To The Moon

Johor Votes Saturday. Your Portfolio Should Be Watching the Ringgit Instead 🦖 🔍 The Angle Everyone is staring at Johor’s ballot box, but the real stress on your retirement sits in the FX and power bills behind it. Johor is pulling in RM16.9 billion of hard capital and posting 8% growth, yet your actual returns depend on a weakening ringgit and a region paying more for every kilowatt. The Johor-Singapore growth story is real, the part nobody prices properly is the currency and energy drag sitting between the headline and your payout. 💰 What It Means For You If the ringgit slides back toward 4.1350 against the US dollar while Singapore’s regulated electricity tariff jumps to 31.91 cents per kWh, your Malaysia-linked income stream quietly gets haircut before it reaches your CPF or SRS. A logi

40 Years In The Market Doesn't Change My Answer (Why I'm Still Cautious on DBS at All-Time Highs) 🦖 The comment that stuck with me was from someone who has been through five crises and still came out richer each time, with more than 60,000 DBS shares sitting there quietly compounding. I respect that record deeply, but I think his question and mine are different. He is testing whether DBS as a business deserves his long-term trust, I am testing what today’s price at all-time highs does to fresh money trying to buy income now. 💰 What It Means For You If you are adding DBS at today’s levels, your CPF or SRS money is no longer buying the same income per dollar that it did even a year ago, the yield has slipped below the hurdle I use when I stress test retirement cashflow. A great bank can stil

40 Years In The Market Doesn't Change My Answer (Why I'm Still Cautious on DBS at All-Time Highs) 🦖 The comment that stuck with me was from someone who has been through five crises and still came out richer each time, with more than 60,000 DBS shares sitting there quietly compounding. I respect that record deeply, but I think his question and mine are different. He is testing whether DBS as a business deserves his long-term trust, I am testing what today’s price at all-time highs does to fresh money trying to buy income now. 💰 What It Means For You If you are adding DBS at today’s levels, your CPF or SRS money is no longer buying the same income per dollar that it did even a year ago, the yield has slipped below the hurdle I use when I stress test retirement cashflow. A great bank can stil

Frasers Centrepoint Trust: UOB Kay Hian's BUY Call Ignores a Two-Gate Balance Sheet Problem 🦖 FCT just sold White Sands for an 8.4% premium and every broker headline reads like a clean-up win. What caught my eye was not the premium, it was what happened to the balance sheet after sacrificing 6.9% of group NPI to get there. Even after applying roughly S$454 million of net proceeds to repay debt, pro forma gearing only drops from 40% to 36.5%, and interest cover is still stuck below 4 times. If you hold FCT for retirement income, the yield near 5.4% to 5.6% looks comforting until you line it up against that 36.5% gearing and a 3.59x interest coverage ratio. The White Sands sale buys time, it does not remove the need for further deleveraging if you want your distributions to survive a nasty S

When A Stock Going Up Is Actually Bad News | Daily Pulse 9 July | 🦖 🔍 The Angle Everyone is staring at DBS’s new record high, but the real story today is that the “worst” performing bank stock on the screen is actually the one that quietly broke my own income test. UOB jumps almost 4%, OCBC has one of the strongest balance sheets in town, and yet DBS is the only one where price alone has pushed total yield, including special capital returns, below the line I’m willing to use for fresh retirement money. On paper nothing bad happened at the bank, the tension is that the tape looks celebratory while the CPF and SRS math just got harder. 💰 What It Means For You If you are 55 in Bedok and thinking of topping up DBS with CPF or SRS, today you are paying more for every dollar of income than you w

All Three Banks at All-Time Highs, Is It Still Safe to Buy? 🦖 Everyone is cheering that DBS, OCBC and UOB are at record highs, but the part your broker is not talking about is that the three banks are now three very different stories for your retirement money. DBS just crossed a line this week, not because the business weakened, but because the same dividend now buys you less income at today’s price. OCBC looks like the safest name on paper, yet its income case is weaker than many investors realise, and UOB is quietly getting more expensive on a yield that was already thin. 📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/w63SochfWk0 📩 Substack: https://investingiguana.com/p/all-three-banks-at-all-time-highs

All Three Banks at All-Time Highs, Is It Still Safe to Buy? 🦖 Everyone is cheering that DBS, OCBC and UOB are at record highs, but the part your broker is not talking about is that the three banks are now three very different stories for your retirement money. DBS just crossed a line this week, not because the business weakened, but because the same dividend now buys you less income at today’s price. OCBC looks like the safest name on paper, yet its income case is weaker than many investors realise, and UOB is quietly getting more expensive on a yield that was already thin. 📺 YouTube: https://youtu.be/w63SochfWk0 📩 Substack: https://investingiguana.com/p/all-three-banks-at-all-time-highs

The OCBC Mid-Year Warning: Why New IPOs Face a 20% Growth Hurdle 🦖 I thought OCBC’s warning was about weak IPOs, it is really about how strong the existing market has become after MAS pushed S$6.5b into Singapore equities. When secondary names get repriced upwards first, any new listing has to steal your CPF and SRS away from proven payers, not just tell a nice growth story. That is the part I do not think most income investors have clocked yet. For a 55-year-old who still needs REIT distributions to top up CPF and SRS, the real tension is this, OCBC’s team is signalling that unless a new issuer can show at least 20% earnings growth, it probably does not deserve the same multiple as the stocks already in your retirement portfolio. That higher bar makes every dollar you shift from a seasone

The OCBC Mid-Year Warning: Why New IPOs Face a 20% Growth Hurdle 🦖 I thought OCBC’s warning was about weak IPOs, it is really about how strong the existing market has become after MAS pushed S$6.5b into Singapore equities. When secondary names get repriced upwards first, any new listing has to steal your CPF and SRS away from proven payers, not just tell a nice growth story. That is the part I do not think most income investors have clocked yet. For a 55-year-old who still needs REIT distributions to top up CPF and SRS, the real tension is this, OCBC’s team is signalling that unless a new issuer can show at least 20% earnings growth, it probably does not deserve the same multiple as the stocks already in your retirement portfolio. That higher bar makes every dollar you shift from a seasone

The Ah Pek Audit: Explaining SGX Bank Dividends Without Using Financial Jargon 🦖 Every bank loves to say its dividend is dependable, but almost none will explain which part is locked in by the business and which part is a management choice that can disappear after the next results call. One investor sees a 4.70% headline yield and jumps in. Another wants to know exactly how much of that yield is ordinary cash flow and how much is a temporary capital return before putting a single CPF or SRS dollar at risk. This audit is built for that second investor, using DBS as the live case so you can apply the same four checks to any bank you hold. Financial statements can look intimidating when all you care about is whether your distributions will still be there 10 years from now. After years of watc