With the Straits Time Index (STI) down by 20% to date, many are wondering if it is still worthwhile investing in Singapore market. While there are counters that have benefitted from the pandemic (glove related business, AEM, IFast etc), what about the bigger companies in in Singapore?

A look at my portfolio, I have 7 counters that are part of the STI and they make up about 30% of my portfolio. As such, I decided to crunch the numbers and see how they have performed for the year thus far.

As seem from the above table, the return is not too shabby. If one had invested equally on the above 7 counters at the end of last year and done nothing this year, the average return would be 3.1%. Despite the cut in dividend from the two banks and MCT, it outperforms ES3 (-19.7%) by a whooping 22.8% and only trails SPY (4.2%) by 1.1%.

With the exception of MINT and SGX, I have added more to the above counters especially during the March to April period, hence my average prices are lower. As for SGX, I only initiated a position in June. With a weighted average return of 5.3%, I am definitely please with this performance. Mathematically, this figure is not TWR or XIRR, but I think it should not be too far off.

I agree with the view points put across in a Straits Times article STI must adjust to better reflect post-Covid-19 realities published on 31 August. I do hope that STI would be revamped to better reflect Singapore market. As retail investors, that however would be beyond our control. What we could do though is to continue to invest in the better managed blue chips at a good price. That would give us good return regardless of STI’s performance.

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