What Have We Done This Month Towards Our Financial Goals – October 2020

On By Mr BudgetIn Financial Goals

Hi everyone! It’s been almost another month since we updated! How’s everyone holding up? 🙂

As with our monthly updates, here are what we’ve done in October with regards to our personal finance.

Portfolio Transactions

Mr Budget
Position Added: SE, Fastly, Syfe
Take Profit: N/A

Mrs Budget
Position Added: SE, Fastly, Syfe
Take Profit: N/A

For October, both Mr and Mrs Budget added SE and Fastly into our portfolio. We added Fastly again after the price came down, and while our second entry was priced way higher that the eventual price crash, we are still happy with our purchase. We also averaged up on SE again, and it is slowly becoming one of our largest core holding.

We also continued our monthly DCA into our roboadvisor Syfe.

As the US market started to recover, our portfolio value too started to increase in value.

Here’s a look at Mr Budget’s latest portfolio as tracked by Stocks Cafe, sorted by percentage holdings.

The list might be getting too long, and we are waiting for opportunities to offload some low performing Singapore counters should the opportunity arise, such as our legacy reit OUE Com Reit, MTQ, and even Hong Kong Land, and divert these funds into high growth / technology themed stocks for the long term.

Net Worth Updates

For our net worth this month, Mr Budget registered a decline in net worth while Mrs Budget saw a continued increase in her net worth. The decline in Mr Budget’s net worth is in accordance to the dip in the US equity market, as well as the cost paid to renovate his Malaysia condo.

Our combined net worth is now at S$846,000, including CPF but excluding our property and mortgage. This is up from S$790,000 last month, a change of +S$56,000. This is mostly due to Mrs Budget unlocking some equity from our home to invest it into the stock market for the long run.

With that, we have reached our short term 2021 goal of having a S$800,000 joint net worth! We are not aiming to reach a joint net worth of S$1,000,000 hopefully by next year! 🙂

War Chest Updates And Watchlist

With the various transactions, here’s an update on our war chest:

Mr Budget War ChestS$65,000
Mrs Budget War ChestS$85,000

Counters on our watch list:

  1. Mastercard
  2. Amazon
  3. Paypal
  4. NVIDIA
  5. SE
  6. Square

For now, it looks like we wont be adding on new positions of US stocks, but rather acquiring more stocks of strong counters that we have already owned. What this means is that we will be adding on counters on our portfolio or on our current watch list over the next few weeks before the year end.

I think we have more or less accumulated most of the stocks that we want, but who knows, new opportunity may present themselves!

We are staying clear of SG stocks for now as we are shifting our focus into high growth US technology themed stocks.

Stay safe everyone, and happy hunting! We’d be happy to also hear your recent purchases too so that we can keep an eye on them too.

4 thoughts on “What Have We Done This Month Towards Our Financial Goals – October 2020”

    1. Mr Budget

      Hi JC!

      Thanks for dropping by. I think there are a couple of reasons:

      1) Sg stocks has not moved and in fact it dropped in value for us over the past 4-5 months. these are all opportunity cost for us during a time where digital adoption is accelerating due to covid. On the other hand, US tech stocks continued their growth and we’d like to capture some of these returns.

      2) Our previous thesis with sg stocks is that, we want to build a strong dividend portfolio which gives us 7-10% return a year. However, we realized that our sg portfolio cant provide that kind of return as compared to the US portfolio. Our effective yield on our sg portfolio is probably at 2-3% now, and we are incuring capital losses too.

      3) We also realized that for US tech stocks, we can visualize the market cap of the stocks growing 2-3x, or 10-20x in the next 5 years, but for sg stocks, its very very very hard to visualize that kind of growth. Hence our thesis has changed accordingly too.

      4) We are slowly being exposed to the idea of capturing multi-baggers, and are trying to do so with US stocks as there are higher chance of capturing multi bagger US stocks than SG stocks. Even if we dont succeed in capturing all of them, even capturing 1 multi bagger US stocks, the return of that will far outweigh any returns we can get from SG stocks. Of course, when we compare sg stocks we meant a portfolio that consist mostly of SG REITs. Very hard to imagine SG reit growing 2-3x for the next 5 year, but easy to visualize this for US stocks because of the different market size (global vs local).

      So it all really is a matter of opportunity cost vs the risk one is willing to take. Unfortunately, our net worth would have been 20-30% more if we invested in the US market instead of the SG market during the start of covid. But better late than never. 🙂

      In fact for this coming week, we will be selling off some of our SG holdings, and diverting them to US stocks. We will be looking at our SG portfolio as a bond portfolio, and increasing our US equity portfolio.

      Hope this helps!

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