Cory Diary : Asset Tracker 2019-0108

Net Worth

With the beginning of the new year is time to assess my net worth trending. In this update, I have added "Non-Retirement line'. There is a good spike ending 2018 due to YEB and VB.  The losses in 2018 is mitigated by monthly income. This will expects to reduce in coming months due to local taxes and parent allowances.

 I should have done better in 2018 but I didn't. Nevertheless, my Assets continue to move up but at a slower pace with increasing expenses and poor market. Based on past trend, 2019 (touch wood) will be a good year for local investor. Why ?

I mentioned on the support lines that is strong. ( link ). Looks like so far they are held up pretty good. So my recent increase in STI Index and Reits help for now. I also did a quick swap on some of my SSB for Jan'19 allotment which is successful. Quite happy as is 0.5% rate up on top of starting 2.01% for year 1 which is almost doubled I had previously. Finally, in my many years of investment, after a year of negative returns, the year after is good positive. This happens 3 times for negative years ( Year 2008, 2011 and 2015) and 2018 will be the 4th !

Cory

20190108

Cory Diary : Investment Portfolio 2019-0104

Portfolio

As usual, my Investment Portfolio excludes tracking Pensions, SSB, Treasuries and Fixed Deposits. This setup is slightly higher up in Trusts/Reits allocation of 53%. I foresee waiting for market dips before increasing further. I have also reserved for a few positions for future acquisition in 2019.

There is nothing much to show on the bubble chart other than the yield expectation for start of year. A lot of overlapping. As the year past, this will probably scatter.

With 24 counters, seems I have my plate full. To most people this maybe too much. However I think is necessary for dividend diversification, and compensate for my selection weakness and emotions. Compared to my wife, she only has 2 stocks. One of them gained 4 times in 2 years. She is clearly on different worlds.

In 2019, I hope not to see drastic change in my portfolio.I have the same hope when I started last year. So ....


Cory
2019-0104

Cory Diary : 2018 Equity Performance

Year 2018

2018 has been tough for local equity investor. The STI ETF registered -6.48% after dividends. For people who is new to this, STI ETF is traded in SGX like shares in stock market. The last traded price is 3.117. (Stock Quote is ES3). It is often use as a benchmark to measure against investor portfolio performance as the ETF closely follows Straits Times Index which tracks the performance of the top 30 companies listed on the Singapore Exchange.

There are few methods to measure STI ETF Performance. I use XIRR after considering dividends distributed over the year. ( Typically twice annually ). XIRR is a function in Excel to calculate annualized returns. So we can do apple to apple comparison to my Investment performance. On the right table computed is how I obtain STI XIRR -6.48% including dividends.

My XIRR for 2018 Performance is -3.28% which is closely match to -3% portfolio losses. If I am to exclude US stocks, it will be XIRR -2.12%. So 2018 is the year where I am in the negative after dividends. My test drive in US Stock is quite bad in timing and the only consolidation is only a few % of my portfolio. So as mentioned in my earlier article, every % counts. The other lesson learned is on SME stocks that are more towards capital gain to size them up correctly smaller as they are more volatile in bad market condition and to realize them. 

What I did well is to contain and manage my losses and therefore outperform STI by 3.2% if I am to include US Stocks or 4.6% for local equity alone. This is especially important to me because over the years my portfolio has grown quite significantly. Every 1% move is quite a delta in $ number today than 5 or 10 years ago. Another thing I did well is work :). I got good bonus and this basically covered all my losses.

Cumulative Performance Comparison

Comparison is more meaningful if we do cumulative to minimize the luck component. This differentiate the men from the boys. However comparison to STI is tricky reason being you cannot decide when you are born therefore cumulative 30 years STI returns can be vastly different from cumulative 10 years STI returns from now. So is very misleading in my opinion if one advocate index investing purely without taking timing into consideration. Since I start actively with sizable portfolio 12 years ago, that will be the benchmark I will use. There are others assumptions made but let's ignore for simplicity.

I check multiple times on STI from 2007 onward. Excluding dividends if you have been doing index investing, is actually -0.2% annualized returns for STI. Which means about 3% returns after dividends.

For myself, 5.4% annualized 12 years compounded. The figure is expected to go on a down trend due to recent years of market weakness similar to STI however I have added disadvantage on aging and need to allocate to lower yield bonds, and much larger allocation of cash injection in later years. I would see the returns going down to 5% to match my portfolio dividend yield if the broad market continues to be flat or negative. Nevertheless is still better than leaving them in the banks.

My New Year Wish is to be able to help my wife manage her portfolio. She has been pretty damn lucky that I won't wish to touch. I have 2 more other wishes for 2019. 

Happy New Year !

Cory

2019-0101