Dear Client,
From CEO/CIO: Happiness on 28th October, SRS tax savings and
other musings
Does what happen in the stock market every day make you happy or sad? If so, every year, you should be happiest on the 28th of October. Because 28th October is historically the best day of the year for stocks, with the S&P 500 Index rising 0.54% on average. It is also the best start date for any six-month period for stocks. This is according to a Bloomberg article citing number-crunching done by LPL Financial going back to 1950. This year, 28 October 2019 did not disappoint, with the S&P500 index reaching a new record that day and heralding more new highs since then.
For all that has happened in between – trade wars, yield curve
inversions, Middle East tensions, Groundhog Day-style Brexiting – the global
equity markets have rallied a whopping 20% year to date. Even investors with
some bonds in their portfolios have no cause for sadness, given that short-term
world government bonds of the highest quality have returned more than 3% and
intermediate bonds have given equity-like returns in the 7%-8% region.
I suspect though, that if you watched the markets every day, your feelings would be more ambivalent. The Bloomberg article that had cited the 28th October trivia described the surging market movement as “climbing the wall of worry”. To reverse an old adage, the price of constant vigilance, when applied to markets, is not freedom, but restlessness. This anxiety can cause us to take actions that we think might benefit us, like “taking profit”, but end up hurting us instead, because it deprives us of the exponential power of compounding returns over the long term. The chart below reminds us how missing just a few days of return (and listening to experts on the macro situation might have cost you that) can cost us quite a lot of money and put a distance between us and the goals we are investing towards. If I were to give an alternative title in Chinese to the chart, I would call it 事倍功半 (pinyin: shi4 bei4 gong1 ban4), which means to put in multiples of effort or activity, but achieve only half the desired result. This is what happens with market timing. This is not to say that markets will continue to go up from now in a straight line – they definitely will not! But we know from data about active fund management that market timing is close to impossible to get right consistently; and we also know that if we stay invested in globally diversified portfolios over the long term, that we can reap a decent enough market return.
Where you can achieve a definitive gain for very little effort (事半功倍 shi4 ban4 gong1 bei1, meaning putting in half the
effort to achieve a multiple of benefits), is to concentrate on areas under
your control and where these benefits are known beforehand. In short, this
means sticking to your financial plan, staying invested to capture market
return and looking out for national schemes that have good and unique benefits.
In this regard, you might wish to look towards an “investment” that
can give you a guaranteed one-off “return” equivalent to your marginal tax rate
(with 22% being the highest marginal tax rate in Singapore) – the Supplementary
Retirement Scheme (SRS). For some of you who have headroom in your personal
tax reliefs, the SRS gives you just that. Of course, you cannot withdraw SRS
monies till retirement age, so you should only put in what you can afford to;
but we encourage this because it gives you disciplined savings for retirement. If
this sounds like you, please consider setting up an SRS account with one of the
local banks before the end of the year, which is the deadline to qualify for
the tax relief. As of today, MoneyOwl has made available online, the investments
of SRS monies into our portfolios. You can invest your monies in SRS within
minutes at www.moneyowl.com.sg Both monthly regular investment plans and
lump sum investments are available. The fullsuite ofSRS account
management tools, such as statements and top-ups, will be handled via other
secure electronic communication and brought into the portal at the beginning of
next year. As a bionic adviser – humans augmented by technology (not the other
way around) – your assigned MoneyOwl Client Adviser will be reaching out to you
soon, so you can have a discussion on our SRS accounts or any other worries you
might have.
Successful investing is about having sufficient returns to meet goals
for the life we want to live, not about winning a hypothetical trading
competition where the odds are against us. Instead of a mindset of maximisation
of market gain, we would do well to have a good financial plan that addresses
everything we need to meet our life goals no matter what happens, comfortably
and sufficiently. Once we have that settled, we leave the markets to work for
us, so that we can have a fixedness and confidence that will not depend on the
market news of the day. We are then free to find our continual happiness instead
in our family and our friends, in work and play, and in intentional, purposeful
living, today, tomorrow and all the days there are to come.
Yours sincerely,
Chuin Ting Weber, CFA, CAIA
CEO & CIO, MoneyOwl
Email: chuin-ting@moneyowl.com.sg
Advisory: enquiries@moneyowl.com.sg
Telephone: 6329 9188
