Our renegade presidential candidate Tan Kin Lian is (overly?) fond of advising people to put their money in ETFs instead of individual stocks. It has also spread to become almost conventional wisdom from professors and the business media. I have my reservations, but that is a different discussion altogether. Just talking about ETFs alone, my discussions with people on the topic show how extremely little is actually known about what ETFs are available out there beyond the obvious STI and HSI ETF. So I figured this to be worthy of today’s Note.

Point #1: There are ETFs for things other than stocks.

It is entirely viable to build a strategic asset allocation model purely around ETFs available in Singapore and Hong Kong. They split by asset classes (Equities, Bonds, Commodities), Regions/Countries (SG, HK, AsiaPac, AEJ, Malaysia, Taiwan, China, Indonesia), Industries (Financials, Consumer Disc., Healthcare, etc), and even religious ...