DBS & POSB Accounts Being Illegally Withdrawn
Read a Yahoo news post about DBS and POSB accounts being illegally withdrawn by a total amount of $200,000.
Some of the victims had $2000 withdrawn from their accounts from ATMs located in Malaysia. Somehow, the details of the accounts and their pins were skimmed by these fraudsters.
A few of the victims interviewed said that they did not have internet bank accounts nor Paypal accounts from which these fraudsters could have gained their bank account information from.
So please check your bank accounts to see if there are any unauthorised withdrawals and approach the bank officers or call 1800-220-1111 as stated in the Yahoo article for help.
Have a Happy New Year and may you have an interesting and fruitful year in 2012, the year of the Dragon.
How’s Your Portfolio Doing?
Markets have been going the way it should the past few weeks. Up some days and down by more. Its likely I’d end the year down with a decline in the portfolio value of 7%.
However, I did take profit just a while before all the market churning action was taking place. I am not a market sage, it just happened that my baby boy was about to be born and I was just keeping to more cash out of prudency.
One of my friends sent me a link to this interesting New York Times post about “How a Market Pro Lost His House.” Which hits home more than anything that even professionals in finance are liable to get it wrong. So when experts can be wrong, and they do this for a living, what hope have mere mortals like you and me?
The answer is quite simplistic and borne out from a decade of investing and learning about it first as a professional in the field and then as a hobby now.
It is to hold on and do your buying and selling in parts and not in whole. After selling some of my positions, I felt silly for not selling more. Even if you feel smug that you have done the right thing, Mr. Market will still smack you in the face and make you look like a fool.
I am sure that you have encountered situations where when you buy a stock, a few days or weeks later, the stock goes south. Or when your sell it, it goes up later. Since we can never sell at the absolute highest or buy at the deepest bottom, the only way we can help ourselves is to buy in parts and never commit your entire reserves. Nor sell everything.
The only vow I have is to in future make the parts a bit bigger, so that I have less of a seller’s or buyer’s remorse for not selling more or buying more.
After all, markets move up and move down. If you can catch it right a few times and have the holding power when you did not catch it, you will have done well by any standard.
Mr Bogle Says Buy
Saw this article on Wall Street Journal by Jason Zweig, “Why a Legendary Market Skeptic is Upbeat About Stocks. ” that talks about John Bogle being optimistic about stock market returns being better than many people expect..
John Bogle if you don’t know, is the founder Vanguard, which can be said to have started the whole craze into index funds as he kept the fund costs very low and helped to popularize this type of investment type.
At the moment, according to the Vanguard site, they are managing $1.6 trillion worth of mutual funds at an average expense ratio of 0.21%. Yes, it is that LOW.
I had read books about Bogle from the local library and his philosophy to indexing and investment is worth looking into.
So when he says something, people will listen. Especially since he is right most of the time also according to Jason Zweig.
In the article he blasted ETFs which are narrowly focused and utilize leverage to speculate. But I think he is talking about selected ETFs and not every ETF. There are those that are similar in nature to index funds. And there are narrowly focus index funds too.
His own portfolio is 80% bonds and 20% stocks which doesn’t really tally with his buoyant outlook. A matter of not doing as what you are saying?
