One of the strong points of IB is the ability to generate all kinds of reports. This really helps me review what I have done, and allows me to refine or reconsider my investment and trading strategies going forward.
If you already do some form of investment (or trading), it is good to ask yourself how you are tracking your past transactions, and their respective returns. It is easy to feel good about a stock that has doubled in price after, say, 15 years, but does it occur to you that such a stock was only growing by around 4.7% per year? Assuming that dividends were negligible, was the risk sufficient to justify the incremental 0.7% p.a. yield over, say, the CPF SA account that gives around 4% per year?
Unfortunately as a Singapore resident, I cannot trade Singapore-listed stocks through IB. So I still have to rely on Standard Chartered. For tracking purposes, I found a resource called Stock Portfolio Tracker created by Kyith of Investment Moats to help track stock transactions over time. It is a very detailed spreadsheet (perhaps with more features/fields than most people might want), but it is a good starting base.
I do hope that eventually, Singapore-based online brokers will realise the big missing gap and plug it by offering similar levels of client-facing features as what IB does today. But don't hold your breath...
So how are things looking for the period August 2017 to August 2018? Pretty good. Despite lingering uncertainty in markets that began around February 2018 and continue with the varied frequency of chest-thumping by big trading nations (mainly US and China) on tariffs and all, the S&P 500 Index (blue line) is close to all-time highs, and is up roughly 15% from this time last year.
While 2017 was an extremely forgiving investment environment (you could almost make money anywhere, just a matter of how much/little), 2018 proved to be far more tumultuous, with hair-raising drops in February and April. Nonetheless, I managed to eke out around 30% returns over the one-year period (green line), beating my personal performance benchmark of 20% p.a.
There has been talk of how we are almost certainly due for a correction. No one can say when for sure, but read widely to get a pulse of the macroeconomic situation around the globe. There will definitely be an opportunity to buy in to the market at discounted valuations when (not if) the correction happens, but that could be one or two or more years from now. In the meantime, consider the opportunity costs of holding excessive cash, which often ends up as the 'default' option for most of us, but is seldom ideal in terms of efficient employment of capital.
