Rainbow on FI

Using US portfolio to hedge against SG portfolio was a mistake. Because they are not perfectly correlated, both in their direction and magnitude. Over the last couple of months, US stocks have been on the run up like crazy and I have lost about USD500+ on VXX which bet against the rise of index. It was opened with the intention of hedging against a general market downturn (which happened around this time last year) but didn't happen - given the trade war fatigue (though no confirmed deal signed), no shocking world news and relatively stable economic condition in the US (relatively low unemployment and low interest rate). So people have been parking their cash in stocks and the stock market has been on a steady climb. I entered too late a position in Mastercard Inc so only have peanut gains so far (a good buy point was at $270). Lesson learnt is to wait for uncertainty in the market and certainty in price action before trying to "hedge". We can never catch the bottom-

As expected, the price declined after ex-div NPI up but headwind still strong, given that Festival Walk (HK) contributed 62% of revenue.  https://sbr.com.sg/commercial-property/news/mapletree-north-asia-commercial-trusts-npi-13-in-q2 Still no sign of peace from the HK protest and there's a recent incident at Festival Walk "Footfall for 1H20 fell 3.6% and tenant sales dipped 6.6% in 1H20. We estimate that 2Q20 metrics were slightly weaker (at -4.9% for footfall and -10% for tenant sales"  https://www.dbs.com.sg/treasures/aics/templatedata/article/recentdevelopment/data/en/DBSV/102019/MAGIC_SP_10292019.xml Top of chart represented a head-and-shoulder pattern. Haven't found a support point for the lower low after shoulder Current yield of 6.27% may be attractive, but as we know yield (or DPU) is pegged to earnings. All eyes will be on April 2020 earning release.  https://www.mapletreenorthasiacommercialtrust.com/Investor-Relations/Financial-Information/Lat

Where capital appreciation and long-term yields are our investment goals, putting our hard-earned money in a company that grows (its earnings) is probably more important than one that gives out high dividend payout in terms of yield (yet has poor cash flow and does not grow its revenue much). One metric to look at would be Earning Yield . It is the inverse of P/E and expressed as a percentage. We can use Earning per share divided by Price per share. A higher than normal earnings yield indicates the stock may be oversold, provided nothing negative happens. However, we should not simply rule out dividend yield in our buying consideration as companies that give good dividend yields are generally less volatile than those that do not give out dividends. This is because fund managers in times of bad market would rather sell off the shares of the company that give less dividend before the one that do if both trades at the same price [source  article  here]. So we can infer that good yield

In simple terms, one can retire when one's annual passive income is more than one's annual expenses. A common rule of thumb for the sum needed to retire is the rule of 25 - based on the assumption of a 4% yield, your net worth should be 25 x annual expenses before you can FIRE. So let's say you are a lean spender who spend $1000 a month, theoretically you would need 25 x 12000 = $300,000 This theory looks simple but has many underlying assumptions to take note of as below.