Official Shiny Things thread Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back

[jinsatkilife]

To earn the 3% bonus (up to S$125 per month) you have to make at least one trade per month. It's hard to criticize their fee and commission schedule, although it's unclear what their currency conversion spread is.

Obviously this promotion won't last forever.

I think it's pretty good.

No fees whatsoever for trading SG stocks...this must be the cheapest platform out there to trade SG stocks in the market. I thought payment for order flow is for US markets but IG managed to do it for SG market too?

That means it's good for DCA but you still need to meet lot size for SGX

That's incredible; hopefully they allow linkage to CPF soon

Also, they are required to offer best bid/ask for IG markets right? Unlike their IG CFD where they can make up their spread

 

[cassowary18]

I would love to be a fly on the wall when the marketing team at IG realizes that their promo—which was very obviously designed to draw in degenerate punters who'll cross spreads all day long—is actually attracting buy-and-hold types who are just there for the fifteen hundred bucks a year. No way this lasts forever, but hey, if they're giving away free money, who am I to tell them "no thanks"?

Nah, I don't think it's that sinister. It's just a sign up promo to get more customers, not unlike the promos that the China brokers are constantly running and the finfluencers are constantly peddling. I'm not going to complain about free money -- just satisfy the min requirements and make hay while the sun shines.

 

[Shiny Things]

Hi I would like to ask for the following opinion?

1) Can I check with you is it feasible to buy perpetual bond? Also, I see that there is a uncommon option call CFD-Bonds https://cfd.cgsi.com.sg/cfd-markets-bonds.html whereby the person can actually leverage one is to 5 and have a huge annualised return.

If you're asking "is it a good idea to buy perpetual bonds", the answer is usually no. You basically get all the downside of just buying the company's stock, with very little of the upside (because if the company does well, they'll call the bond and refinance more cheaply).

And that leverage to buy bonds costs money. If you're paying SORA+180 for your leverage, that's going to eat up the vast majority of your "huge annualized return". Don't do this.

2) if I want to buy endowment plan, it is better to buy those par fund return year on year right?

It's better not to buy endowment plans in the first place. The returns are worse than just investing in a bond fund (because that's all that the endowment plan is doing on the back end). Just buy a bond ETF instead.

3) [...]. How can I actually console myself that the stock price will actually appreciate [...]

This is a good question, and the answer is "you get used to it". Part of your question was "how do I get used to the larger PnL swings as my portfolio gets bigger"... look, I'm not going to lie, it does throw me occasionally when I look at my portfolio and I see it's up or down a decent chunk of my monthly salary in a single day. Three things that help:

1) If your portfolio swings more than you're comfortable with, dial back your exposure to stocks and dial up your exposure to bonds instead. That will generally reduce how much your portfolio value swings around, though at the cost of lower returns over the very long term.
2) If you're fine with your exposure - say, you're using a "110 minus your age" rule and comfortable with it - look at your one-year or three-year returns instead of your daily or weekly returns. The chart of ES3 and IWDA over a five-year period looks pretty great!
3) Ideally - just don't look at it at all. Some people can do this, some can't; but if you can teach yourself to not check your account balance every day, and just let the market do its thing, that's the best thing you can do. This is especially important during market dips; if you don't look at your portfolio, you won't get shaken out of it, which is what you want if you're buying and holding with a decades-long horizon.

 

[highsulphur]

3) Ideally - just don't look at it at all. Some people can do this, some can't; but if you can teach yourself to not check your account balance every day, and just let the market do its thing, that's the best thing you can do. This is especially important during market dips; if you don't look at your portfolio, you won't get shaken out of it, which is what you want if you're buying and holding with a decades-long horizon.

When the market went into a bear phase, I once just deleted my brokerage app from my phone!



One point about not checking your portfolio often is that you won't know what is the highest point of your profits and hence less likely to be affected by how much you have "lost" from that highest point when in fact it's more like less profits rather than actual losses

 

[twinbaby]

Hi, Shinythings,
I would like to check is it ok to replace ES3 with EQDP programme which Minister Chee agency in charged has funded about $5billion. I saw a unit trust from Fullerton Value Up that cover all the small cap stock.