Highlights & Questions At The Seedly Investing Meetup 2018

Over the past weekend, we ran our largest Personal Finance community Meetup for the Seedly users and readers. We saw over 140 individuals coming down to MOX for the event to learn about Investing basics and strategies.

Here are some quick facts:

• Almost 50% of the people who came are from the millennial segment (most have just started working, aged between 20 to 35 years old)
• We also had a good equal representations of both male and female investors! (unlike most other investment workshops)
• Overall, we had a solid response for the event which was sold out within days.

Here’s what went down!

I will now aim to do up a quick summary of what was shared – with the best questions which were covered during each segment.

Personal Finance 101 – Kenneth from Seedly

• Prudent Personal finance is adopting a holistic approach at growing your wealth
• You will need to cover your bases first before shooting for the skies
• The best investment is the one that pays you the most when you need it the most (Insurance)
• Insurance = Your Goalkeeper = Sufficient coverage for the right reasons at the lowest costs

Q1: How much should one spend on insurance based on their age group?

Age group is almost irrelevant. Let me explain why…  A 35 year old Single man who sits at home and plays games all day has a very different liability profile compared to a 35 year old married man with a spouse and 2 kids.

ETFs and Robo-Advisors – Tai Zhi from AutoWealth

• It is extremely difficult to predict the market and actively manage your own funds (e.g with Trump, Brexit, Trade wars etc)
• Almost 90% of actively managed funds get their decisions wrong
• Over the historical averages, you’ll find that if you had invested in the Indexes (eg the MSCI World Index) you would have outperformed most actively managed funds
• Robo-Advisors offer a transparent, fuss-free, low cost method of investing for beginners and intermediate investors

Q2: Are ETFs the same as Mutual Funds (Unit Trusts)?

Collective investment schemes, the legal term used by MAS, comprise of:

1. Mutual funds (unit trusts)
2. Real estate investment trusts (REITs)
3. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

ETFs are different from mutual fund in the following ways:

• listed and trades easily on the stock exchange as opposed to not being listed
• Fund manager typically do market benchmark-tracking as opposed to fund manager who actively engage in stock-picking and market timing

Yes, we had an amazing selection of healthy greens to go along with our kopi.

Portfolio and Age Strategy – Ming Feng from Seedly

• Our goals change as we age, likewise for our financial targets and aspirations
• Your portfolio should shift start with more equity (more risk) when you are early in life and shift towards more bonds as you age (less risk)
• At each age profile you would know that you have different risk appetites due to different liabilities and commitments (eg family, kids, home loans etc)

Q3: Supposedly I’m in my 20-30, but faced with a bearish market soon. What should I do?

You may want to consider starting with either a 60% stocks 40% govt bonds portfolio or a 40% stocks 60% govt bonds portfolio, especially if that helps you to be psychologically more resilient against a market correction/downturn…Therefore, it is certainly worth the effort to carefully assess your resilience against market corrections (ie. risk appetite) and select a portfolio risk level you feel comfortable with, even in a market correction.

Value Investing Like a Boss – Alvin Chow from DrWealth

• There are many false investing beliefs in the market with lack of data to prove that they work (eg wearing a red underwear, sticking a coin on calculators, sell in May etc)
• Value investing is a proven way to look at small cap stocks which are often underlooked by most investors because they are less sexy and non blue-chip – hence undervalued from the onset.
• The goal is to use the Net-Net strategy to figure out the fundamental price per share of the stock to decide if the stock is undervalued (with a margin of safety of 2/3)
• Gave examples of Creative Technologies and Qian Hu (fish supplies)

A day filled with great conversations and knowledge

Hope you had a great day with us, take care and see you at the next one!