Phoxchop

About

Hi, welcome to this little corner of the internet! I am a Singaporean graduate student that enjoys learning new things. I started this blog to have a space to write and share about all the stuff I have learned in my free time. Since this is an outlet for me to write freely, forgive me if I get some things wrong or fail to reference sources. Hopefully you enjoy your time here, and learn something new. Feel free to reach out if you want to have a chat!

Note: I update this page with new posts/pages/links/resources, check back here if you want to see if there’s anything new.

Happy reading!

Personal finance

I recently wrote a short summary of my investment philosophy for a friend. While I encourage understanding things in a deeper and more rigorous manner, I also think it is useful to condense important things into a short piece. So here it is:

(1) Buy all the stocks, (2) keep fees low, (3) do less not more, and (4) don’t chase performance.
Justification:
(1) Stock market returns are positively skewed—which just means a small number of winners drive the majority of returns. So it is incredibly difficult to pick the winning stocks. Buying everything tends to give you a net positive return without having to gamble on a winning pick. An easy way to do this is to buy an index fund.
(2) Good investment products can be cheap. Competition has driven the annual fee for even the best investment products to mind-blowingly low amounts. For example, the annual fee for an index fund can be as low as 0.03% of your invested funds per year. Yet, some still sell products costing >1% per year. You are almost definitely not getting your money’s worth on those.
(3) Realistically, if you are not already hired at a hedge fund, trading more is only benefitting your broker. Thankfully you don’t need to trade much. Just buy a good product and hold it through thick and thin. Sell when you need the money, and buy when you want to save. Let your needs, not the craziness of the market, decide your trades.
(4) High performing funds are popular, and popular things often have a price markup. If the price is higher, your returns are typically worse—you paid more after all. This is the same reason why good companies are not always good investments.

I should also note that investment is not all of personal finance. It is quite common to think it is. But many other important things like insurance, pensions/annuities, taxes, estate planning, and planning financial goals probably deserve more of your attention.

Useful planning tools
Useful external links

Smaller topics

Health and dieting

  • Different diets
  • Sports, exercise, injury

Random thoughts

  • I’m debating whether to write philosophy here, since I basically already do that full-time…