If studying the historical performance is just to understand the performance of different asset class, rather than predicting the future, then pure indices will do the job, and you should use the current condition (i.e tax free), rather the the super old tax policy.
No, I disagree. The U.S. municipal bond example is instructive.
You just need three families of REITs - Mapletree, Capitaland, Ascendas, DCA and hold for the long term.
That's quite risky, though. You lose, perhaps big, if even one REIT has solvency issues, if Singapore stagnates or declines, or if real estate stagnates or declines. And your equity in your owner-occupied home isn't a hedge against such risks; it's doubling down on them.
Diversification is helpful.
If there is anything to be learnt from this data, is nobody should dismiss REIT as a sub-optimal asset class. I brought this up because you and ST, seems to brush away whenever people intend to have a holding in SREIT, while it is historically better than the STI by a far distance.
We don't actually know whether SREITs have outperformed SGX-listed equities on a historical basis. There are necessary calculation adjustments still required to figure that out.
I'm frequently concerned when somebody overweights practically anything within a portfolio. In Singapore it tends to be real estate since that's the most common such local affliction. But if you're overweighting Eastern European beer stocks, I'd have exactly the same reaction.
I don't actually have a particularly strong view on real estate as such, except that I don't see how that sector grows much faster than the rest of the economy over the long term unless there's some disruptive technological breakthrough. There have been a couple such breakthroughs over the course of history, such as elevators and steel framing (skyscrapers), so who knows. Regardless, diversification is helpful.
That said, I have issues/problems with overweighting SGX-listed stocks, too. I've explained this a few times already.
