Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Year 2019 Portfolio Performance and Dividend Income

Alrighty. The markets have closed for 2019 and it is time to review my investment performance for the year.

Dividend Income


Q4 2019 SGD Dividend Income

Dividends received from my SGD-denominated portfolio in Q4 2019 was an improvement over Q4 2018. Regular readers would know that I have been pruning the weaker counters from my portfolio for over the past 1+ year and substituting them with stronger counters (mainly large caps). This appears to be bearing fruit but I'm not sure how sustainable this is going forward.

Q4 2019 USD Dividend Income

As SG REITs and income stocks have been trending higher and higher, I have been increasingly hesitant to add to them. Instead, I have been placing some spare cash into boring old US dividend growth stocks from 2018 and early 2019. This appears to be bearing fruit now.

I have also received my first dividend payout from the Tracker Fund of Hong Kong in Q4 2019. No graph for my HKD-denominated portfolio this time as it's just one bar on a bar chart.

Q4 2019 Transactions
In the last quarter of 2019, I subscribed to the Mapletree Commercial Trust rights issue (with excess) to enlarge my position in the counter.

I have also chosen to receive scrip dividends from OCBC instead of dividends.

I have accepted the general offer from ISEC. For a holding period of 2 years and 9 months, my annualized returns were 11.20%.

That's all for "traditional investments." In contrast, I have been making plenty of strides into the cryptocurrency markets. For those interested, do refer to this post I specifically made to share what I have been doing in cryptoland.

Performance
For my SGD-denominated portfolio:
Returns for Year 2019: 22.82%
Annualized returns since portfolio inception (March 2015): 10.03%

For my USD-denominated portfolio:
Returns for Year 2019: 4.55%
Annualized returns since portfolio inception (March 2016): 4.88%

For my HKD-denominated portfolio (portfolio started in May 2019):
Returns for Year 2019: 9.15%

Unrealized gains from gold: ~15%
Unrealized gains from silver: slight profits

Unrealized losses from Bitcoin: ~ -10% (excluding dividends)
Unrealized losses from Ether: ~ -30% (excluding dividends)
Unrealized gains from SNX (Synthetix Network Token): ~ 70% (including dividends)

Thoughts on Performance
Generally, I am satisfied with my performance across all my portfolios. When one portfolio or asset class is down, another pulls it up. This is what I have been working on; a diversified portfolio that emphasizes stability and survivability over returns. Come rain or shine, it is dependable, a bastion of strength with layers upon layers of defence.

REITs and income stocks provide me with the cashflow. Cashflow provides me with the liberty to swing for alpha (cryptocurrencies). Gold and cash provides me with peace of mind, a hedge against catastrophic crashes and dry powder to use when wildfires grow out of control and liquidity (pun intended) is scarce.

Camaraderie is important. When HongKong Land, our star player in the USD-denominated portfolio, fell from grace this year, fellow USD-denominated soldiers like BlackRock along with Medtronic did a good job in holding the fort. The larger positions in my portfolio are higher-conviction plays. If they flop, the mid-tier and small-tier positions are there to lend support. A bundle of sticks is not easily broken. They will survive and then thrive.

Note: returns for SGD/USD/HKD portfolios are computed using Excel's XIRR function. In contrast, gold/silver/cryptocurrencies returns are computed as the difference between market price and average purchase price.

Net Worth breakdown
Not much changes to my networth breakdown. Still in the accumulation phase for cryptocurrencies.


Net Worth Breakdown

As per before, "the pie chart depicts the breakdown in my net worth across the various asset classes in percentage (pie chart neither includes my CPF nor my emergency fund). To be conservative, I computed my precious metals allocation at spot price even though I am holding everything in physicals."

Debt Levels
Interest Coverage Ratio: 22.28
Debt-to-Equity Ratio: 0.013

Leverage in relation to overall net worth has been increasing due to my use of credit card to purchase cryptocurrencies.

Current Holdings
After converting all my USD and HKD holdings to SGD at the end of the quarter, the following table shows the percentage of each stock from only the equities allocation of my net worth (arranged in descending order).

Stock Name
Percentage
Hongkong Land
8.5
AIMS APAC REIT
7.83
Frasers Centrepoint Trust
6.67
OCBC
6.27
Parkway Life REIT
6.06
DBS
4.72
Hong Kong Tracker Fund
4.48
Mapletree Industrial Trust
4.27
SPH REIT
3.91
BlackRock
3.72
First REIT
3.66
Mapletree Commercial Trust
3.49
Thai Beverage
3.25
SGX
3.23
SATS
2.77
Singtel
2.46
Capitaland Mall Trust
2.24
Medtronic
2.24
ST Engineering
2.16
Capitaland
2.05
Raffles Medical
1.87
Japan Foods
1.82
Frasers Property
1.54
JM Smucker
1.54
Frasers Commercial Trust
1.51
Dairy Farm
1.41
Sheng Siong
1.13
Frasers Logistics & Industrial Trust
1.13
Welltower
1.01
Riverstone
0.84
Kraft Heinz
0.79
General Mills
0.66
Hormel Foods
0.56
Abbott Laboratories
0.21


BlackRock joined the top 10 stock holdings due to its 2019 good performance, kicking First REIT off the list.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading!

Non-financial updates coming up next!

9 comments:

  1. Hi UN,

    Happy New Year! Good diversification you have there. :)

    Forgot to ask earlier, which platform / wallet are you using currently to store cryptos?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Rainbowcoin,

      A Happy New Year to you too! :)

      I use Trezor T, MetaMask, Coinbase, Coinhako, Crypto.com, and BlockFi.

      Cheers
      UN

      Delete
    2. Hi UN,

      Then which you find is the most reliable and user-friendly?

      Delete
    3. It really depends on what you want to get out of it. Do you want to hold cryptos over the long-term or is it for short-term trading purposes? How particular are you about security? What are your views on centralization/decentralization of custodianship of cryptocurrencies? How user-friendly do you want the wallet/platform to be? How do you manage risk and to what extent do you want to spread your cryptocurrency assets across multiple wallets/platforms to de-risk?

      Depending on your responses to these questions, you can narrow down your choices based on what is available on the market.

      As you can tell, my selection is informed by my individual needs. For longer-term holdings that I would not be willing to risk, I place them in my hardware wallet (Trezor T). However, similar to "cash drag" in traditional investing, I am not willing to leave all of my cryptocurrencies in hardware wallets earning me nothing. I am okay with risking some of them in centralized savings accounts (Crypto.com, BlockFi); this comes with a certain amount of custodianship risk, etc.

      Hope this helps!

      Cheers
      UN

      Delete
    4. Hi UN,

      Thanks for the valuable points.

      I shall explore using wallets first as I am not too keen on custodian account at the moment. Till better regulations are in place.

      Delete
  2. Hi! Which crypto platform do you use to convert your crypto to fiat?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi,

      I have Crypto.com debit card and Coinhako, but I have yet to use them to convert from crypto to fiat.

      Delete
    2. Hi UnN

      Considering your extensively diversified portfolio among different markets, equities and asset classes, will you be looking into any other ETF apart from the HK tracker fund?

      Your portfolio allocation thesis sounds similar to the all weather portfolio thesis by Ray Dalio. It might be easier to switch in / out of ETF to manage your time and transaction costs. Good luck in your investment journey for 2019!

      Delete
    3. Hi INTJ,

      For the moment, no. I am happy with the HK Tracker Fund.

      I've been thinking of how to evolve my portfolio as well. First, like you say, is to assemble a portfolio of ETFs. A second way is to adopt techniques from the quantitative school to identify existing counters to be eliminated and for new counters to be added such that the correlation between asset classes is well-balanced and my overall portfolio would do okay in any scenario.

      Good luck in your investment journey too!

      Delete