SG Wealth Builder

As a wealth builder, I constantly ask myself how I can improve my investing skills in order to make more money.  I view wealth as a journey, rather than a destination point. That is why I chose the name, “SG Wealth Builder” for this blog. Investing is important component of wealth building. So in this article, I will pen down my thoughts on the three tenets of successful investing.

Strategies

In investing, different people have different approaches and styles. Some people like to buy and hold blue chips while there are others who invest solely in Reits for dividend incomes. Then there are value investors who buy stocks at bargain price and sell them for capital appreciation. Growth investors look at companies with potential to grow and thus are willing to pay a premium for stocks that are trading at high price-to-earning ratio. At the end of the day, it does not matter which strategies you adopt as long as it yield positive results over time.

The worst thing in investing is not having a strategy and invest for the sake of investing. Without the clarity of thoughts and a proper framework in mind, the chance of winning the stock …

I suppose at some point in your life, the thoughts of making more money must have crossed your mind. Otherwise, you will not be visiting my blog! When I started my financial journey, I did not know that I would follow my late father’s footstep and become a sole breadwinner one day. Being young, I could not appreciate what Dad has done for us. On hindsight, if you have been receiving all the time and not giving, you may tend to take things for granted.

To feed us, Dad had toiled and worked hard all his life, much to the detriment to his health. At the age of 38, he suffered from a crippling stroke that would make him disabled for 20 long years. As a result, his income abilities got impaired and our family suffered for many years. Now that I am approaching 40 and am taking on the same responsibility as a sole breadwinner, I am determined to work hard for money and also to make my money work hard at the same time in order to mitigate the financial damages arising from permanent disabilities.

Work hard for money

The conventional way to make more money is to …

For many investors out there, it must have been a nightmarish experience for the past few months given the massive stock market decline. During this Chinese New Year long weekend, many Singapore investors and bloggers took this opportunity to take a break and recharge their batteries. Many choose to stay away from the stock market because they cannot bear to face the reality that a huge portion of their wealth just vanished into thin air.

Panic. Fear. Self doubts. Depression. Anger. These are the common emotions that have been displayed over and over again in many investors during the many stock market corrections. Unless you are a robot, you would have experienced some of these emotions if you have been vested in the stock market in the past few years. To be successful in investing, you must take the emotions out of investing. Not many people, including me, are able to achieve this. To achieve fearless investing, you must really be a disciplined investor and set entry and exit levels for every stocks that you purchased.

To be a fearless investor, you must have knowledge of the market and be precise in your execution. To do so, you need …

This coming Chinese New Year, many investors will have little to cheer about given the bearish market outlook. Many investors have seen their portfolio diminished in value and are feeling the pain of losing money in the stock market. Are you one of those investors who feel depressed over the recent stock market decline? If so, then brace yourself for further drops in the stock market because this is going to be a long ride. With China’s growth engine slowing down and the unexpected oil price rout, you know it is not going to be business as usual.

My Investment Mantra

As a wealth builder, my mantra is always to diversify my wealth on different assets. I have bought a bit of gold bullion, purchased insurance endowment plans and recently bought some K1 Ventures shares. I prefer to buy stocks during bad times because it is only during this period of time that you can buy stocks at reasonable prices. During bull market conditions, a lot of amateur retail investors would have pushed up the prices to ridiculous levels. The key thing is not to be greedy and set entry and exit levels when it comes to buying stocks …

It is often said that the rich becomes richer and the poor becomes poorer. Globally, the issue of social gap is entrenching in many cosmopolitan cities. Even Singapore, which is home to one of the largest concentration of millionaires in the world, is no exception. One of the key questions is how did the rich make their money and preserve their wealth in times of crisis? In one of the financial workshops I attended recently, the consultant briefly shed some light on how the rich made their fortune.

Every now and then, you would have heard about investment themes like renewable energy, technology, currency, property, ETF, gold/silver, investment-linked insurances and what not. These are actually hypes made by the movers and shakers to create bubbles so that small time investors like you and me will buy-in.

What happened was that years before the bubbles occurred, the ultra rich gathered their analysts and made them formulate new investment themes. After determining areas where they can reap in big monies, the rich dudes then pump in their funds.

They would hold press conferences and churned out quantitative data and charts to convince retail investors that their investment themes are the next …

Lately, my wife has been asking me what does passive income mean and how to create our own sources of passive income.

To most working adults, the concept of passive income can be quite alien or new, especially for those who are not financially educated. This is because most of us were brought up with the conventional thinking that we should study hard and then secure a good job that pays well. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this traditional thinking but following this route will probably not set you on the path to financial success. In today’s context, with so many graduates (local and foreign) flooding the market, you need something special in order to be ahead of the peck.

Coming back to the main topic, passive incomes are sources of incomes which do not require you to actively work or labor in exchange for monetary rewards. Effectively, you are making money even when you are sleeping. Of course there are trade-offs to make. When we are working for a pay check, we are exchanging our labor or time in exchange for monthly salaries. Likewise for passive incomes, we are exchanging intangible commodities in return for monetary rewards. …

The recent mini-correction in the stock market must have caused some jitters to many local investors. Most of us wonder whether the current Euro debt mess, which has been on-going for three years, will spark off a major world-wide stock market mayhem or taper off in a few years. My own personal view is that history will repeat itself all over again and that a major correction is coming, probably at the second half of the year.

During 2007-2008, my company announced pay adjustment for all existing employees and I remembered my pay was adjusted upwards by $550. The feeling back then was buoyant for everyone in Singapore. Fresh graduates got record high starting pay and people were making money in the stock market. Penny stocks were speculators favourite plays and volumes for these counters were extremely high.

Then, reports of “sub-prime mortgages” started to surface in newspapers article. Most people just shrugged off this development in the United States. The issue dragged on for several months and soon imploded with the collapse of the Lehman Brothers. Of course, the stock markets tanked and caused world-wide mayhem. There was a U.S. Presidential Election and Obama was sworn in as the …

During the 2008 – 2009, stock market crashed throughout the world and triggered the collapse of several big US banks. It was a period of chaos and great uncertainties. Back then, even the Singapore government had to make the unprecedented move of guaranteeing all bank deposits till end 2010 to prevent bank runs. There were mayhem and carnage during the financial crisis.

There were also opportunities. There was one point I was very tempted to purchase Citi’s shares, which was trading at USD1.00 through my Philips Securities POEMS account. Citi’s shares was trading at rock bottom and anything below USD1.00, chances of it being nationalised by the US government would be very high. I did not proceed ahead to buy the shares as I thought the risk would be too much for me to take. Of course Citi survived the crisis and its stock subsequently recovered.

The “Great Financial Crisis” presented many good opportunities to make big bucks in the stock market but I was unable to fully utilize my Opportunity Fund back then as I was saving up for my wedding. What a shame! The 2008-2009 financial crisis was a rare window of opportunity for smart investors to make …

Have you ever paused to wonder why Singapore has one of the highest concentration of millionaires in the world? There are so many cash-rich Singaporeans out there that even during the recent downturn. Many of them were seen snapping up private properties like hot cakes, despite the sky-high prices.

The reason is simple: many of them made big money from the stock market during previous financial crisis. It may sound odd, but every crisis is an opportunity for retail investors to make big money because that is the time when stock values dropped below their intrinsic values.

Most investors, especially the novice ones, tend to panic sell during stock market crashes because of the crisis in confidence. This is a typical “herd mentality” mistake that most investors tend to make and because of this, they tend to “buy high, sell low”, instead of “buy low, sell high”. The reason why most investors committed such mistake is because many of them are not fully aware of how the market works.

The stock market consist of three groups of players, namely Institutional Investors, Rich Investors and Retail Investors. Institutional Investors are players who invest on behalf of investment/insurance companies. They are the …

To make explosive wealth, one must have opportunity fund to invest during times of crisis. In September 2008, the collapse of Lehman Brothers (an investment firm in the United States.) ignited the world financial crisis. Before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, fear of a “big bang” recession had been lingering around for months due to the festering subprime mortgages mess in United States.

But no one would have predicted the magnitude of the economic crisis. Back then, the President of the United States announcing no bail-out for Lehman Brothers as it was considered not “too big to fail” (unlike other mega banks like Citibank, Bank of America, etc).

The next day, there were blood-letting carnage in stock markets throughout the world. Dow Jones witnessed a jaw-dropping decline of more than 770 points overnight. Singapore’s stock exchange (SGX) was not spared either. In the six months following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, from September 2008 to March 2009, stock markets worldwide fell by almost 40%, wiping off about USD16 trillion in capitalization. Singapore’s stock exchange also fell by close to 35%.

On looking back, the 2007-2009 financial crisis was indeed a “once in a generation” defining event in the financial sector. …