Owning a USD bond fund is only "low volatility" if you think in USD terms.
Many people do, to some degree anyway. If you enjoy online shopping from U.S. merchants, take vacations or visit family members living in the U.S. or in other U.S. dollarized countries (such as particular Middle Eastern countries with U.S. dollar pegged currencies), or otherwise expect to have some non-trivial U.S. dollar spending, then you might hold a U.S. dollar denominated bond fund, to some degree. "It depends."
DBSV Cash Upfront has higher fees for selling, which might be annoying further down the road when you start rebalancing.
Maybe, but DBS Vickers also supports CDP custodization, and that also means any broker connected with CDP can sell the securities. There are also some potential DBS Multiplier interest benefits associated with DBS Vickers.
You can investigate these factors and see what makes sense in your situation.
Will transfer my existing E3S over to SCB then. (Or rather, sell E3S over at POEMS and then buy them back using SCB; the transfer charge over at POEMS is really high.)
Why would you do that? ES3 at POEMS has zero custody cost, doesn't it? So why incur any cost to move those funds? If you want to start buying more ES3 via Standard Chartered, OK, fair enough, but I missed the good reason for liquidating and moving your current holdings at POEMS....
....Ah, OK, you have some shares of ES3 at DBS Vickers. But there's zero custody charge there, right? It doesn't make sense to me why you'd *sell* those holdings that are already there. I don't think anybody suggested that. For
additional shares of ES3, OK, different story maybe. You're not going to sell any of your ES3 holdings until retirement, right? So why incur a double sale charge -- selling them at DBS Vickers now, then selling them again at another broker in retirement? There's also the fact that DBS Vickers, Standard Chartered, or both could change their sales charges some XX years from now when you're retired. All you know now is what their current sales charges are, and that's the only information you have in order to make decisions about where to buy your
next shares. Anyway, all of that means you don't worry about the shares you already have bought unless there's an ongoing custody charge that's avoidable. You wouldn't want to incur a double sales charge, right? That doesn't make sense, surely.
You could also look at what the cost would be (if any) to shift your ES3 shares to CDP custodization if they're not already there. There's no need to do that now, though.
