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. 

Confirming FSMOne Flat fee

 

FSMOne recently reduced its flat fees for ETF trades. Together with a reasonabe forex exchange rate, this is one of the best deals in town together with its 0% comm RSP for certain ETFs.

I bought some 3010.HK Asia ex Jpn ETF on HKSE and this is the invoice I got. Basically, the total is HK$46.89 as there appears to be HK$8.89 of assorted fees you have to pay over and above the base HK$38.  Since HK$8.89 = S$1.5, its not a big deal.

The one tip I learnt is that it might be better to change your S$ to HK$ and to buy using the HK$ as exchange rates <could> be better. I'm not 100% sure but previously I published my experience with my ETF RSP where I allow FSMOne to change my S$ to HK$, versus changing the S$ to HK$ myself. There did seem to be a difference, albeit a small one.

The 'problem' with changing HK$ yourself is that you will inevitably end up with some excess HK$. To me that was not a problem because I can 'sweep' up all excess HK$ by using the ETF RSP function.