A big apology to the few readers (if any) who read this blog.

About five years so, I had made a pivot to ETF based Exposure to a global financial portfolio from an approach of picking individual stocks.

A link to that old post is here below.

https://sgx-stocks-sti.blogspot.sg/2016/10/festina-lente-make-haste-slowly.html

Broadly speaking in the last four years, the vast majority of time has been spent in

a)       Exiting investments in individual stocks (The sins of the past have to be paid for, I guess)

This led to an exit from Cache Logistics, Neratel, Second Chance, Casa Holdings, FJ Benjamin, Noble Group and Sabana REIT.

b)      Forced exits from ETFs.

One of the disadvantages of using ETF exposure through SGX is that one is at the mercy of the ETF issuer.

One main provider who had a lot of ETFs on offer was Deutsche Bank and when they closed a lot of the ETFs on SGX, it led to exits.

That led to the exit from the China CSI 300 ETF, Euro 50 ETF, ASX 200 ETF and the MS Japan ETF.

The other ETF provider who used to provide country specific, index ETF was Lyxor. They also closed the NASDAQ ETF, the Europe ETF and the Hang Seng ETF.

Hence, the choices are now limited to

a)       STI ETF – For Singapore Equity exposure

b)      Principal FTSE Asean ETF – For Asean Equity exposure

c)       Principal FTSE Ethical APAC ETF – For Asian Equity exposure and

d)      S&P 500 ETF – US Equity as well as

e)      iShares High Yield Bond ETF - Income

The methodology was to utilize the money from the forced closure to buy into the worst performing ETF in the portfolio.