It has been a very good several months for the S&P 500 – returning 7% in August after 5 consecutive months of gains; although the same cannot be said for our local Straits Times Index.
Many Singaporean investors start out their investing experience in Singapore stocks – maybe because the majority of the financial content we have in the blogosphere and in social media is focused on local investments.
Or maybe because we are more familiar with local businesses and brand names like DBS, SingTel, CapitaLand and Mapletree. This home bias may manifest itself in poor investment outcomes because investing only Singapore restricts your investment to a tiny part of the world.
There is a case for investing overseas.
In the last 10 years post the financial crisis, the local stock market, benchmarked by the STI, has returned a mere 1.97% (unfortunately the poor performance was thanks to COVID)....