Author: Investment Moats

Some of my friends alerted me to this post where they quote what I have written. The lady, Marianne, loves a good challenge.  So she proceeded to see if she can survive on $5 a day. By all accounts, she failed. She cites the great Financial Samurai who said that if you are not hurting while you are trying to save, you are not trying hard enough.  And then proceeded to throw me into the mix by saying I advocate a 70% savings rate.  Now, if this article was posted on ChannelNewsAsia I would have gotten some serious burn....

I do not understand this acquisition by LMIR.   They currently have a dividend yield of 10%. Then they proposed to buy this mall which will reduce their dividend yield. I did some notes for a friend, so I thought I will put it out here. For those who are invested in real estate investment trusts (REITs), the company not just pays you dividends. Sometimes they do ask for money from you again. And again. So you got to be familiar with all these rights issues, placements, preferential offerings. If you don’t learn about this, better not invest in REITs....

Growing up, I used to have some relatives and friends telling me not to buy 4D.  It is one Singapore lottery that seems to be less popular as I grow older. My parents used to buy it. Strangely, non of my colleagues, or co-worker mention buying it. Now TOTO, which is another form of lottery, that is another story all together. During Chinese New Year, when the pool of money snowballs to a large million, it is a must purchase for many. I guess a common gripe about 4D might be that, people don’t commit a lot to buying...

The government, the union and the employers are unanimous. They agreed that changes needed to be done on Singapore’s retirement age and re-employment age. Manpower Minister Josephine Teo asked the Tripartite Workgroup on Older Workers to look into whether we need to change the retirement age of 62 and re-employment age of 67 and if they should be made when should they be made. Singaporeans living longer. Josephine Teo’s data shows that on in two Singaporeans aged 65 today is expected to live beyond 85, and one in three will live beyond 90. Longevity and demand for greater quality...

Here is a higher yielding, safe way to save your money that you have no idea when you will need to use it, or your emergency fund. The Apr 2019’s SSB bonds yield an interest rate of 2.16%/yr for the next 10 years. You can apply through ATM or Internet Banking via the three banks (UOB,OCBC, DBS) However, if you only hold the SSB bonds for 1 year, with 2 semi-annual payments, your interest rate is 1.96%/yr. $10,000 will grow to $12,175 in 10 years. This bond is backed by the Singapore Government and its available to Singaporeans. A single...

I think I have some thoughts about things related to the CPF that I would probably share over time. They will be smaller articles some what like this. It is meant more to invite my readers to tell me if they agree or disagree with the points raised and give their point of view. When you are older, you lived with the system more, and as you hear more things, you want to put them out there. I also am privileged to be educated by the CPF team in the past. So I am a pretty good “Wu Jian...

I don’t have a lot of friends I know who invested in the Hyflux Cumulative Perpetual Preferred Shares (CPS) or the Hyflux Perpetual Bond. That is because they tend not to be investors in the first place.  I do have fellow bloggers or investing friends that I am acquainted with, that are caught in this.  You can say that you have taken the proper portfolio risk management actions by not making either the Hyflux CPS or the Perpetual Bond a large part of your portfolio, but it absolutely sucks to know that you might lose 100% of this. I...

At 30 years old, I had 6 years of investing under my belt.  But my returns was heading nowhere. One of the main reasons was that I was trying a lot of different things. So I told myself, its time not to mess around anymore and try one method that I feel goes best with my character. Then I doubled down on it. I lean towards investing for dividends. And what a friend said about respecting value makes sense.  So I doubled down on value investing with a focus on finding dividend paying companies.  I been doing that since...

You give some people whose job is to invest money, and by a lot of standards they are good at it.  Shockingly only 49% of their picks made money. Some of them was successful only 30% of the time.  At the end of these, almost non of them lost money. They still made a lot of money out of it.  I think this was the part of the article that caught my attention.  The main reason is that it is something that is not often explain in a book, or by course trainers, or in video how to navigate...