short positions. I have also decided not to buy and let my portfolio takes its natural course for now. Just like the bears have sharp paws, bulls have sharp horns as well. If it hit you with its horns, it may not just be a simple injury case, it could be a fatal blow as well. Survival in this volatile market is the key. And checking on the latest market sentiment actually gives me some surprises. One should expect that the sentiment s ..read more

  First of all, please don't get me wrong. I love Singapore, Singapore is my home and I am always ready to defend my country if necessary. What I am referring here is just the stock market itself. Like many other fellow Singaporeans, I started off my first investment in the home market. I was not sure what I was doing at that time; in fact, I am still not 100% sure now too (i.e. we should always be humble and be prepared that we may be wrong). I recall that my first few investments in the home market are mostly the blue-chip companies such as Keppel (SGX: BN4), Sembcorp Industries  ..read more

If there is one word I can use to describe what we have gone through in the market for the past 6 to 8 months, it will be confusion. I can't recall the last time we had such a high count of negative news piling up the bearishness in the market. In 2000, the bearish was ignited by the dot com bubble burst. In 2008, it was caused by the global financial crisis ignited by the USA subprime mortgage issue. In the 2020, it was caused by the COVID-19 virus outbreak and so forth. This year however seems to be very interesting as multiple negativity have been piling onto the seemingly never ending be ..read more

What an eventful month! Besides busy earnings news, we also have some interesting news on the M&A front. This time, it is the potential merger of PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) and Pinterest (NASDAQ: PINS). The news came up after one of the world's largest activist fund managers, Elliott Investment Management has disclosed its significant stakes in both companies recently. This is understandable as the investment firm is well known effective activist fund and these two acquisitions came about in a rather unprecedented time too. Apparently, the market loves it when the news is announced; both stoc ..read more

I can't recall the last time it had captured so much attention when a senior politician visited Asia. Perhaps it was the meeting between North Korea and USA leaders in Singapore. But that meeting was kind of a more peaceful one. This time, not only it was getting so much attention around the world but it had created a lot of tension in the region, Asia especially. And yes, I am referring to the USA House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan during her trip to Asia recently. (tweet it) I will be reserving my political view here since this is more of a personal finance blog. Nevertheless, t ..read more

What an interesting moment to be alive! I was watching the news and find it really amazing to see how the White House officials were so eager to clearly "define" the term, recession. This actually made me wondered if they already knew something ahead of the official GDP announcement. My gut feeling was that we should be heading for a negative GDP and it turned out to be the case when the official estimated Q2 GDP growth rate was at -0.9% on 28-Jul. One would normally expect the stock market to crash upon such announcement but you know what? The stock market went up instead. Why was this the ..read more