Investment

Are you a pessimist or an optimist? Is your cup half empty, or half full? What about the financial markets? Is it a good time to invest? I ask because I know some people (and I am sure you know [...]

In recent months, cryptocurrency, particularly Bitcoin has been a hot topic. When Elon Musk announced that they bought US$1.5 billion Bitcoins and that Tesla will accept Bitcoins, its price [...]

After knowing how much you need to fund your desired lifestyle in retirement, the next thing you would need to do is to work out where you currently are. In this episode, I will walk you through [...]

The first step to have a successful retirement plan is to know how much do you actually need after you have stopped working. In this episode, I will be sharing with you some tips and guiding [...]

Investors typically look for 2 crucial features in their investments: Their investment must not lose money Their investment needs to keep up with inflation You realize that… #1 and #2 are often [...]

My courtship with Vanguard funds started 16 years ago in 2004. Providend was licensed to give advice only about a year back and while we had an investment philosophy & process in place, there [...]

The anticipation building up to elections often brings with it questions about how financial markets will respond. But the outcome of an election is only one of many inputs to the market. When [...]

In property-centric Singapore, buying an investment property is one of the preferred methods of growing one’s wealth. While it is a good way to add some diversity to your portfolio and [...]

Some investors may have reservations about investing in a fund that is denominated in a currency that is not their home currency. For most of our clients, they hold equity and bond funds that are [...]

To hedge against high inflation, we should own gold. However, I think if you are allocated to equity, they would do well in periods of higher inflation as well. To provide liquidity, smoothed out [...]

Here we are, a few days after National Day and we have had quite an eventful year. We have clients who remained invested. When the markets came down, we explained to them that markets eventually [...]

Many of our clients are invested in investment-linked policies (ILP) and unit trusts, which are usually recommended to them by their previous advisers. We would often tell them to check the [...]

I recently came across an article in the FT which told the story of Victor Haghani, who was a very successful fund manager in the 1990s. He managed billions of dollars for huge hedge funds, [...]

In the last article, we explained that our investment philosophy is largely driven by the needs of our clients.  We developed a set of model portfolios to help our clients achieve a range of [...]

Our Client’s Needs Drive Our Investment Philosophy At the very tip of wealth building, what we think drives investments is what our clients need their wealth to accomplish. Finance professionals [...]

March 2020 is a bit of madness. March Madness is also the name given to National Collegiate Athletic Association Division 1 Men’s Basketball tournament in the United States. It is no surprise [...]

On March 26, 2020, the United States Labour Department announced that 3.28 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits for the first time the week before. This is a very large number. To [...]

The last month has been a crazy time for those of us who are invested in the equities market. The US market went up 10% in one day and then came down 12% on another. On the day when it came down [...]

One of the values that Providend help our clients with is to help them make sense of a very complicated world. The idea is that prospects or clients who subscribe in some ways to the mainstream [...]

In 2008, the year of the Great Financial Crisis, I wrote an article in July that year, that was published on The Business Times and it went like this: It was Monday (yes, just 2 days ago) and I [...]

Some clients may have come across advertisements of companies that are about to do an initial public offering in the newspapers or certain bulletin boards. The initial public offering is known as [...]

A year ago, at about this time, market watchers were generally pessimistic about 2019. After all, just a month ago on Christmas Eve of 2018, markets (represented by MSCI World Index) fell by [...]

The power of compounding is a concept I came across while in my final year of Undergraduate education. I started to play around with a few numbers to see how compounding works with money. [...]

We just concluded our last Retirement Weekend here at Providend. At this event, we explain the holistic considerations that many may not have considered when they are near retirement. One of the [...]

To get ready for your retirement, or your financial independence, you will need a recurring stream of cash flow. We often have clients seeking our help to evaluate certain financial products [...]

Are your investments liquid or illiquid? When a holding is liquid, it simply means you can sell it anytime the market in which it trades is open for business, without losing your proverbial shirt [...]

It has been eleven years since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008. This event has changed the economy of the world, the mindset of investors and the investment philosophy of Providend [...]

Many skeptics, especially people who have never invested before, regard investing as another form of gambling. Even though there’s a thin line between the two, they are two vastly different [...]

Many years ago, a foreigner made a joke about our army in front of me. He said our army is like boy scouts, only good for marching during National Day Parade because unlike other armies, we have [...]

Last week, we introduced the Personal Wealth Equation to you. And if you still remember, on the investment side of the equation, there is really no need to constantly guess where the markets are [...]