Dividends Collected: June 2025

 

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Just a normal month of dividends. The Mapletree family paid dividends this month.

Sold Hong Leong Finance / STI 4,000

 

With STI finally hitting 4,000, it is the right time for me to do some cleaning-up of my portfolio. I have therefore sold my small holding of 4,000 Hong Leong Finance shares @ $2.57. Having held this for 10+ years, I have received 4-5% annual dividend and a little bit of capital gain. However, since I am holding loads of Finance Counters, I can take a cold hard look at which are worth keeping and which have to be sold. 

At best, HLF will just keep on chugging along in the same niche it has carved out for itself without much growth prospects, but at worst, it may be disrupted to Fintech and not have the size or resources to respond. So its time to sell.

At the same time, I have bought an equivalent amount of Lionglobal All Seasons (Growth) Fund. I expect it to outperform HLF over the medium and long term. 

2025 Mid-year Performance

 

Despite the war in Ukraine and the bombing of Iran, stock markets continue to rise. 15% return for 2025 seems to be a very real possibility and 20% might even be on the cards.

Some say dividend investing is bad, dividends can go to zero. But 2025 is a year when dividend investors can collect dividends and also get capital gain.

Portfolio: 6th milestone achieved in June 2025

 

Despite the ongoing situation in Ukraine and the Middle-East, markets continue to rise with STI ETF hitting the elusive $4 mark. Therefore, I decided to check the current value of my portfolio (my scripts to scrape SGX stock info for google sheets no longer work so I have to do a bit of manual calculation).

I'm pleased to note that I have hit my 6th Portfolio Milestone just 11 months after hitting the 5th milestone. Since I have started to dabble in a bit of active trading, I am hoping that this will help me achieve my 7th milestone in even less time.

T-bills crashed to 2%

 

Turns out SSBs were better after all?

As I have mentioned, I have been placing my maturing T-bill funds into a combination of Fullerton SGD Fund, LionGlobal SGD MMF, and LionGlobal All Seasons (Standard) given the declining T-bill rates.

What I found interesting is how so many investors prioritised putting funds into 6 month T-bills as opposed to SSBs when SSBs were yielding 3%+.   To me this was a classic example of short-termism. 

Since you can always redeem an old SSB and put the money into a new SSB if rates rise (which is what I did for a few of my SSBs), bidding for SSBs yielding >3% was a no brainer.  I made sure I had hit the $200k quota of 3%+ SSBs.

At the end of the day, the drop of interest rates makes it important to rethink my cash management strategy. The opportunity cost of holding cash/near-cash is high if rates are low. but I would like to have some lower risk investments. Which is why some of my cash allocation is going into the conservative LionGlobalAll Seasons (Standard) instead.

Exiting my small Telco Positions: BT, TEF, Starhub

 

For Telcos, I hold Singtel, Vodafone, Telstra, Telefonica, British Telecoms and Starhub.

Telcos have been rallying YTD though the 5-year chart is not very pretty. Its more a case of holding on, collecting 5-6% dividend over 5 years, and exiting at a small profit (compared to S&P500 5 yr performance).

I plan to close my smallest positions, so I have sold my BT and started selling some of my Telefonica. 

Starhub my average buying price was $1.85 during GFC so I have collected 16 years of dividends to reduce the pain of capital loss. I should be closing out the position shortly, or maybe for sentimental reasons I try to hold a bit longer until I have fully exited some other counters.

Dividends Collected: May 2025

 

$46k dividends. UOB, OCBC, DBS, LLOY, SAN, ING paid their dividends in May. Wonder why all the banks paying out in the same month.