How time flies, its near the end of 2017 already. We are now in the month of December which is just less than one month away from the Christmas and new year celebrations again. In this post, I will do a summary of my investments and what has happened in 2017. Nearer to the end of the year or early start of next year, I'll write another post on the investment strategies for 2018.
For 2017, it has been an extraordinary year for investments. You may ask how extraordinary is it? Using the Straits Times Index as a benchmark, if we have invested at the start of the year and did nothing, it would have gained about 18% return on investment by now.
The STI ETF started at 2.95 at the beginning of the year. It is now at 3.48. I did invest some of my money into the STI ETF back when it was $2.80 last year. To date, it has gained over 30% inclusive of dividends.
For this year, I only had 14 buy and sell transactions. Most of the stocks were bought near the end of last year where I thought valuations were attractive back then. Some of my stocks were acquired, especially the Japanese Reits, which had been a good income investment (7%-9% dividends) and also capital gain (more than 80%). For 2017, I invested more into the hospitality sector namely Far East Htrust. I also subscribed to the rights of CDL Htrust. Both investments have been good especially CDL HTrust which has seen its value went up close to 30%. I also invested into Comfort Delgro seeing the distress in the taxi industry. It has yet to be proven whether this investment will work out so there's still much monitoring to do.
There was another rights issue by Capital Commercial Trust (CCT) which I also subscribed to it. I manage to get quite a lot of excess rights which was a bonus. The investment in CCT has gained over 50% (inclusive of dividends) to date. Office Reits are performing quite well currently where there are expectations that office rents and occupancy will continue to do well. Another investment I have in office Reits is Suntec Reit which also provides stable dividend income for me.
All in all, the average dividend yield of my investment portfolio is about 5.14% and the XIRR this year is around 21.17%. My portfolio value is slightly above $60K now. The next plan will be to increase my investments to $100K whenever opportunities to invest comes my way. There remains a few weeks left to the end of 2017. I may still have some other transactions in December and also there is one more dividend from Singtel where there will be a special dividend paid out.
We shall see how the market performs for the rest of the year. Elsewhere on the news, Bitcoin has been really hot these days where I see people everywhere talking about it. This is a sign of a bubble which we do not want to see. I'm not into this investment and will stay away from it as far as I know. It is never a good thing to have greed in investments.
