My Market Transactions — Wk26 2023 - Yes got!

 

Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash

 

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here!

Below are the transactions for last week.

Capital injection: ~14KSGD

1. IWDA - ~14KSGD

I wanted to stay with DCA. But due to a misjudgment on my fund balance, this injection was smaller than usual. 

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash

Capital outflow: 48K SGD

1. China Southern Airlines - ~48KSGD

I emptied my holdings. I bought it because my wife asked me to and I have been waiting for her to tell me what to do with it. Only recently, I realized that she had forgotten about it. So I took matters to my own hand (also partly due to my misjudgment on fund balance).

Looking at the history, this counter gave me very good returns in multiple occasions over the past two years. I was not able to capture any of it. This week, I dumped it with basically no profit.

This is what happens when people do not understand their holdings enough to know when to add positions and when to sell. The chance of getting returns is close to 0.

A painful lesson to be remembered. 

Till next time!

My Market Transactions — Wk22 2023 - Yes got!

 

Photo by Andre Taissin on Unsplash

 

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here!

Below are the transactions for last week.

Capital injection: ~24KSGD

1. IWDA - ~24KSGD

I used up the cash balance in my brokerage account.

No hurry actually - I think the Bull is still a while away. Short term, it might fall further. 

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash

Capital outflow: 0

Till next time!

Monthly Net-Worth Update - May 2020

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here.

It is the end of May. How time flies!

It is the 4th month for which I have zero income. Life goes on though. Hope things improve soon.

Below is the summary.

Net-Worth increase from last month: 0.4K SGD

We had a few major insurance bills this month and that offsets our gain in the stock market and my wife's salary.

Investment: 0.66% annualized return, incl. dividend 

We are in the positive again. Both World and China market is doing pretty well this month.

We did not have any capital injection this month.

Till the next time!

Monthly Net-Worth Update - Apr 2020

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here.

It is end of Apr, well beginning of May~. Actually, I updated my Net-Worth tracking sheet on 28th Apr. However, due to the tight schedule of the project I am currently on, I am only writing this post today. Apologies for the delay!

So lets get started. Again, below numbers are as of Apr 28th.

Net-Worth increase from last month: 21K SGD

The increase is due to stock market rebound in Apr and my wife's salary.

Compared to the drop (-56K) last month, we are still on our way to recovery.

Investment: -0.78% annualized return, incl. dividend 

Compared to last month (-3.76%), it is an improvement.

I emptied 2/3 of my limited war chest quickly during the beginning of the downturn, far from the bottom. I became very cautious about the remaining war chest. So when the bottom actually came, I was thinking maybe it would drop further. So I still have 1/3 of my war chest.

So I guess the strategy in the downturn is to set a target price and go all in after the target price is met. Again, the baseline should be DCA. If the average buying price is lower than DCA, I think one should be satisfied. I consider it the benefit we get by not entirely staying "Passive".

Of course, it is much harder done than said. I knew not to time the market from the very beginning of my investment journey, yet I am still trying to do it. And the benefit vs the time and emotional investment? Not sure...

I do not know what will happen next. With the ease of isolation measures, maybe the stock market will continue to recover. Maybe the fundamentals that can support this kind of market level are long gone and we will have another crash.

Whatever happens, life goes on. If you are in your early 30s or younger, I doubt this downturn will have any material impact to the overall financial success of your life. So relax and enjoy!

In the end, I would like to ask for a favor from my readers: can you recommend a good way to DCA? By good, I mean cheap and simple. I will choose what to DCA into and transfer money in just before the DCA date. And the platform or tool will DCA for me.

I knew the "Regular savings plan" staff from the banks, but they are too expensive to me. The robo-advisor is still too expensive and I am not sure about their selection of portfolio. What I am looking for is essentially IB+the DCA functionality, with the same rate. Haha, maybe that does not exist.

The reason why I am asking is as below:

• I more and more inclined to go all "Passive" with DCA to further reduce my time and emotional investment and to eliminate the opportunity for me to try to time the market all together
  
• I started feeling it a drag manually updating our Net-Worth tracking sheet. In my post "Basics 02: The tracker tool I built and am using", introducing the tracker, I actually said I kind of enjoyed updating it. I did. But with the new work, free time is much harder to find and updating the tracker has lost its attractiveness.

Thank you!

Wish us all all the best! Till the next time.

Basics 03: My investment journey and outcome

Dear Readers,

Thank you for coming here.

This is going to be the third post in the "Basics" series. And I am going to briefly describe my investment journey and the path we intend to take going forward.


A bit of history

My investment journey really started from beginning of 2018.

Before that, I was buying stock based on what I heard without knowing anything else. 

Not surprisingly, the stocks I bought did not perform well. One of them remains the counter with biggest loss both in percentage and absolute value after almost 3 years, even though the amount I invested was very very small compared to my portfolio now. Just an idea, the stock price has dropped 62% by end of Jan 2020.

Coming to 2017, I switched to a stable job from management consulting. After the initial few months, I started to have spare time. And the pay was enough for us to have savings every month. Combined with the fact that stock market was doing super well in 2017, we decided that it was high time for us to take investment seriously.

We started by reading quite a bit. Special thanks to "Hardware Zone" "Money Mind" forum, especially the two active "Teachers" in that forum, "BBCWatcher" and "Shiny Things". We find the theories of the two teachers agreeable given our circumstances and the time we wanted to put into investing.

So we were quick to decide on our investment strategy:  

Take a long term approach and avoid timing the market.

The way we do it:

Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) into World ETFs on a monthly basis 

Specifically, we decided to divide our investment into two parts based on the currency our cash was in:
- SGD: DCA into DevWorld ETF (80%) [IWDA] and SGD ETF (20%) [ES3]
- RMB (on-shore): DCA into A-share ETF

I thought the strategy was good and I still think so now. However, the execution was, well, pretty bad.

First, we first bought ES3 at the beginning of 2018 and soon afterwards, the stock market went into correction mode.

Initially, every time we saw a drop in ES3 prices, we treated it as an opportunity to buy. And the more it dropped, the bigger amount we invested, trying to bring our average price down.

Before we realized it, our war chest run dry around May 2018 and we had not started buying IWDA. By the way, May 2018 was way before the ES3 reached the bottom at the end of 2018 or the very beginning of 2019.

Then we decided that it was more important to widen our portfolio. So we stopped investing in ES3 and started in IWDA, trying to come back to 80/20 split.

So that was pretty much what happened in 2018. Our portfolio performance in 2018 was btw -13% and -1%, with no month with positive performance.

Coming to 2019, we pretty much stick to the "DCA into IWDA" plan, well for the first few months. And as the stock market started to recover, our portfolio performance finally entered into the positive area.

However, as the market continued to go up, we started to feel IWDA was getting too expensive and we again violated our strategy and stopped buying in the 2nd half of 2019.  Well, the market continued to go higher.

So now we have some cash. And our portfolio time-weighted performance was ~6% for 2019.


Going forward

From a long-term perspective, we would like to stick to our strategy and benefit from the development of the world. 

Short term, I really do not know. 

For a start, with all the changes and uncertainties with my career, we intend to keep some cash. 

Secondly, my wife is abssessed now with some A-share active investment course. She has paid quite a bit tuition and is really eager to try. I don't know how to stop her. Guess I will just let her try it out. 

However, whatever we do, you will read it in this blog. 

Till next time.