STE's Stocks Investing Journey

  Small debts, big problems   <source: restofworld.org> "According to Reuters,  a state-compiled report on how Ant Group’s microlending products have encouraged poor people to build up debt ... “Because it doesn’t need to meet strict financial requirements, online microlending has evolved into more like a Ponzi scheme,” Shen Yan, an economics professor at Peking University’s National School of Development, tells  Rest of World . “For some companies, the ‘better clients’ in their eyes are those who can’t stop borrowing money.” “Most people don’t bother to calculate the interest. They just see the advertisement and think, ‘Oh it doesn’t cost much.’” The story behind Ant's ( and others FinTech )  high growth micro-lending business..... Although this is still not happening in SG , but I think is better to know and understand the "pitfalls " behind these so called "micro-lending / micro-credit "... The Dark Side of Fintech Borrowing < source : Harvard B...

 I think most of us will feel happy happy so long as you have CPF account as your interest from CPF been credited this morning , no matter rain or shine on 1st day of each new year. We (STE & Mrs. ) are so happy to see our CPF account  balance increase by $28,118.64 with these interest credited in.. I always emphasize that the CPF act as the Triple AAA Bond in our portfolio and if you are still young , you should treat it as long term AAA Bond  with only exception that you can see but can't touch at this moment. But I think we should not ignore the power of "compounding " effect if we are talking about 20-30 years kind of " lock in " period. Again, no right or wrong , some may think 20-30 years is too long and there is always a " policy risk " involve in  this regards. My Way Is Not The Only Way W have regularly done our RSTU while still being employed to save some personal income tax  and also doing some transferred of  $ from OA to SA  from t...

  Market sentiment continues to improve with good news from vaccine approval by US FDA and hope of more stimulus package. STI has rebounded strongly from 2400+ in early Nov to above 2800+ now, moving close to -0.5 SD level. I don’t have any buy or sell since the last update but some positions change due to price movement, e.g Public Bank move up by 7 positions due to price appreciation by almost +17% after it announced bonus issue of 4 for 1. Although this is quite irrational as from financial and fundamental’s perspective, everything remains the same, it just that the price may become cheaper after you are getting more shares and it may also improve company trading liquidity since more shares will be available. But investors seem got excited with such news, ummmm ....so maybe DBS / UOB should follow suit to have bonus issue and we may suddenly see price increase by 10+% with just a “magic announcement “ !! :D   What is Bonus Issue With Real Stock Examples < source:...

  Time flies and we are in the last month of the year 2020 and I think most of us (investors) are busy calculating how much passive income or dividend we will be receiving in 2020. As we are still surrounded and suffered from Covid-19 pandemic and just have little hope on the vaccine’s development recently, market sentiment has improved slightly. This year is not a good year for so-called “ value investors “as most of the companies had either reduced or suspend their dividend pay-out due to economic recession caused by Covid-19. I guess most of us are suffering from getting lower dividend income but you will be happy if you are a “ growth investors ” with full of tech stocks in your portfolio as some of these tech stocks have gone up much by few hundreds % e.g   (Zoom Video+692%),(Salesforce.com +149%), (Fastly +400%), and also EV manufacturers ( Tesla +615%), (NIO +1467%), (Xpeng +640%) etc.   As a value investor, my portfolio still in RED and underwater, guess the...