July 2017 – Portfolio Updates

This would be my first post for an update of my portfolio. Yay! The main reason is because I have collected some dividends in July and would like to note down the progress of my portfolio.

It has been almost three months since I stepped out of my comfort zone and bought my very first stock that isn’t the STI ETF. Fast forward till today, BF (yes, I pulled him along with this journey with me) and I have built a portfolio with almost $30,000 invested capital. At the time of writing, each of our stock holdings has generated paper gains. Our portfolio stats, as calculated from my online portfolio, has an overall time weighted annual return of 9.9% and a paper gain of 5.57% on invested capital with dividends collected.

Fail-safe investing – Building a Permanent Portfolio

Image source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/559931-6-etf-permanent-income-portfolio

In my previous blog entry related to investing in gold, one of my readers and fellow financial blogger, Warriortan, introduced me to the Permanent Portfolio, which is sometimes also known as a fail-safe investment strategy. He has been developing this strategy in his personal portfolio and you can read his progress by clicking here and here.

I must admit that I was initially intimidated by the words “fail-safe” because those two words just sounded too good to be true in the world of investing.

A Beginner’s guide to The Balance Sheet – A simple analogy

READ THIS: This is a continuation of A Beginner’s guide to The Income Statement – A simple analogy in part of Fundamental Analysis. Do read that article first if you haven’t done so as the same analogy is being used below.

The Balance Sheet is easily found together with the Income Statement (and of course, the Cash Flow Statement) in a typical annual report of a listed company. It has very useful information to understand the financial situation of the company at that particular moment. Many key financial ratios (e.g. Current ratio, Debt/Equity ratio)

A Beginner’s guide to The Income Statement – A simple analogy

I decided to start a beginner guide to the basics of Fundamental Analysis starting with The Income Statement. I want to record my knowledge somewhere and what better way than to blog about it? It is also in fact beneficial to me whenever I pen down my thoughts because I’m sort of materializing whatever that is going through my mind, which in turn challenges my understanding towards the topic. Plus, I get a chance to receive some constructive feedback from my readers. Win-win! 🙂

I refer to a quote from Einstein:

A value stock – Keong Hong Holdings Ltd

If you’re a regular reader of Miss Niao, then you probably know that I know nuts about buying stocks. Wait a minute… On second thought, “nuts” could be an overrated word to use. I contemplated for some time on publishing this blog entry because it is my first time performing an analysis of a stock, and I don’t wanna screw up by saying something silly.

Now that I’ve finally decided to do it, my only hope is that I would be able to gain more insight through any comments on this article.

You should only Dollar-Cost-Average for 12 months?

I was Googling one day about how effective dollar-cost averaging is on a general basis and I came across this very interesting article. Although written in 1997, I find it still relevant to today’s context. It talks about the amount of risk that DCA can mitigate as compared to a lump-sum investment and a study was conducted on how different DCA periods can have very different returns for the investor. The numbers show that DCA best protects your capital (in beating lump sum investments) with an investment period of 6 to 12 months.

Should you invest in gold? Warren Buffett says “No”!

Last week, my driving instructor (yes, I’m learning driving!) asked me if I knew anything about buying gold. He said that he had some spare savings now and wanted to buy some gold since the prices for gold seem to be pretty low now.

Is it? I don’t know. He told me to try and find out more information for him. And so I did.

It brought me back to a few months ago when I saw one of my girlfriends posting on her Facebook wall with a few new gold bracelets that she bought. The description included was that since gold generally appreciates over time, buying now would be a good investment.

Upon more research, I’ve even found out that there are gold ETFs! So interesting. So technically speaking, you don’t have to own physical gold to own gold.

Wah, sounds good! Don’t even need to think of where to store your gold anymore. Use other people’s vaults lah! Hahaha…

Jokes aside, I did more “serious” research and found this on Youtube:

Looks like I won’t be buying and fondling gold anytime soon. Hehe. It also wouldn’t be able to help me build up the “income” part of my portfolio as commodity stocks do not provide any dividends (like duh).

Thanks for reading!

Miss Niao xoxo