I understand from your perspective that we should invest in our own country as well as somewhere we might consider migrating in the future and I feel malaysia is quite close to heart and thats the rationale for investment.
I'd be a bit careful about "close to my heart". Investing with your heart—just because you like somewhere—is a recipe for making lousy investments and sticking with them long after they've turned bad. If you genuinely think there's a good chance you'll retire there, then that's different.
for noble and mmp wise, they have crashed from a huge high but i think you are right, I should just get rid of mmp and write it off as a loss.
I think you should get rid of both of them. It'll be cathartic; you'll get the busted-ass companies out of your portfolio; you won't be reminded of them every time you open your brokerage account; and you'll feel a lot better without them.
Noble, specifically, is pretty busted. They didn't respond adequately to concerns about their accounting, and now they can't get access to liquidity any more (and borrowing is the lifeblood of a commodities trading business); they're having to sell their most profitable businesses just to stave off bankruptcy. Even if they don't go down the tubes, they're never going to be as big or as profitable as they used to be. Book a loss on that one and move on.
would you recommend me removing the perp sec & retail bond and simply adding it to ABF bond?
Yep.
Hi ST,
Correct me if I am wrong, but using the DCA strategy, we would end up buying lesser amount of the etf if the prices increase over time.
Think about it in dollar terms, instead of number of shares, and you'll see you're buying the same amount, whether it's a distributing or reinvesting ETF.
If you use a distributing ETF, you're buying more shares, but at a lower price. If the ETF reinvests for you, you're effectively buying fewer shares at a higher price - but you're getting the same dollar value for your dividends.
Does the accumulating nature of iwda also mean that it is even more important to do a 1 time lump sum investing asap instead of dca over 3 or 4 months if I have a huge amount that I want to put in iwda?
Mmm - technically yes, but it really doesn't make that much of a difference. The reason to spread a lump sum investment over a few months is to reduce any buyers' remorse you might feel if you drop a huge lump of cash in and the market subsequently goes down.
I doubt that the fund manager reinvests dividends immediately as soon as one of IWDA's 1684 holdings distributes a dividend - that would mean that it would be reinvesting practically every day.
Nope, they do! Part of an index-fund portfolio manager's job is to handle inflows of new money—whether those come from a portfolio company paying a dividend, or from new investments—and figure out how much of each stock to buy to keep their portfolio tracking the index as closely as possible. And this happens every single day, because there's inflows and outflows every single day.
ST - so IWDA even with SCB bad spreads is still worth it for Diversification + tapping international markets? For Long term the 1.5% is bearable?
Yep. The 0.75% FX spread is a one-time thing. Less would always be better, but compared to the diversification benefits from 20 or 30 years of IWDA investment, it's pretty small.