Dividends Collected: October 2025

 

Collected more this month than last year, but still lagging last year's dividend YTD.

October 25 Performance

Despite losing even more money on NVO as it went down further, my portfolio gained about 1% from last month.

 

Contactless Spending for Oct 2025

 

To recap, UOB Visa Signature generates 4mpd for contactless transactions with a minimum spend of $1k and a spending cap of $1.2k. The spending for this card has to be during the statement month (see Milelion's review of the card for an explanation of the difference between statement month and calendar month). Fortunately, my statement date is the 2nd of each month so its virtually the same as calendar month. 

I thought it would be useful to document my $1k contactless spending on my credit card in a month when I had no big ticket items (no single item costing more than $100) to see what my spending pattern is like. Obviously if I bought a big ticket item, the spending chart would be quite skewed.

My main contactless spending is understandably F&B at 51%. This includes restaurants, takeaway food, and Starbucks. Many restaurants have switched to ordering via QR code but most collect payment at the counter or have the option open, so that I can make a contactless payment.

On months when I am making a big ticket purchase which results in the $1.2k cap being hit early, I can shift my F&B spending to the UOB Krisflyer card which gives 3mpd for dining.

Its great that the SQ Annual Time to Fly sale takes place after the Global Redemption Sale, because you get to use up your miles first on discounted redemption tickets, and then whatever you are unable to redeem, you use cash. Makes more sense than the other way round.

For this year's sale, I bought one biz class ticket to Australia for $4.5k. That translates to roughly:

• 11,500 miles (to be earned after flying):  +25% booking class bonus +25% Elite Silver bonus (yup, my Elite Gold has expired)
• 13,500 miles from UOB Krisflyer Credit Card (3mpd)
• Total 25,000 miles.

LionGlobal All Seasons and Gold

 

While I mentioned that I have not been buying Gold, one of my favourite Unit Trusts had taken a tiny position in Gold (0.55% of portfolio) by January 2025 or earlier (the above screenshot was taken in Feb 2025 of the previous month's factsheet). Currently the value of that holding is now 0.99% of the portfolio which I presume is mainly from price appreciation. That should be good for a couple of basis points of alpha which is not that much, but good to know that occasionally active managers can make good trades....

Link to Feb 2025 post: BuyafterCrash: Lion Global All Seasons Fund revisited (SRS strategy)

Gold? (Looking back to 2016)

 

When I first started this blog in 2016, one of my earliest posts was about Gold and how I felt it was insurance rather than investment. If everything was normal it should match inflation plus a few basis points for 'holding cost.' If something terrible happened, then the 'insurance' function would kick in and the price would spike. The 2016 photo above shows my tiny gold holdings which I have not increased since 2016 (I think I bought a couple more bars/coins after the photo was taken but nothing after 2016).

Instead, my strategy was to invest in economies that have a significant commodities business as any increase in commodity prices would benefit that economy. Specifically, I have a large position in Australia, which is the 3rd largest producer of gold.

Recently, there has been a sustained increase in the price of gold, which cannot be explained by its 'insurance' function. Perhaps the idea of you should pay a price premium for a 'store of value' function has taken root thanks to crypto. Or crypto millionaires and moving some of their crypto winnings to Gold.

I do not plan to buy more Gold as I find it too difficult to value. As I mentioned in 2016, Gold doesn't generate earning or cashflow. Instead I hope to be a beneficiary of the Gold boom indirectly though the Australian market.

My 2016 Post: BuyafterCrash: Gold?

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Postscript: The morning after I posted this, CNBC reported a rare earths investment framework/agreement between US and Australia.

October Strategy: Just continue DCA

 

Trump threatened 100% tariffs in retaliation for China rare earth export controls, but market quickly recovered and marched upwards. 

For October I bought more VWRD and a smaller amount of VHYD. Also continuing my HK/China ETF RSP with FSMone. Nobody really knows when the next correction will occur so I will just continue adding to VWRD.    

One thing I am paying attention to is the (over)concentration of the ETF constituents. FSMOne provides a useful auto-calculation in their ETF pages and I noticed that 3010.HK is on one hand, relatively less concentrated with top 25 holdings comprising 46.13% of total assets and on the other, TSMC is a whopping 13.5% individual weightage.

Finally, USD:SGD is on the move and went back above 1.3. That should generally be good news for my portfolio which has a reasonable chunk of US$ fixed income ETFs.

Miles Strategy

 

Someone asked in the HWZ forum about miles and there were the usual doubts expressed whether it was worth chasing miles. Coincidentally, I have just started to learn more about miles collecting, mainly from the milelion website, and my short answer is that if you are going to spend the money, then why not make sure you get some miles from it? For me, I got no interest holding 10 credit cards and min-maxxing the miles, but I feel I reached an easy-to-follow 'middle ground'.

HOW MUCH TO SPEND TO GET AN AIR TICKET?

Again, thanks to milelion constantly scanning the SQ website so I don't have to, I redeemed 3 return air tickets to Japan for 2026 at 43,200 miles each.

If you were a min-maxxer with a 4mpd card, you would be able to achieve 43,200 miles with no more than S$10,800 spend. The MMs will take advantage of promos that increase the mile earn rate above 4mpd, so their average earn rate will often be above 4mpd.

For myself, I only have 2 cards so my effective mpd is less than 4mpd, but it keeps things simple.

UOB Visa Signature - assuming $1,000-$1,200 contactless payments a month, that will give 48,000-57600 miles at 4mpd.  (Bonus activated at $1k spend, max cap $1.2k).

UOB KF Credit Card - assuming $1,000 a month of qualifying transactions at 2.4mpd plus $12k worth of SQ/Scoot/Pelago/Kris+ spending at 3mpd, that will give 28800 +36,000 =64,800 miles. (there are also miles awarded by SIA which are separate)  UOB KF has no spending cap, so the $1+1k/month is more like my estimate of spending.

So very roughly, if I have $3k/month of qualifying spending at maybe 3mpd (average of a 4mpd and a 3.0/2.4mpd card), that will be good for some economy tix to Japan every year when they have their global redemption sale.

Remember your unused miles

Remember that each time you fly Scoot / SQ on tickets you buy, you earn miles from the flight. Very often, these miles alone aren't enough to redeem a flight. But when they are added to the miles you earn from credit card spend, at least they are not 'wasted'. For example:

• Singapore-Sydney Business lite (the cheapest biz ticket) return nets you 9,780 miles.
• Singapore-Tokyo Economy value return nets you 3,294 miles

I selected these examples of actual flights I would take. Sydney is long enough that I would want to fly Biz, but Tokyo flights are short enough to fly economy.

Miles Millionaire: Whats that??

Finally, I note that some influenzas like to flex they are "miles millionaires" and this term appears to have been 'endorsed' by the official SIA Krisflyer instagram account:

While a million dollars invested will grow your networth through compounding, I fail to see how accumulating one million miles will do anything for you. In fact, miles depreciate over time. My strategy is to redeem flights as soon as possible. I have enough in my account to redeem a ticket or two just in case there is some not to be missed fantastic sale, but even then, its way less than 100,000 miles.

Tempting to Min-max?

I will try my best to stick to 2 credit cards and not get influenced by these influencers... though there is certainly a temptation to go up to 3 cards if my spending increases enough to justify a 3rd card (hopefully not).