Portfolio Update for October 2025

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This will be a relatively short post, just to update on the transactions for the month.

For the month of October, it was a eventful month for my portfolio.  In the first half of the month, attention was on the possible ignition of the US-China trade war as China started imposing more restrictions on the export of rare earth minerals, and implementing new controls on technologies used in rare earth processing.  This news angered Donald Trump temporarily, and he threatened to impose a further 100% tariffs on China.  This caused a short term blip in the markets, because soon after he TACO ("Trump Always Chicken Out") and declared such tariffs are not sustainable and he and President Xi are still on good terms.

Another concern will be the frothy valuations in US Technology companies.  Although I no longer own any US stocks at the moment, the performance of the US markets will still have an impact on the performance of the SG market.  I am unsure if US big tech companies are currently forming a bubble that awaits to be burst, but the recent news of the "inter-investments" between Oracle, Nvidia, OpenAI, AMD, Microsoft and Google do seem like some form of a final push of the bull market to me.  Whether I am right or wrong is no longer important as I do not own these shares now, but the situation definitely makes me cautious and hope to build up a little bit more cash buffer to prepare for any possible corrections to come.

Furthermore, the recent limelight on the bankruptcy of auto parts maker First Brands exposes smaller US banks to bad debts and their solvency remains in question.  This brought the recent collapse of Silicon Valley bank back into investors' memories and the jitters definitely impacted the share prices of these smaller banks.  Will this expose the weakness of the financial markets remain to be seen, but cracks are indeed forming.

On the contrary, all these bad news are propelling the price of gold up to all time highs of USD 4,300 per ounce, before retracing back to around USD 3,880 and stabilising around USD 4,000.  Due to limited funds, I probably will not buy more gold in this correction, as I prefer to keep any available funds to accumulate more dividend shares to boost my dividend income.

Closer to home, Mapletree family REITs have announced their results for the 3rd quarter of 2025.  Mapletree Logistics Trust (MLT) and Mapletree Pan Asia Commercial Trust (MPACT) have announced slightly concerning results, but the slight increase in distribution per unit (DPU) quarter on quarter gave positive sentiments.  However, Mapletree Industrual Trust (MIT) gave a disappointing set of quarterly results due to divestment and underperforming US data centers.  All these inevitably resulted in a decline in DPU.  With such disappointing results, it is no wonder that MIT's share price tumbled after the release of its results.  Coupled with the latest FED meeting where Jerome Powell hinted that there may be no further rate cuts in December 2025, the share price of REITs tumbled.  

For this month, I injected approximately SGD 2.5K capital buying the following shares:

SGX:    Bank of China HK SDR

Total Portfolio Value has increased by approximately 2.3% to around SGD 687K including capital injection, very much due to the optimism in rate cuts and the improving sentiments of the tariffs.  Looking at the numbers, though my portfolio value has declined rather significantly due to liquidation last month, I am happy that my cashflow from my Malaysia assets have improved and turned positive.  As such, the financial stress and strain has turned into positive boost.  Overall, I hope I can successfully begin the first phase of Barista FIRE next year, with sufficient amount of dividends to continue reinvesting and further grow my portfolio.  May my dividends continue to accumulate to greater heights!

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