For our growth investing portfolio for US and China markets in Interactive Brokers, we were up by about 31% while the S&P 500 was up by about 7.5%. The screenshot below taken from one of our portfolios at Interactive Brokers. It is always easier to have a robust platform to be doing the calculations for us like in the case of Interactive Broker. Our time should be wisely spend on evaluating investing decisions or for leisure.

On the other hand, another broker that we use is TD Ameritrade. A quick calculation showed that the ROI was slightly higher than the one in Interactive Brokers this quarter. But there is work involved which you need to do the sums on your own. But the good thing is that for TD Ameritrade, at one glance, it allows us to quickly have a visual of the P/L of all our positions year to date. It is important that generally most of our positions are in a good shape and ideally not to be doing well just because of that a few positions holding up the entire portfolio. It is good to be able to make money from most stocks and not because of that “one good tip” you had.

Our most compelling ideas which became our biggest winners were Facebook and Alibaba among the many other tech firms which saw capital rotating into them this year. The only position that we were underwater for the year still is from JD.com. No complains here, but nonetheless a clean sheet is better still. 😆 It is always important to be able to contain your losses while letting your winners run as far as they can.

The market goes where it wants to go but as an investor, we must be able to manage our downside while not compromising on the gains. Screenshot below taken from one of our portfolios at TD Ameritrade showing all our positions in it. For this quarter this account had realized gains of about USD $150K.

As you may see, most of these companies are known to most investors and not because of some hidden gems that we unearth. I think this screenshot is also particularly helpful because doubters may suggest that we can always “cherry pick” portfolios that are doing well for showcase purpose. But when one can really probe further below and examine that every position we took up are more or less done in a prudent manner, perhaps then it is quite unfathomable to think that we would have actually messed up the other accounts isn’t it? 😉

Generally, we invest in large-cap companies with solid fundamentals. So should there be companies that are slightly less than ideal or have a shorter track record, our positions in them could be miniscule such that its gains or losses are not that significant but more for the “fun” of it.

Apart from the usual buy and sell trades, we do employ the relevant options strategy occasionally to create asymmetrical bets that favor us. This is how we were still able to make some money or mitigate our losses despite some counters like Bank of America (-13%), UnitedHealth Group (-10%), JD.com (-24%), Dominos Pizza (-5%), Abbott Laboratories (-10%) which are still negative overall for Q1 in terms of performance.

This is what defensiveness look like for us in our portfolio based on our investing methodology when we have to defend, while concurrently ensuring that we can still counter-attack aggressively when pockets of opportunities present themselves like in the case of Facebook and Alibaba.

At its core, it is designed to withstand the volatile market conditions and allow us to confidently make our investment decisions against the threatening macros of a possible looming recession among many other worries. As investors we must not be solely problem-minded but also be opportunity-minded to see how we can leverage on the volatility to make outsized returns.

Just like Arsenal and Manchester City, (although I am not a fan of both 😁) the way to win the Championship of investing is to concede little (GA-Goal Against) and score many (GF- Goal Fared) like the table below.

And we will take some profits off the table whenever it is time to do so where the risk to reward is no longer in our favor. This is also what we termed as the Moneyball way of investing. As long as we have a situation where the marketplace undervalues or overvalues assets, we can find opportunities to profit from it. 💰 By realizing gains, we had more firepower to accumulate more REITs and plough them back to the Singapore markets during the last quarter when they were going for a sale.

In other words, the only time money falls freely from the sky for us is during the payment dates for our respective REITs. Otherwise we earn our keep and build up our war chest largely through active Moneyball investing. This is critical for anyone who wishes to do say 1M45 instead of a much later age. The idea is to be able to be financially free at a much younger age where you still have the time and energy to enjoy the world or start living the life you desire much earlier.

Over to Singapore, our dividend portfolio consisting of Singapore REITs also shot up from the capital gains in addition to the dividends collected. Below is the screenshot of one of our dividend portfolio performance for Q1 2023. We were up by our 12% for this account while one of the popular REIT ETF, the CSOP iEdge S-REIT Leaders Index ETF was up by about 5% during this period.

The good thing about building a dividend portfolio is that your money will not just grow from the reinvested dividends but also from long term price appreciation. While collecting passive income is pretty, the bigger money can often come from capital gains when executed correctly. The key thing is to be ONLY buying at reasonable price points and selecting ONLY the sound REITs. Otherwise the dividends collected may not even be able to cover the capital losses over the long term as shared in one of our previous YouTube video.

Some of the REITs we added in February and March this year were also shared respectively with our community on Telegram and in InvestingNote, a local platform where like-minded investors gather together.