Financial Review FY2015

Before I stepped into the workforce, I have already planned my personal finance in detail. From weekly budget, to saving targets, to when I am projected to accumulate my first S$100k. Over the course of the year, I have made some revision to my financial plan as I gain better grasp of my spending habit.

Fast forward to today, 10.5 months have past since my first day of work and I have managed to hit my first-year saving target of $33,000 earlier than I expected. During this period, the stock market have also presented various opportunities which helped me expanded my investment portfolio from $4.2k to $24.1k. Hopefully, more of such opportunity will arise over this volatile year.

Expenses wise, about $1,190 was set aside each month for fixed expenditure which include insurance premium, telco bills, utility bills, transport fares, and family contribution. My variable expenditure, which consists of dining and entertainment (D&E), was about $115 per week. Bulk of the D&E expenses went to dining as my gf and I don't really have any expensive hobbies nor do we shop frequently. A large dip in expenses is usually a pretty good indicator of when I had an argument with my gf. /sweat

In my quest to build up my passive income stream, I have picked up various tricks along the way to maximize my dollar.

• Ditch your kids savings account and set-up a high interest current account (e.g. OCBC 360, UOB One, or BOC SmartSaver)
• Use a credit card that best suit your spending habit. With the right card(s), the cash rebate can be significant
• Use ShopBack to enjoy greater discounts from a wide selection of online stores
• Participate in various government initiatives, such as Travel Smart or National Steps Challenge, for monetary rewards. These initiatives reward you for doing what you are already doing everyday such as taking MRT or walking

While these little tricks may seems to earn you insignificant amount each time, cumulatively, it can be quite substantial. To date, I have earned over $400 from doing the 4 things above.

For the next financial year, starting June, I have set a higher saving target of S$43k. Assuming no change in spending habit or any large unexpected expenses, this should be a relatively easy target. I also hope the new financial year will bring more investment opportunities so I can deploy my idling fund to work hard for me. 

Portfolio

Chanced upon an extremely useful website called SGXcafe, which allows you to track your investment portfolio with great details and helps you compute various financial statistics.

ETF investing via Dollar Cost Averaging vs. Standard Chartered

Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA), or sometimes referred to as Constant Dollar Plan, is an investment approach of buying a fixed dollar amount of a particular investment vehicle (typically an index fund or exchange-traded fund) on a regular schedule, regardless of the asset's price. As the amount of money invested in each interval remains constant while the market value varies, it systematically buys more shares when market is cheap and vice versa. This simple yet powerful strategy free investors from committing excessive amount of time and effort to monitor the market, and ease the burden of timing market entry. 

There are various options available that allow you begin your DCA portfolio. The more popular ones include POSB's Invest-Saver and OCBC's Blue Chip Investment Plan. Both enable you to invest in STI ETF for as little as $100. 

Increasingly, there are also people who try to mimic DCA using Standard Chartered (SC) Online Equities Trading. Enticed by the extremely low brokerage fees (0.2% compared to 1% for Invest-Saver), this group of investors buys a fixed number of shares at regular interval. At first glance, it appears that SC offers a cheaper alternative to POSB and OCBC's constant dollar plan. However, by buying a fixed number of shares using SC, it loses the powerful mechanism of buying more when the price is cheap.

In order to assess how the trade-off weight against each other, I constructed 2 portfolios based on POSB Invest-Saver and SC 'fixed share plan'. To ensure comparability, the set up of the 2 portfolios are as follow (you may ignore this part unless you want to scrutinize the methodology):

In the SC 'fixed share plan':

• One lot, or 100 shares, of STI ETF (ES3.SI) were purchased on the first trading day of each month beginning Jan 2008.
• Fees of 0.2325% (brokerage + market fee) were incurred for each transaction
• All dividends were included

In the POSB Invest-Saver:

• $301.30 were invested on the first trading day of each month. The investment amount was selected to match the investment cost price of the SC plan as of March 2016.
• 1% sales charge was incurred on the $301.30 each month 
• Residual shares were removed
• All dividends were included

The chart below compares the performance of the 2 portfolios.

*Click to enlarge

The chart shows the value over investment cost (portfolio value  minus cost price of the shares) of the POSB Invest-Saver (blue) and SC fixed share plan (red). The good news is that both portfolios have grown substantially over the cost price. As of 11/03/2011, the Invest-Saver portfolio value is $37,202.92, while the cost price is $29,970.97. What's interesting is that, despite the much lower fees of SC, it failed to outperform Invest-Saver. This illustrates the power of the cost averaging mechanism. In addition, the convenience of investing via POSB Invest-Saver far outweighs having to manually trade using SC Online Equities Trading. I can also imagine investors who are using SC will be more likely to be swayed by market sentiment. After all, how many people dare to buy when they are surrounded by gloom and doom?

The extremely inclined readers may point out that the total invested amount for the 2 portfolios are likely to differ over the period assessed. Indeed, the investment cost of Invest-Saver exceeded SC for most of the period. One way to take this into consideration is to look at portfolio value over cost price to evaluate the difference in return. Plotting the value over cost time series, it again shows that Invest-Saver outperformed SC. To keep this post manageable for novice readers, I have decided to exclude this section from the main content.

Portfolio Performance

This blog was initially started to document my investment journey back in 2011 (unfortunately, many of my early entries were accidentally deleted). As time goes by, my focus gradually shifted to nus module review. Now that my undergraduate years are over and is actively building my portfolio, I think it is time to revert this blog to its original intent.

Let me start with my portfolio performance for the past 5 years.

The returns were computed using XIRR and benchmarked against dollar cost averaging (DCA) the STI index (subjected to 1% sale charge and inclusive of dividends). To read this plot, the % return is the per annum gain if the entire portfolio was liquidated at that point in time. For example, if I liquidated my portfolio in early 2013, my return would be ard 20% p.a. for the period of investment. Alternatively, If I were to liquidate my portfolio last Friday (22 Feb 2016), my return would be around 17% per year for the last 5 years. This is in contrast with the near 0% return of the DCA portfolio.

Over the past 5 years, my investment theme has changed. When I first started, my focus was on high yield counters (mainly REITs). However, ever since Ben Bernanke, then FED chairman, announced QE tapering, my target shifted to low-debt-high-cash companies that are less vulnerable to interest rate hikes. My current portfolio consist of the following stocks:

Company	Share
Sheng Siong	5000
Raffles Medical	1000
Singtel	2500
Parkway Life REIT	2000
Total Value	S$ 22,270

Going forward, I will continue to be actively seeking investment opportunities to grow my portfolio. Hopefully it can grow to $100,000 by early 2018, barring any financial Armageddon.

Dropbox link to lecture notes and tutorials

Here's the link to the module materials that I have uploaded to dropbox. I apologise to those who emailed me to request for some of these materials but did not get a response from me. I seldom check my personal email nowadays.

NUS Modules

All the best for the upcoming semester.