~~Towards Barista FIRE~~

This month marks the end of the 1 st quarter of 2022. Thus it's definitely a good time for me to record the performance of my portfolio for the very first time to see how it has been. I started my SG Dividends Portfolio in late 2017, and I began tracking the dividends and all reinvestment done starting 2018. To date, my SG Dividends Portfolio consist of banks, REITs and defense technology. On the other hand, I only started the US Growth Portfolio in late December 2021. I took the opportunity to start the growth portfolio as the US market corrected, which made me believe it's a relatively safer time to enter the market compared to the all time highs in mid November 2021 for the NASDAQ. Currently, my US Growth Portfolio consist of mainly big tech names, bank and exchange traded funds (ETFs). Being a relatively conservative investor, I prefer to dollar cost average (DCA) into the market to slowly build up my portfolio. The advantages of using Interactive Brokers to buy th

The power of compounding is known to be the 8 th wonder of the world. Compounding is not something new. In fact, it has been practiced by many investors for a long time. I have been exposed to investing via compounding for a long time, however, I only put it into practice 4 years ago to present. Compounding involves reinvesting all the dividends payout, to let the new shares bought with the dividends generate more dividends in future. For instance, with a capital of $1,000.00, and a dividend payout of 5%, The total amount of dividends collected at the end of 20 years will be $2,653.30. Comparing this with simple interest, with the same capital of $1,000.00, and a dividend payout of 5%, which is collected and not reinvested yearly, the total amount of dividends collected at the end of 20 years will be $2,000.00, which is about 25% lesser compared to compounding. This shows the accumulation will definitely help to build the profit margin. Before one jumps into investing via c

This is my first post in this blog to document my journey. I have started investing since 2010, which is a great year to start investing after the Great Financial Crisis. However, without any proper planning and execution, I made many small profitable trades and also multiple losing trades. This results in a zero sum game, and I did not earn much profits at all despite the great recovery of the markets. After some reflections, I managed to analyze and evaluate my actions, emotions and methods in “investing” to see where the problem lies. I concluded that my stock picking skills were total crap. One look into my portfolio at that time will show that only dividend-paying stocks were profitable. The so-called growth stocks always end up in the red. In addition, I restricted my investing to only shares listed in SGX. My limited knowledge makes me afraid to invest in US stocks and shares. As quoted from Benjamin Franklin, “Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling