SGXCafe - a tool to track your portfolio

I don't receive anything out of this recommendation. I want to commend the creator of SGXCafe for the website he developed. If you are serious about investing, you will most probably be like me who religiously track every buy/sell transaction. The reason is to know what the breakeven price is if we need to cut loss or to calculate the total return on our portfolio. This is a very tedious process. SGXCafe simplifies all that and saves at least 1 man hour a month of my time checking the dividend dates, updating the dividend amounts to revise my portfolio returns, etc. I spend 1 man hour partly also because I have many shares to read and update.

Here's how it will look like: https://www.sgxcafe.com/user/profile?username=jarwey

I chose not to show the actual amount, but anybody who is smart enough can guess by looking at the total dividend and work backwards.

SGXCafe Profile Sharing Settings

Benefit 1: Calculates total return per share (past dividends collected + capital gain)

Benefit 2: Calculates total return for your portfolio. You can create different portfolios to calculate this return differently if you are managing different accounts for your family members.

Benefit 3: Easy to share the portfolio to friends who ask you what you have bought. Particularly useful when you have so many shares that you can't remember every single one within 5 seconds.

Frill: A game that you can play to practise your skill at evaluating stocks. To be honest, this is probably not suitable for newbies because it doesn't teach you how to evaluate. It shows a bunch of financial ratios and you decide whether to buy or not. As the game removed the company name, the business is unknown to you, but you can see how well/badly the company performed compared with similar businesses (in the same industry). Here's how the scoring is done:

Although the creator asked for feedback to share how we (the players who had played the game) evaluate the numbers, I find it hard to explain what goes through my mind. One thing I know for sure is I always avoid companies making losses. Out of all the loss-making companies I chose to ignore, I only recall 1 or 2 companies that outperformed, which is probably the most a 5%. I am ok to forego that 5% companies for now, but I haven't given up trying to identify what indicators will point to the outperform possibility.

What will I buy with $3000 (Sep 2016)?

I didn't post what I will buy with $3000 in Jul and Aug 2016 because I wouldn't have bought anything. My last purchase was $3000 worth of SPH REIT in Jun. I felt that it was worthwhile to adopt a wait-and-see attitude because traditionally, the second half of the year usually performs worse than the first half of the year.

Without spending $3000 x 2 for the 2 months, it means I have $6000 more in my opportunity fund (aka warchest). I had also been trying to digest the statistics, in particular, unemployment statistics. The reason is there had been many reports of company retrenchments worldwide in sectors that are facing lower demand and higher automation. Unemployment rates inched up a little. For the quarter ending Jun, it's 3.1% for Singaporeans. Overall, including foreigners, the rate is 2.1%.

The next number I was looking at was job vacancy rate, which means jobs that have not been filled. For example, you want to hire a waitress, you will contribute to this job vacancy number that is measured every quarter. This is no data for the quarter ending Jun, but the job vacancy to unemployed person ratio is 1.03 for Mar, which means there are more job vacancies than unemployed persons. This rate is quite similar to the rate in 2012, but circumstances are different. In 2012, the property fever had not been tamed. In fact, the cooling measures had the reverse effect of buyers rushing to buy properties for fear that there will be more cooling measures that will prohibit them from buying in future. STI in 2012 was around 3000 points, versus 2800 now, for the same timeframe of Aug-Sep.

What will I buy in Sep? More bank shares if it heads back into the low range. If not, I will just add the $3000 into my warchest and continue to hug my warchest tight. Read my earlier bank stock review which shows the low range prices.

The writer owns units in SPH REIT, DBS, OCBC and UOB.