3rd Investment Milestone Reached: Nov 2020

The news reported that Biden's transition will formally begin as markets continue their rally. Yellen as Treasury Secretary is reportedly welcome by Wall Street as being market friendly. As a result, my investment portfolio has hit a new high and I have hit my 3rd investment milestone.

2010 approx: 1st investment milestone reached

Aug 2018    : 2nd investment milestone reached

Nov 2020    : 3rd investment milestone reached

2022 ???     : 4th investment milestone / Financial Independence?

I took a long time to hit my 2nd investment milestone as I was servicing a housing loan.

I am still not ready to declare 'Financial Independence' yet because my dividends collected this year have dropped on a year-on-year basis. Assuming that 2021 is the recovery year where my dividends recover to 2019 levels, I will have to wait for 2022 to grow my dividends more in order to become financially independent.

While there may be different understandings of what Financial Independence means, I prefer the definition in Investment Moats, one of the few local finance bloggers worth reading. He has many good articles about Financial Independence:

However, as one of his articles points out, while passive income > expenses/standard of living, one should always be aware that passive income can drop anytime (just like this year). You can adapt by accepting a lesser standard of living, or you can continue building up your passive income in order to have a 'margin of safety' so that your standard of living is protected.

In case you're wondering, 3M is my shortform for my 3rd investment milestone, just decided to do something like the 3M logo for fun.

 

Property Valuation Part II

Having just posted about receiving a 'personalised' property ad from one agent, I promptly get another one. I guess the novelty is going to wear off soon once everyone starts doing it.

I guess with the advent of technology, APIs, and data mining, more property agents are 'personalising' their property adverts with the valuation of your property. 

Quite clever to be able to write an automated script that prints out the mailing address you are sending the ad to and the corresponding property valuation. Edgeprop gets its data from UrbanZoom while ERA got its data from SRX and their valuations were different. 

Frankly, having a "3" in front of my property valuation seems be bit unrealistic. If real, it means that SG property has yet again outperformed the STI. But fortunately, STI has been staging a mini-rally and I think theres a realistic chance of it going back to 3,000 by the end of 2021.

URA Space upgrade

 I was reading about the upgrade to URA Space  which now reports 5 years' worth of private property transactions.  Five year transaction history is really far more informative than the previous 3 years. 

It appears to be interacting with onemap.sg data so you get to see a map whereas a long time ago it was all text based reporting.

There are property agents that are diligently recording down all this information and perhaps you have even received a mailer from one of them. 

I really feel that property prices, especially Condo prices, are getting a bit ridiculous. Developers try to justify the prices by claiming they have added plenty of luxury extras, but seriously, just give me a grass lawn and shady tree over a marble fountain anytime. 

A 3 day rally: Relief?

 

I'm sort of relieved that the rally lasted for 3 days as it means that I'm still holding onto the big gains from 9 Nov. This was the rally I have been waiting for as I continued to accumulate throughout the year, but being realistic, I know there's no guarantee it will last, given the 'troubles' in the US.

On the SG front, the first travel bubble for twice-a-day flights between HK and SG have been announced. Hopefully this will be a confidence building measure that leads to more air travel. 

Rally Continues (10 Nov 2020)

 

Rally continues today for most sectors though there is a rotation (perhaps a much needed 'rebalancing') out of tech.

Waiting to buy some stuff at Lazada's 11.11 sale tonight....

Nice Rally (9 Nov 2020)

This is probably the biggest 1-day move my IB portfolio has made. Its also probably a textbook example of 'time in market' vs 'market timing'.

Stock markets rallied mildly on 5 Nov but exploded today 11 Nov with reports of an effective vaccine. As I am writing Financial stocks are staging a massive rally and many stocks in double digit territory:

Prudential (PRU) +17.91%

Santander (BNC) +21.98%

Lloyds (LLOY) +14.38%

Shell (RDSB) +12.54%

Not everything is double digit of course, stocks like GSK which had a good run up already is merely +1.82% up. CISCO, which I had picked over Zoom (shows how bad I am in stock-picking even though I got the sector correct - Video Conferencing) is at least up 4.5% while Zoom is down 15% (presumably because of the vaccine).

Dividends: October 2020

 

Quiet month for SG dividends - all 3 banks paid their dividends. I took scrip for UOB /OCBC but count the cash value.

On a year on year basis, I've collected more than $10k less dividends compared to 2019.

US Election: Investment Strategy

The market went down further in the run-up to the US election and I bought more Capitaland as it hit an 8-year low. For good measure, I also bought a small amount of STI ETF  at $2.465 and more WQDV at $4.92 (my plan is to buy WQDV whenever it dips below $5).

As I am writing this, the election has not been called yet but the spread-betters are favouring Biden and the market seems to have reacted favourably with a rally. 

I am not sure if I will continue buying in November or whether I should take a break; quite a bit of uncertainty in the market. Regular 2800.HK FSMOne RSP is still coming up though.