It is another painful week for equity investors all around the world.

For local investors, we witnessed the STI going below the 3000 points psychological support to close the week at 2972 points, 3% down from the previous week. This mirrored the S&P 500 index, which dropped 4%.

What was scarier to me was the volatility in the markets in the last two weeks.  Higher volatility means higher risk because the valuation of our assets can reduce drastically overnight without warning. I could imagine that it will take a lot more courage for any new investors to even parting their cash to invest in equity now.

Though the overall market was gloomy, for local income investors, things were looking ok on the dividend front.

Last week, I had a bumper crop of 20 companies on my watchlist reporting results and out of which, 15 declared dividends. Only 3 (or 20%)