What are /r/singaporefi's favorite Products & Services?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Tbh there won't be much of a difference.

Does Market Timing Work?

This research article by Charles Schwab actually shows that investing on the first trading day of every year VS dollar-cost averaging monthly didn't produce much of a difference.

For book, this is the best one that I found
"The Everything Guide to Investing in Your 20s & 30s" -
Book is in US context but can be easily translated into Singapore context.

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Guide-Investing-Step-Step/dp/1507210302

Saxo will be very expensive in the long run. They charge .12 (more than the expense ratio of the ETF) as custody fees. Rule of thumb - run away from platforms charging custody and dividend fees. Also, the exchange rates offered by Saxo are terrible. If you’re looking to grow your investment amount in the long run (say to 100k or more) Saxo will be a bad choice. Currently, SCB make may sense given the low amount of DCA. In due course, you could shift to interactive brokers.

There are plenty of websites that allow you to track expense rations over a period of time. You could look at this website to see how much you’ll really be paying the platform in the long run: https://www.omnicalculator.com/finance/expense-ratio

Unsolicited advice : you may consider investing in VWRA for more diversification.

Interestingly Wise did a comparison of Revolut and YouTrip lol

I'll probably stick to YouTrip for the flat no-fees as it seems like Revolut may charge a markup for depending on whether it's transacted on a weekend? Anyway the rates are all interbank rates so no big deal for me. I don't need all the bells and whistles and I like how YouTrip is more straightforward (like how it doesn't charge for card delivery), but you do what works for you.

Hi OP, i would recommend you to read this book to start with getting some fundamental knowledge on investing in a Singapore context: Rich By Retirement: How Singaporeans Can Invest Smart and Retire Wealthy It is a short read, and covers most of the advice already given by people here in more depth.

Please do not buy any ILPs. Protection (Insurance) should always be separate from Investment.

If you are 22 year old Singaporean / PR who is just starting out, make sure you have a term life insurance that covers death, disability and possibly critical illness too. Also make sure you have comprehensive medical insurance on top of basic Medishield.

In terms of investment, monthly SIP in just 3 ETFs or possibly 3 ETFs and 2 REITs will give you fully diversified portfolio that you can continue to build through your working years. One of the ETF should be linked to Fixed Income instruments whereas other 2 ETFs (eg STI ETF and CSPX listed on LSE) will be more than enough to give you necessary equity exposure.

This of course is a general guideline that I give to my own children (both are working professionals in their 20's) - please do your own research and decide.

And please do yourself a big favor. Go and get yourself 'Four Pillars of Investing by William Bernstein.

It is a must read for all retail investors no matter what their education and experience. There is a lot of smoke and mirrors in the world of investing.

Hope this helps.

Interesting, I had missed out on this when screening the Endowus Investment List as I had zoomed in on "Equities" which impliedly removed "Multi-Asset" funds from consideration.

LionGlobal All Season Fund (Growth) is available on Endowus for 0.355% after the trailer rebate c.f. GC at 0.26%. Though if I now widen my search & look across all asset classes, Fullerton SGD Cash Fund is even cheaper at 0.1% though intuitively doesn't seem to make sense to park SRS money there?

So I think my criteria isn't simply going for the cheapest SRS investible fund but something else though I'm not sure what it is/should be 😂...

After reading the book: https://www.amazon.com/Rich-Retirement-Singaporeans-Invest-Wealthy-ebook/dp/B01JXW17ZM

LOL.

TBH I've been thinking of liquidating my SG ETFs, but haven't done more DD to see what else I can buy. Maybe I'll lurk around this sub more haha

Like what schizmmy says, different market have different opening hours. US stocks opened at 930pm Singapore time.

But is weird the warning came out as short sell, usually there are three type of order type. buy/sell Limit Order, Buy/sell Stop Order, Buy/sell Market Price. https://www.schwab.com/resource-center/insights/content/3-order-types-market-limit-and-stop-orders

The only reason why the short selling warning occurs is OP accidentally goes to the "sell tab" and accidentally click on the short sell.

to be honest, if you're having such a worry, you're obviously not suitable to hold individual stocks regardless of the amount of time and effort poured into research.
What you should be doing is holding the entire market through an irish domiciled etf that buys the SP500 index and build your portfolio from there.

Low Tax and fees should be the top priority in your mind as a recent investor.

It's not as exciting as when NVIDIA announces a new GPU and their stocks skyrocket but by having an ETF which holds the entire market your position will not be as volatile and you do not need to worry about how bad your individual positions get. As the market grows, your ETF grows. DCA into these 20 years and you'll thank yourself for sticking through both good and bad times.

20 years of holding individual positions just cause some say these big name companies are good can just be as bad cause you don't know what's gonna happen. They don't even have a crystal ball to prove it to you.

I see some people recommending call options here. You just started investing. Unless this is money you're willing to burn, this should be a no no for you.

You should also start with this to get what I just summarised above: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Book-Common-Sense-Investing-ebook/dp/B075Z6HSCJ

https://www.reddit.com/r/eth_liquidity_scam/comments/ronkkk/coinbase_wallet_potential_lawsuit_information/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Coinbase Wallet App is now associated as being scam facilitator.

Especially after one agree and Join COINBASE WALLET App. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.toshi

The malicious Dapp has scammed many and can only do thru COINBASE WALLET APP ie auto infinite withdrawal without needing any approval from wallet owner.

>Dec 3, 2020, 00:00 UTC - Dec 3, 2021, 08:41 UTC

SGD/USD close: 0.729559 low: 0.727911 high: 0.759035

https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=SGD&to=USD&view=1Y

If measure from top to bottom instead of 1Y/YTD its just -~4.3%.

Pretty much where we were at exactly 2 years ago.

Not familiar with forex but it sounds very tame to me. Wonder what made OP say

>losing its value quite dramatically recently

CFA has a single THB REIT. But I have seen some nomads complaining of USD/THB movement (from 2016 onward) . So I'm not certain for TH, a USD denominated REIT ETF is a good choice.

IASP's geographic spread by descending order: 1. JP 2. HKD 3. AUD 4. SGD 5. USD.

Doesn't seem to relate to either THB or MUR.

So bottomline: If there isn't a clear benefit due to FX, default back to a SGD REIT ETF with a decent yield and TER?

https://www.etoro.com/customer-service/regulation-license/

since it is not regulated in SG by MAS, I wouldn't deem it as legal in SG per se

Yeah, for sure, budgeting needs to come first before emergency funds/savings, which is in turn before investing.

I used MoneyWell for at least 5 years to do envelope budgeting, because it did exactly the sort of envelope budgeting I want - allocate incoming money into buckets based on a prioritised plan, charge all outgoing money to buckets, if buckets go negative they stay negative, and I get to decide when and how I'd like to move money between buckets to balance them out. It's a bit different from YNAB because it has the concept of Income Buckets where I can park money before I decide to allocate it, and it has explicit Bucket Transfers where I can reason about "oh look the money i saved on not buying so many bubble teas can be moved towards my travel savings" vs the more abstract allocating less money to the category next month kinda thing in the YNAB style.

Unfortunately, MoneyWell's basically been in maintenance mode for several years so I can't recommend it. It's also Mac/iOS-only and I switched primarily to a PC some time ago and there's just been no great replacement. I've been using Actual (USD 4/mth) recently which is super cross-platform and has some interesting ideas, and it does kinda work for me, but it's really still too raw and unfinished to recommend to anyone. The developer also found that he just couldn't get enough subscription revenue for him to work on it full-time so he got a job and development has slowed accordingly.

While we all hate paying recurring fees (like the new YNAB -- USD 7/mth, crazy), I think it's really difficult to sustain software on a one-time license fee. But yet they need to fund ongoing customer support and bugfixes, until there's no money left to actually build the next major release. Oh well.

I think those books mentioned are pretty good. However, they were geared more towards passive, low-cost investing in a savings kind of way.

Rich by Retirement is very short and instructional. It tells you what you need to do in a Singapore context. However, if you wish to see how that relates to financial independence, I do recommend also an easy read call A Simple Path to Wealth by JLR Collins.

Collins is a blogger in the United States and invests mainly in one index fund VTSAX. I like the book because he explains certain questions that I get quite a few times from readers.

Hey man, I feel you. I’ve found Stoicism really helped me get a better handle on things and gain some useful perspective. Particularly when I was going through a rough time not that long ago.

I’d recommend...

This video as a starting point: https://youtu.be/5J6jAC6XxAI

And this book: Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales Ad Lucilium https://www.amazon.sg/dp/0140442103/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabc_7XwQFbQXFBHKR?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Good luck on the path.

I've been using the Money Manager Expense & Budget for over 2 years now. I used the expense data of my 1st year to form my budget, basically taking the average amount of expenses in each category (food, entertainment, household, transportation) as the budget for each category.

The app tells me how far I spent on my budget today (eg. it's the 28th and I've only spent 70% of my budget on food), so I get to stay within my budget pretty well since I can either cut down or spend more according to how much I've left for the month.

As for keeping track of my accounts, I usually update all my account balances (savings, investments) on the 5th of every month when the account statements are posted. This helps me keep track of my net worth.