Caveat Emptor

William Bernstein on Life cycle Investing (With my own thoughts) 1)    Your childhood experience directly affects your relationship with money People whom are spenders and don’t save, tend to have authoritarian fathers and come from very poor backgrounds. People whom train in architecture tend to value aesthetic changes and spend heavily on it. Nurture and Nature plays a part in the savings and investment behavior of individuals. 2)    Investing for Youngsters Young investors should be praying for long extended bear markets. An extended sale greatly favors those at the accumulation phase. Defensive investors / most young people should rely on more of their human capital to build up their investment capital base. Enterprising investors may take different paths to suit his performance goals. Stocks are least risky for youngsters as the stocks have more time to recover and grow.  3)    Investing for Geezers For Older investors, sequence ri...

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...