Earlier I wrote about the painful (and expensive) financial lessons I learnt over the last few years. I’ve been reading books and articles and will slowly reshuffle my investment portfolio.

My current investment portfolio looks like this:

  • My nett investments are approx. 25% of my cash, i.e. if I have $20K cash, I would have $5K of investments (total $25K).
  • Around 30% of my investments are in Prudential ILFs and not doing very well.
  • The remainder are in SGX in various stocks and REITs.

Over the course of the next few months, I plan to accomplish these:

  • Recover from my Prudential ILFs and surrender them ASAP. They were initially invested into a variety of equity funds that plunged badly in 2011.
    • I switched to bond funds in 2012 which grew slowly over the last 1-2 years but my returns are still negative to-date. I have only recently split half of it back into Singapore-based equity funds when STI went below 3,000 earlier this month.
    • Fingers crossed — once my ILFs break-even, I will surrender them and invest in ETFs instead.
  • Gradually increase my investment-to-cash ratio until it is around 50%, i.e. if I have $20K cash, I would have $10K of investments (total $30K). I will apply dollar cost averaging by doing this continually on a monthly basis, although sometimes I may need to spread it across two months since 1 lot of STI ETF costs circa $3K — some timing the market may be required here.
  • I will try to maintain the following ratios within my portfolio:
    • 30% STI ETF (ES3)
    • 30% ABF SG Bond ETF (A35)
    • 40% Mix of Telecommunications, REITs, Energy, Industrials
  • Learn about and apply the various technical indicators to help time the market. Well-known indicators are RSI, Bollinger Bands and MACD. Being a programmer helps here and I might probably develop a simple app to generate alerts against a list of stocks I’m holding/watching. I know there are paid commercial services available but… just take it that I’m a cheapskate.