~~Towards Barista FIRE~~

This will be a relatively short post, just to update on the transactions for the month. For the month of July, it was another interesting month.  The first half of the month seems all bright and rosy, with S&P 500 and NASDAQ hitting all time highs, boosted mainly by the Magnificent Seven.  This helped to propel my portfolio to a new high in the first week, with almost all the stocks in my US Growth portfolio hitting individual all time highs.  Even the lagging Tesla has staged a strong rebound, rocketing from below USD 200 to above USD 250 within 2 weeks!  The strongest hype came when the June CPI numbers were released this month, showing slowing inflation year-on-year and even a decline in core inflation month-on-month.  This immediately caused the 10-year yield to ease and propelled the price of REITs in the following days.  That is definitely a welcome move as it is beneficial to my portfolio, but whether it will last remains to be seen. I say this because many analysts are al

Dying has been a taboo subject for many, especially for Asians.  Personally for me, I am not too worried of passing on, as I do not have any children who are dependent on me.  I am just very very worried to be in a bed-ridden state for whatever reason.  Besides that, in the event that I passed, my only worry will be my mum, but I believe my brother will take very good care of her, so no worries there as well.  So, why am I writing about this taboo subject?   Due to family medical history, I do not think I will live a very long life (70 is probably a bonus number), however, nothing is absolute and predictable.  Therefore as much as I would like to get as many things done as early as possible to ensure minimal regrets, I will also need to protect myself from longevity risks.  Personally, being able to have a rough prediction of how much time I have left is a very fortunate thing, because that will enable me to prioritize and do as many things as I could with the time I have left.  Howeve

I am not a financial expert, so this post is just purely my personal feeling.  Learning from AK71, I am starting to talk to myself a little bit more as well (without the part on technical and fundamental analysis).  As such this post is just based on my gut feel and not supported by any statistics or numbers.  Just having fun! So since the speech by Jerome Powell on 10th July 2024, the Singapore REITs have registered a huge rebound in the following two days. Based on the Lion-Phillip S-REIT ETF, REITs staged a 6.35% rebound in the following 2 trading days (11th and 12th July 2024).  More encouragingly, the daily trading volume in these 2 days were around 10 times higher than the average daily trading volume in the past year!  This price movement, supported by the high volume, may be an indication that this run up for REITs still have legs!  Fast-forward to this week, the performance of the REITs are largely subdued (except for the US Commercial REITs) and the trading volume has normali

First half of 2024 have passed and previously I did a quick review of my portfolio in the 1st quarter and 2nd quarter in my earlier posts.  I classified my portfolio into 3 components, namely SG REITs, SG Non-REITs and US Growth.  An overview to the performance of my portfolio for the past one year is shown below: Things to note: 1)     SG REITs' performance seemed stable, but that is due to consistent injection of small amounts of capital through dollar cost average (DCA) into the portfolio along the way.  Without the capital injection, I believe the drop will be quite significant, especially when the performance of the Mapletree family of REITs (which were supposedly the blue chip REITs) were way below expectations, and their share price has not really found a bottom. 2)     SG Non-REITs' performance were quite stable for the first half of period under review.  The spike in value on week 42 is due to large capital injection and portfolio rebalancing to include Development

Do note that this is not a buy or sell recommendation.  This is solely my personal reasons for adding the shares into my portfolio.  Do perform your own due diligence! Recently, share prices of the Singapore-listed REITs are back to their near term lows, and for many REITs, their prices are actually very close, or at their 52-week lows.  To many die-hard fans of REITs, including myself, we are always happy to dollar cost averaging down on the REITs to capture the high dividend yield of quality REITs at rock bottom prices.  However in the past one to two years, I think REITs-investors like myself had borne the brunt of the "low getting lower" share prices for the REITs, so much so that many of us are actually running out of war chest, or some may decide to pause and take a look to see where the price supports actually lies, before continuing to invest. Personally, I am not planning to wait as I do not know where the price supports are, or when the share prices of the REITs are