(Post 73/week 55)Learning investing/trading together part 11:Shiny things thread summary from hardwarezone part 2

Continuing on from the last post here...

Tip 10:On Insurance

• Buy Term Insurance + Personal Accident Insurance.
• Buy Hospitalisation Insurance.
• Buy Mortgage Insurance, if you have any outstanding mortgage loans
•  Invest the rest.
• Do not buy Life Insurance.
• Do not buy ILP, Investment-Linked Products
• Mixing Protection ( essentially, Insurance ) & Investment in a product, e.g.. ILP, Life Insurance, Endowment Plan, is a terrible idea because these events are mutually exclusive & it should not cause liquidation.
• Cheapest Term Insurance in SG: Aviva SAF(The only good thing that NS has provided)
• This is the first insurance you should get if you don't have any for Death & TPD. ( Total Permanent Disability )

Tip 11: Growth-Centric / Dividends-Centric?

• If you are near retirement age, opt for dividends-centric stocks / Bonds ETF.
•  Generally, you buy stocks for growth gains, not dividends.
• One of the most dangerous things an investor can do to a portfolio is to seek bond-like returns from the stock market while taking de facto equity risk on the fixed income side. In English - to turn their bonds into stocks & their stocks into bonds.
• Buy high-yielding dividend stocks for their current income and pretending they are "bond-like" is a recipe for nasty surprises at some point down the line. But this is precisely what many in the industry have been doing - Financial advisors, ETF providers, money managers - everyone's playing. 

Tip 12. Diversify

• Hold diversified assets in different countries.

Tip 13. ETF

• ETF: Exchange traded fund, basically tracks / holds a bunch of something.
• ES3 is an ETF the tracks 30 sg-based companies, i.e. DBS, OCBC, SingTel, Keppel, etc.
• It's safer than buying 1 company and rises with the economy.
• During a crisis, you can be sure this ETF won't disappear, can't say the same about any single company.
• A35 is a bond ETF, it holds many bonds to maturity. One can treat it like a bond. It's stable and yields about 2%.
• ES3 and A35 are stock code.
• Their name is STI ETF and ABF SG BOND ETF. You can buy/sell them on the stock market.
• The Top 7 of STI are heavily weighted in Banks and a smaller spread on Telco's, Real Estate, Oil & Gas where they made up of 60% of STI.

Tip 14. on SG Reits (Aug 2015)

• If you buy a bunch of REITs, you're explicitly making a bet on real estate prices - they're nothing to do with the STI really.
• The STI is mostly banks, real estate companies (not REITs, the companies like CapitaLand that run the REITs) and SingTel.
• REITs are a tiny slice of the index, like 3.5% of it.

Tip 15. Avoid punting on FX if you are an unsophisticated Long-Only blue chips / ETFs investor.

• Compared to investing in equities, when the price goes below your FX position, you have to fund it. Meaning you have to pay to maintain the position OR cut loss and sell the position.
• Going Long-Only on blue chips, ETFs, REITs, won't make you rich, but it won't make you poor either. 
• From 1928 through 2014, the S&P 500's compound rate of return was 9.8%, enough to transform a $100 investment at the start of 1928 into $346,261 over 87 years.

Tip 16. Pro Tips About Trading.

• Don't trade after-hours OR in the pre-open. Spreads are WIDE & you don't know what the "real" price is.

Tip 17. SeekingAlpha.com for US-centric stocks / investment-related news.

Tip 18. the most basic books about investing.

• Millionaire teacher
• The coffeehouse investor

Talking about investment books, one of the next few posts will be about investment books that I have read, I would try to provide the eBook version if it is available, do look out for it!