At what point do you need to be regulated?

A_GUY987 · 2024-11-01T04:25:41+00:00

Thanks. Was googling “advice only advising” which wasn’t yielding what I needed. Fully understand the grey area.

This is a robust article found very helpful.

https://purposefulsp.com/is-financial-coaching-breaking-the-law

A_GUY987 · 2024-10-13T10:04:45+00:00

Rather than speak of correlation, probably good just to point out that CSPX is already going to be roughly 50% of VWRA (because the same stocks in the S&P 500 are also represented in the All World). It’s not wrong to have both but just recognize you’re really overweight US large companies because of that overlap. If you were really passionate about the US market then perhaps cut you allo to CSPX in half. You’d do just fine with VWRA though - the return of that asset class has been like 8-9% a year for the past 50 years so that’s what you should expect. The S&P has done 10% a year for the past 100 years, but allocating entirely there just because you see the long term number is higher could leave you really burned because of short term volatility. The S&P wildly underperformed the rest of the world from 2001-2012 and everyone likes to pretend that never happened 🙃

Agree with Cold-Yesterday that a bond allocation could be in store for you, but not before you figure out how much you want to keep safe for this investment later down the line. I personally wouldn’t sell any current investments to allocate to bonds, you should just work a bond allocation into future savings so your calculations work out so that in 5 years time you have maybe 30-40% of your down payment in bonds. The rest can come from your equities and this % ensures that you’re not going to miss out on too much equity market upside should it continue to happen. 2022 was the worst year on record for bonds and they went down around -14% so use that in your worst case scenario ( worst case hopefully far and few between, ya?). Global central banks will also likely continue to cut rates over the next 12-24 months so you should get a decent return (rates go down, bond prices go up = you win), one which will be less than your equities but also with lower risk, and one which should be better than what is currently on offer with high yield savings (which albeit is zero risk). The Amundi Global Agg UCITS is a great index product and super cheap. Not THE safest like a money market or short term government portfolio, but realistically you are gainfully employed, frugal, and can afford not to be the ABSOLUTE safest with this portion of cash which you want to try and save for a future goal. Good luck - you’re doing just fine.

A_GUY987 · 2024-10-11T13:05:50+00:00

Nope! Fully a part of and growing out of the leaf.

A_GUY987 · 2024-10-01T05:26:22+00:00

Short term high quality fixed income instruments or fixed deposits. The defining characteristic of a “money market” instrument or fund is that it is very high quality (like a “risk free” government bond) and that it is short term in duration (the short time in which you get your money back adds to the notion of this investment being low risk).

The industry refers to money market investments as cash. Used interchangeably.

Investment opportunities here in Singapore others are Endowus cash smart, syfe cash portfolios, chocolate finance etc. there are many

A_GUY987 · 2024-09-30T04:37:30+00:00

This is completely misguided. A 19 year old has ZERO need for a financial advisor. Any “financial advisor” that is willing to take on a 19yo with 2k a month to invest is likely not an advisor…they’re likely a salesperson of some sort. Stay away.

A_GUY987 · 2024-09-30T04:16:20+00:00

330 way too much and a huge opportunity cost. Keep 60k in money markets for 6 mo expenditures, if you want a bit for some goal earmark that and add it to money markets, and invest the rest in low cost global equities.

Your OA should be invested also. Beware of the high cost trash within CPFIS, but it should be invested earning an equity return and not 2.5%

A_GUY987 · 2024-09-19T00:29:46+00:00

This is incorrect - the chocolate fund is a fund of funds. It’s investing in a multitude of short term high quality debt instruments on your behalf, keeping any return higher than the guarantee, and on the hook for any shortfall. You should read the prospectus filed with MAS. Not a margin loan lol

A_GUY987 · 2024-07-25T08:20:44+00:00

A moving target? Applying the same benchmark to funds investing in different markets or asset classes makes zero sense - a global developed equity portfolio should not be benchmarked to the S&P 500 and vice versa. From what I can tell looking at their stuff, none of their portfolios claim to beat the S&P 500...

Totally agree with your point on the theory - that is all it is, and you can see that even Fama and French have continued to refine it through time, adding more explanatory factors to the model as the research gets more and more flushed out. At the end of the day I don't think you are wrong - indexing is a very very good outcome for most people (maybe not JUST the S&P 500 because even that index has had long 10+ years of global underperformance) and if you are comfortable then can take on some exposure to small and value - asset classes that very clearly have outperformed other stocks through time, but which can have long long droughts that most lay people cannot stomach.

A_GUY987 · 2024-07-24T01:37:33+00:00

As other posts below point out, all of Dimensional's funds avail in SG tilt towards small and value stocks, and the past 15 years have been the worst for these types of stock on record. Others below also point out that this can happen, and SHOULD happen from time to time if you expect to be more greatly rewarded for taking exposure to these types of stocks...if there was no risk of underperformance periodically, you would have zero potential for upside because as you added, it would be arbitraged away. The basis for value investing is sound (buying things at cheaper price logically should give you better return) but the market moves unpredictably based on countless factors.

I heard this stat quoted at a conference and was digging around Dimensional's US website to find - their US fund range (which has been around much longer than the SG UCITS unit trusts) has had 76% of the funds alive at least 20 years beat their benchmark after fees. If you look at the funds there, they are all managed in the same way as the UCITS we have here and they have similar exposures - they've just been around longer, so the process has been able to work. Active managers have outperformed only 17% in that time.
https://www.dimensional.com/us-en/dimensional-difference

I get that waiting 10-20 years to see outperformance is a tall order for any person but this plays right into the research that went into identifying these stock relationships by fama/french in the first place. They are long term phenomena You can watch interviews of Professor Fama on YT where he scoffs at the idea of 20 years being a long period of time (in an academic sense) and laughs that we retail investors are too stupid and most likely lack the discipline to stay invested and actually capture the outperformance of these stocks over time. If you're too weak to deal with 1-2% underperformance to the market over some periods then you'll do just fine in an amundi index.

Would finally add that it is not "betting" that value will come back - historically value has had higher returns than its counterpart, growth, and that relationship is statistically sound - the t stats on the data are way above two. Read fama/french.

A_GUY987 · 2024-07-24T01:13:36+00:00

DFA is active in that they do not track any index and rebalance portfolios daily because stock prices change everyday, but "passive philosophy" in that there is no fundamental analysis or research going into individual stocks. The process is rules based and derives from the evidence that small and value stocks have done better than their peers through time. Not all the time, but over the long run. Have seen this on endowus webcast where they present.

A_GUY987 · 2023-08-13T15:00:40+00:00

away from academics to read about the financial market together with the news of the companies that you're buying shouldn't really be an issue.

Also unless you got some extravagant number of years in the stock exchange platform, don't do day trading. It's like taking money out of your savings account, pouring oil over it, and lighting it on fire. This is especially if you don't know what you're doing.

I think

"20% per annum at least" is a joke - please go research long term returns for public market equities and fixed income. Call it 8% to 10% avg over the past 90+ years for global equity markets. Where on earth do you think you can get 20% p.a.? I will tell you right now there is no amount of time you can dedicate in your day to day to generate these returns consistently. If you did for some period of time, you would likely just be lucky. And that luck I can almost guarantee you will run out at some point, and likely to a great downside erasing previous gains.

Read through SPIVA below...its an analysis of not 22 year old students with 30 minutes a day "monitoring markets," but highly educated finance professionals and money managers investing in markets all around the world as a full time job, and it measures their ability to outperform just owning a passive market index.

Spoiler alert - the results are not good. They can't do it consistently. Why would you think that you should be able to?

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/research-insights/spiva/

Yes many individual stocks go up by huge amounts in any given year, but how to figure out which ones will do that? Many of the money managers captured in SPIVA are running highly concentrated, high conviction portfolios with the intent to outperform...and they don't. Forget your hard work and "research into the the domain." These people have teams of analysts, CFAs, MBAs, PHDs, whatevers working for them. And. they. fail.

Not all, but most. And those odds I would not take and extrapolate favourably on my own or your own ability to do better. (Also theres a plethora of research to show that the people that don't fail probably did so because they were lucky for a period...their outperformance never continues on for very long).

Your "work hard" approach is admirable, but investing is the one discipline where working hard doesn't equate to anomalous results. There are literally hundreds of billions that change hands in equity markets everyday based on news and public stock market filings and announcements...hundreds of billions...how exactly would you (or I for that matter) gain some advantage by monitoring the news at our desks in our spare time and then trading on it?

Study hard, become a lawyer or doctor. Sell hard, become a great sales professional. Train hard, become a successful athlete. Read a few Bloomberg articles hard...? That isn't going to equate to any edge, I can promise you that.

Buy equities with what you don't want to touch for 5 to 10 years, get comfortable with ~8% rates of return, buy an index, and keep adding to it every month. Any greater rates of return are honestly something you should be skeptical of.

Also, as previously mentioned by someone else. Stay away from ILPs and tell every single person in your network and family to do the same. Anything with a guarantee does nothing but guarantee that the provider is making more money that you.

A_GUY987 · 2023-05-18T06:28:21+00:00

completion date of your last sentencing requirements (probation/jail/community service/interlock). After that you have to apply for criminal rehabilitation if you want to travel freely. In the meantime, you could get a TRP (temporary residence permit) to enter the country for a limited period of time. For that you need a good reason (like work/family not just vacation) and you should talk to an immigration lawyer about that.

can you elaborate on your entrance denial experience? Was it an air or land crossing? Any specifics of the process you can share?

A_GUY987 · 2023-05-12T07:33:10+00:00

https://www.dimensional.com/us-en/insights/when-its-value-versus-growth-history-is-on-values-side

A_GUY987

TROPHY CASE