Farmer Joshua, his quest to efficiently manage and increase the yield of Gold eggs: Opinion Piece

My investment principles

• I am a buy and hold, set-it-and-forget-it, long term retail investor.
• Low fees for a long term investor is very attractive and therefore free or low fees for my portfolio management platform is very attractive to me.
• Viewing ALL (or as close as possible to ALL) my holdings in a single Portfolio Management platform’s dashboard is important to me.
• I have read through some of the previous reviews, consolidated and added some of my own experiences to it. This is a pretty fantastic article: https://blog.seedly.sg/best-stocks-investment-portfolio-tracking-apps-platforms-singapore-free/

Why write this article?

• My reason for writing this article is to share my experience and hear from others about how they track and manage their portfolio, what is good and bad about the platform they are using.

I started off investing in 2014 I had just finished JC and I was in a limbo waiting for enlistment. My hustle back then was as an MOE relief teacher (I was the relief teacher I always wanted when I was in school HAHA), it paid well for a JC kid. With the money I made I bought $100 worth of DBS (my very first stock) via the FRANK OCBC BCIP platform. It was nice, I felt good finally participating in the markets. I could see the number of stocks I owned on a single platform. I couldn’t understand why anyone would need a portfolio management platform. After all, my portfolio was just 1 stock. At the end of the month OCBC would send me a summary of my transactions detailing how many shares my $100 bought, how much was deducted for fees and how much (if any) was returned to my FRANK savings account. All was pretty clear cut and simple (Clearly, I was onto something, Dollar Cost Averaging).

As time passed I decided to allocate more cash to other familiar Singapore Blue chip companies and OCBC continued to send a monthly summary at the end of each month detailing each of the transactions. I was able to see each of the stock I bought in my OCBC FRANK BCIP application. Since the fees payable were the same I increased the amount of money I allocated to buying a single stock. At that time brokerage's minimum charge was around about $25 (without the miscellaneous fees) for each trade on SGX. This was before the plethora of discount brokers decided to pop up seemingly all at once. Still I didn't see the need for a portfolio management platform.

Soon, I began to feel that the 7 or so shares I got each month was simply not enough. I felt that the number of shares I bought needed to be of a critical mass so that the dividend income and capital appreciation which ensued would be of significance. Younger me was excited that the dividends that trickled in was a proof of concept that I could create a stream of dividend income but it was a trickle (I couldn’t even buy chicken rice, now also I think I cannot buy.. inflation and chicken ban HAHA).

Around that time OCBC Securities also introduced the Young Investors Programme (YIP) which only charged $15 (I think) instead of $25 for each transaction in the SGX market. I took it and ran (quite a cheapo huh… thrifty la HAHA). I bought stocks that were around $1 -2 as I was not able to afford the lot size of 1000 shares (now 1 lot is 100 shares on SGX). I carried on to purchase shares that had a share price of more than $10 through the BCIP account. Now my shares were custodised in both OCBC Bank and SGX CDP. I no longer had the luxury of opening a single application and viewing all my holdings.

At this point I began to wonder if maybe I needed a platform where I could consolidate and view all my holdings at a single glance. This would allow me to not have to do math every time I want to know the total number of shares I have in a company. The way I did it was logging into both OCBC Bank and then logging into CDP (and mind you we didn’t have Singpass or FaceID at this point) then do the math.

In my moment of despair I turned to the trusty excel sheet.

YouTube and early investment blogs were my guiding light in creating my excel sheet. I made a rudimentary tracking sheet which I was very proud of. A couple of years passed, I bought more stocks, I ventured into the US market, the excel sheet got increasingly complicated and at times I didn't know what calculation I was actually doing. I seemed to be spending more time on the excel sheet rather than reading up on the companies I held. This madness had to stop!

(Much in FRIENDS when Phoebe shook Monica saying "It's madness, I tell you!")

At this point I went out into the wilderness of the internet to hunting for a new way to track my holdings, necessity being the mother of all innovation (or rather coming out of your comfort zone to forage/search)

I came across Bloomberg (The bankers/traders used it… so must be good), I made an account and tried it (Free one of course),the free version only supports 2 watchlists and like 30 transactions. There was a lot of advertisements and the dashboard seemed cluttered.

I then tried Morningstar, much confusion took over my brain, I guess to a new investor everything just seems confusing and daunting, it would have better if i had a mentor.

There were a couple of other sites that I checked up on and and tested. I don't remember all of them anymore but it is safe to say that I didn’t quite know how to use them hence I moved on.

I finally came across Yahoo Finance! It was free, unlimited and I only had to key in my transaction fees, cost of each share, number of shares bought and that’s all yahoo tracked it all for me, gave me news to read too! It had everything, stocks from the US, UK and SG! I was once again a happy boy. Needless to say the excel sheet gradually became obsolete, it was the end of an era (I still do keep the soft copy of the excel sheet for the memories).

Around about the time I found Yahoo Finance I discovered StocksCafe. I can’t say I was immediately intrigued (on top of being thrifty, I am generally cynical and a little distrustful). I read that it was made by a local for locals (support local), that it had decent coverage for different markets namely (US, UK, SG) no Aussie tho and it was priced at an affordable range. There was a free section, so homie had to give it a try first. StocksCafe was impressive and it was no frills, But on the free version you only got a limited report each day? The StocksCafe report of dividend and portfolio tracking) was much neater than my Excel sheet, and Yahoo didn’t quite have that much detail. I think this was the point I bought a 1 year membership with StocksCafe (Joined on 20 Sep 2019). When I signed up for StocksCafe they didn't have an application yet (now there is one each for Android and IOS).

At this point Yahoo Finance started to play 2nd fiddle to StocksCafe, covering the markets that were not (Australia and Switzerland) tracked by StocksCafe.

StocksCafe pulls data from Morningstar so that made it convenient for me as I didn’t have to do that by myself any more. StocksCafe allowed me to customize certain financial metrics. All in all the experience has been great. I get to see almost all my stocks holdings on 1 platform and I can perform my analysis from a single website itself. It has saved me time and makes me happy when I have up to date data on my portfolio. I believe that this data has made me a more astute investor, I am able to make smarter decisions with proper empirical support. However, I remind myself to remain decisive and to not be paralysed by analysis and the plethora of numbers and ratios which have to seemingly align before going long or short on a stock.

I extended my subscription with StocksCafe by another 3 years after the first year ended. I am still using StocksCafe and I am pretty happy with it.

This being my first opinion article, I decided to reminiscent and document a period in my investment journey on a Friday evening just before heading out for the night, TGIF.

Disclaimer: The information in this opinion article serves as an educational piece and is not intended to be and does not constitute personalized investment nor financial advice. For investment advice, readers should always perform their due diligence and consider their financial goals before investing in any stock aka DYOR. The writer may have a vested interest in the company mentioned.