Seasonal update - May 2021

It's seasonal because I don't intend to do updates simply because how boring my portfolio is. There's no drastic turnovers, no astronomical returns, and no Bill Hwang moments. This is just some kind of periodic review and reflections.

As of May 2021, however, my floating* wealth had touched another milestone again, of 600k SGD - yay! . Breakdown as shown below

*Floating because most of my wealth are in financial assets, which prices fluctuate all the time, so this just happens to be a snapshot as of writing.

As consolidating these data are rather time-consuming, the previous one I done was 3rd Feb 2021, about 3 months ago. Back then, total wealth stood at S$562,353, a gain of 6.7%.

For comparison, the Dow Jones Index rose approximately 7.6% during the period, not too shabby I'd say, considering that over 20% of my wealth are currently held in cash. Of course these included my jobbo's salary for these few months as well, but they're just a small fraction of it.

WHY so much cash? Well, I liquidated approximately 100k SGD worth of US Equities, half of which are Index ETFs (DIA & SPY), anticipating a correction after it hits all time high ("ATH") week after week, which seemed pretty ridiculous given that we are still nowhere near the end of the pandemic then. Then again this just proves that the market could remain irrational as long as JPOW keeps the printer going $brrrrr.

A lesson on opportunity costs learnt while attempting to time the market. Retroactively speaking, could I have made more gains? Yes. But do I think this is a wrong move? Not at all.

In line with my main investing principle - to be able to sleep at night, I believe it is perfectly fine to liquidate positions whenever one feels it is overvalued, even if it continue going up.

I just don't see that much upside versus the downsides at that point in time. So definitely do not let greed stop your profit taking. Simple thought process here, if you think the stock will drop more than it will rise, sell em.

Subsequent to the liquidation, I allocated some of the cash to stocks that are not included in indexes, as I plan to buy them back again at some point in the future. Diversification is the plan here. Such stocks include Alibaba and Nio, which highlights the geographical diversification and also adding China exposure to my portfolio. EVs are also something I would like to add into my holdings as I see growth in the future, hence Nio and CCIV were added.

Among them, a rather small proportion went to meme stocks, just to add some spice to my investing journey. They are all sitting in the deep red now though :sadge:.

Cash drag was also reduced significantly via the selling of options by using these cash as margin collateral, details which might be in a future post.

All in all, while quite a bit of turnover and events happened, portfolio performance, direction, and investing principles remained unchanged. I believe these few months have proven that if you have a determined and disciplined risk appetite in play, the way you go about playing it wouldn't really affect your results in general, so go wild exploring and learning, but don't get lost in the change.