Caveat Emptor

Limit Break! The 100K Mark! While most Singaporeans are busy pondering over the future of the nation amid cooling down day, I was ecstatic over something different entirely. I broke the SGD100K mark! Breaking the portfolio threshold beyond this resistance line at the age of 28 is something I am immensely proud of. Considering I graduated with negligible savings and did not land a high paying job, the portfolio is built up from scratch entirely through my own research and frugal savings. Although the value/GARP framework did not bear fruit for the first 2 years of investing (a result of dollar cost averaging in the STI ETF), my investment results improved immensely after the value in Ascendas India Trust and Ascendas REIT are realized by others. After I have gathered enough confidence to venture beyond Singapore to HK and US markets, my investment performance improved tremendously. I do not have any evidence that foreign markets are more efficient than Singapore markets, but the same f

Revisiting the Fama And French Model Serious investors whom have a decent foundation in quantitative finance will have came across the Fama and French 3 Factor model in his readings. Huge amounts of investment research and literature and quantitative asset pricing models are based on this. Even hedge funds or robo-advisers whom reject the efficient market hypothesis / CAPM have their key assumptions / origins based on the writings of Fama and French. With the large number of market commentary commenting about the death of the value premium (including a professor I greatly respect), I am exceptionally lucky to come across a recent commentary by French (March 2020) whom originated the model. His views will be more factual compared to the marketing speak of robo-advisers / investment trainers whom like to tout recent market volatility as a permanent change of things, or based their materials on outdated data and analysis. For an active investor whom utilises hybrid active stock picking an

Wire-card or Wire-Fraud Wire-card may be a familiar brand to consumers in Singapore. Singaporeans whom have paid for their food through EFTPOS terminals through Visa / Nets /Mastercard will have noted the terminals featuring this particular company. Never could I imagine such a large scale fraud could have happened within the shores of the Singapore financial center. Large scale fraud that I thought to be prevalent in S Chips (Missing cash and regulatory breakdown) in distant shores turned up at my doorstep. Although I am not vested in this company, to have directly used the payment services of a company that is engaged in large scale misrepresentation / fraud is jarring. A scuttlebutt analysis from vendors whom used its payment systems may simply have expected late payments from wirecard, instead of the entire insolvency of the company, which has a market cap of 18.26B as of 23 April. To quote some choice excerpts from the FT investigator / whistle blower Quote ht