Fresh off a HIGHLY EXTENSIVE RESEARCH DOCUMENT on Energy (which if I'm honest I didn't put in as much time as I should to understand), I told the client in question that one of the reasons it's a good time to invest is because Winter is coming. Because my client is extremely intelligent, he decided to do a quick check for himself and concluded otherwise, and I had no rebuttal as we sat in that dark restaurant. "I'm not seeing it," he uttered factually and coldly, as he highlighted portions of the graphs diving downwards on various years leading up to December. I felt pretty embarrassed.
So you can imagine my surprise when in December, I was compiling information for my course when an article recommendation popped up and I saw this.
It didn't add up to me, and so I did a quick google...
Well okay.
I'm not sure if it's a Singaporean thing but both the client and I assumed that winter was from October to December. I think it's because some old textbooks with spring-summer-autumn-winter just made you assume that it starts from Jan 1 and ends in December 1.
It's really embarrassing.
My point is that everyone has gaps in their knowledge, even if you're a subject matter expert. In my situation, I'd say that 2022 was where I had many gaps.
For those of you who want to see last year's full portfolio reveal, the link is over here and below. I'll be summarizing some of the biggest losses and the tougher lessons learnt.
READ ALSO: Revealing my 7 Figure Investment Portfolio in 2021 (November)
The Portfolio Summary
The above is my current portfolio value as of November 22, 2022 - almost exactly one year since the last time I did one of these. For context, the portfolio in November 20, 2021 is listed below, and you can read the full article here.
READ ALSO:
I can't seem to caption this picture for some reason, so it was $1,007,750.
Naturally, I'm no longer a millionaire. Yep.
Hmm...
I think it's ok. A bit bittersweet, but my life has been so blessed in the face of all the issues that I've experienced personally and professionally, that this is not even a serious concern.
Similar to the last review, many of the numbers are rounded up or down to estimate easier. There isn't too much difference between these numbers and the actual portfolio size (daily volatility could even it out).
This time round, I also included the differences between this year and last year so that I had a clearer idea of not just the impact of my investment decisions, but also the impact of my life decisions on the portfolio.
The labels are as follows:
Amount: The current value of the investment.
Initial Amount: The investment value at the beginning of the year, including investments made in the first half of the year.
Assumed Amount: The investment value of the businesses in particular, based on valuations in June 2022.
Loss/Gain %: Losses or gains expressed in %.
Numerical Loss/Gain: To quantify my paper losses. The only definitive loss so far is the land, since I gave it up. Some investments are also cash flow only and do not appreciate.
Several notes to account for:
1) The initial amounts are not the original capital amounts; they are just the previous year's numbers and amounts that were added to them.
To date, the Manulife Investment, FSM, CPF and all 3 businesses are still net profit from initial capital, but they may be losses compared to last year.
2) As usual, I do not consider cash or insurance in my portfolio.
3) This will be the last time I am recording the land investment. I have noted it in future article to elaborate on.
4) Some of my portfolio investments made in the later part of 2022 are not accounted for, since technically my track record of investments starts in April 2017. As such, I didn't count the investments made after that - frankly, I didn't have that much capital to deploy anyway.
With that, here's my portfolio and what happened/what I'd do better.
Manulife Investments/CPFIS/SRS [Bad]
It was hard to make a judgement call on moving money out of Technology initially because Tech investments had been fundamentally overvalued for many years, with reports saying as much coming out as early as 2017.
If you'd invested back then, you'd still have made money (and my own track record has attributed large returns to Technology). But I made a call to be permanently out of Tech for now as early as April.
The parts where the portfolio suffered the most was probably a combination of the timing and unexpected further losses on China. At one point, the portfolio was down as much as 43%, but it's been improving rapidly after Covid-Zero was relinquished. It is likely that by the time this article is published, my situation will have improved a lot.
Since Manulife, SRS and CPFIS all had very aggressive China investments, it wasn't a net positive for me.
Private Bonds [Good]
I added another $64,000 in private bonds. This was a big risk for me because my private bonds have been reliable for coming onto 3 years now and taking on another one seemed a little unnecessary.
Funny story - one of the new bond holders was so terrified about potentially failing meeting his contractual obligations that I got a phone call from his mother to reassure me that she would cover him if his business failed.
I really appreciated that sincerity from him to risk humiliating himself in order to assure me and fulfill his obligations.
The bonds do not appreciate but they pay out 1% in cash flow every month, which has been essential in my pivoting business during these high inflationary periods and making sure that I don't have to let go of any of my staff.
That's a 12% coupon a year vs even high rates of 4.5% in T-Bills, but I wouldn't recommend it for the people unexperienced in this space. Even I thought CoAssets would be safe at one point in my youth.
FSM [Bad, not counting post April 2022]
Most of my investments after April were in FSM and Manulife. Those have had positive returns, but everything before that has been negative.
Disappointingly were the China Investments for sure, but also some of the disruptive technology funds I had forgotten about. I really have no excuse for th