On holiday in search of great coffeeshops

 

I'm back from my 4th short holiday this year. I flew business class one way to Australia as I managed to clear the redemption waitlist and economy return. I took a red-eye flight so I informed the stewardess that no food or drink service was necessary, and went to bed. To me, the lie-flat seat is the main point of business class. If the flight is too short to sleep, then not sure what the point of a lie-flat seat is....

My holidays mainly involve reading in coffeeshops, finding a nice park for a shakeout run, reading in coffeeshops again, participating in some running event or other, and back to reading in coffeeshops again. Holidays are a great time to clear my reading backlog as well. Nowadays I read mainly non-fiction and I have notebooks in which I take notes. Basically, its a pleasure to write and the pleasure is increased if the writing is done using a nice notebook in a nice environment. This is what holidays are about.  

One of my holiday 'side quests' involves a  search for great Matcha Lattes. This time, I found a lovely coffeeshop with plenty of natural light (a sense of space in the environment also promotes creative thinking) and a lovely selection of pastries. I paired my matcha latte with a Basque Cheesecake and accompanying Greek Yogurt. 

For the rest of the year, I have tickets for 1 more holiday already bought, and planning 3 others.

By have multiple short holidays to nearby destinations, I maintain a regular cadence of holidays that I can look forward to as the next holiday is no more than 6-8 weeks away, and the time I am away is so short it doesn't cause any stress for me at work. In fact, I was able to buy the tickets in 2025 as I know the holidays I'm taking are so short that I'm sure I'll be able to work around any work commitments. 

Portfolio Update June 2026

 

This is my mid-year portfolio update. I have sold down my First State unit trusts. While they have served me well, the fund manager Martin Lau is no longer young and its time to move on to low cost unit trusts and ETF. Basically, I have transitioned my First State China into two dividend ETFs, 3070.HK and 3110.HK. The top 10 components of these ETFs are totally different so they are complementary (Claude  AI also thinks so). First State Bridge being a balanced fund gets transitioned into the Lion Global All Seasons Funds.

Due to capital gains, OCBC enters the XL category while A$ appreciation helped ASX 200 ETF IOZ enter the L category.

As I posted earlier, Astrea VI PE Bond was redeemed just before stock prices jumped so I managed to deploy most of the money into equities.

Dividends Collected: May 2026

 

$40k+ dividends this month, including contributions from the 3 local banks. On track for $20k/mth passive income this year.

Portfolio Performance May 2026

 

I am glad that my portfolio somewhat recovered and 5% is a decent return. But S&P500 seems unstoppable and its going to be hard to match it's return this year.

Looking back at Hong Leong Finance

 

Blogger BFire just posted that he sold his Hong Leong Finance holding:

Finally I Sold Hong Leong Finance

It reminded me of my own decision to exit HLF on 1 July 2025 at $2.57:

Sold HLF

While HLF has been a stable stock (compared to say REITs), there is an opportunity cost to holding it instead of deploying the cash in more attractive investments. I also felt that there was a risk of disruption by fintech and HLF being too small to be able to respond effectively. Finally, I had committed myself to either increasing the size of my smallest holdings or exiting them. I was not prepared to buy more HLF so I exited and bought LionGlobal All Seasons (Growth) Fund using the sales proceeds. Turned out to be a good idea as the All Seasons fund grew from $1.531 to $1.818 which is a 18.75% gain.

LionGlobal All Seasons (Growth) Fund 

FSMOne RSP / JEPG Active ETF

 

FSMOne is trying to "encourage" increased use of RSP by publishing the  RSP amounts for the median/upper quartile/top decile by age group. As I am a big fan of FSMOne's commission-free RSP with decent exchange rates, it is no surprise that I am in the top 10% of FSMOne customers when it comes to monthly RSP.

On 13 May 2026, I compared the SGD:USD exchange rates:

FSMOne: S$1,277.2 to buy US$1,000
SCB: S$1,277.8 to buy US$1,000 (silver tier)
IBKR: S$1.2729+S$2,55= S$1,275.45 .to buy US$1,000 (added US$2 comms)

FSMOne is still slightly cheaper than SCB's silver tier and way better than SCB's blue tier. Both can't compare to IBKR if larger amounts of US$ are changed, but for RSP amounts below US$1,000, FSMOne is very competitive.

________________________________________________________________

One of the latest ETFs that I have added to my RSP list is JPM Global Equity Premium Income Active UCITS ETF - USD (dist). It is basically an active covered call ETF that tries to generate income from dividends and option writing and has a reasonable expense ratio of 0.35%. 

It has basically underperformed the market in 2025 and 2026. Currently its negative -3% year to date. As the S&P500 and World indices continue to shoot up, the price of this languishing ETF becomes more attractive to add a little bit of diversification to my portfolio. My hope is for a steady dividend yield and stable price and I will benchmark this against my USD Corporate Bond ETF because JP Morgan's advertising seem to be pitching this as a better alternative to bonds because this strategy is less affected by interest rates.

Experimental Unit Trust Portfolio

While I have been helping my relatives set up Poems accounts to invest in Amundi unit trusts, I have not done so myself because my main UT platform is FSMOne which doesn't sell Amundi funds. Also, my main method of investing in index funds is via LSE-listed ETFs which are technically tax-advantaged because VUSD has 15% US withholding tax and LSPU has 0% WHT (because its synthetic). Amundi USA, being a physical replication unit trust, is subject to 30% WHT at source (it doesn't matter if it is IE domiciled or not - also note that Amundi also has a synthetic USA fund but that is not sold by Poems).

In April, since I had some spare cash to deploy, I decided to put $20k into an experimental Poems portfolio comprising Amundi funds and to see how it goes. As you can see from the screenshot above, its 80% developed markets and 20% EM, which is 'technically' overweighting EM compared to MSCI All World, but I've always felt that EM is under-represented in the All World Index.