Sunday's rambling

I browsed through Sunday Times today and noticed that there is an article on the low rate of interest provided by financial institutions in Singapore recently, presumably due to the plunging SIBOR rate, again presumably because the world's central banks are cutting their rates to boost the economy.

It's interesting that every politician have a fetish for growth. It's quite impossible to generate growth forever you know. Imagine that a hypothetical bacteria doubles their population every one minute - meaning a growth rate of 100% per min. If this rate goes on forever, we'll be covered by bacteria in maybe a few months? But this will not happen because somewhere along the nice growth rate on paper, there will be a limit to this whole growth process. In the case of the growing bacteria, either they run out of space, or they run out of food, or their toxins emitted kill each other, or all of them at the same time. I guess economic growth is the same too.

I looked at the article and there are suggestions by different people on what is the best place to put your $50,000. Almost all of them suggest at least a small part in equities related instrument, either 'safe' blue chips or a few well diversified funds.

If you ask me, where you are going to put your $50k depends very much on what you intend to do with the $50k. Are you saving up for short term use - like getting a property, a car or marriage within 2-3 years? Are you saving up for your child's education in 25 yrs time? Are you saving up for retirement in 40 yrs time? Basically the longer the time frame, the more you should put into equities related instruments. If now is not the best time to invest, when is it? 2006? 2007? If you need the money in 2-3 yrs time, I'm not so sure what you put into the equities market can be recovered in this time frame. Hence, if you can't afford to lose your capital in the event of pre-matured cash out, then don't put it there.

I'm put most of my money in MMF because of my short term needs (see my post on Budgeting for the near future). However, they are getting lesser and lesser returns (though I must add they are still better than banks' rate), with monthly returns dropping from 0.17% per month in May 2007 to around 0.06% in Feb 2009. This means that the returns per annum dropped from around 2% to 0.7%. I think I'll stop putting money and perhaps draw some out of it. The risk of losing the money in MMF (though low probability) is not worth the 0.06% returns per month I'm getting from it, especially since I'm not going to put it there for the long term.

For those interested, mine is the Phillips MMF. Here's the unit price for year 2009.



Here's the graph plotting for the unit price of Phillips MMF since I started tracking in May 2007. Can you see the shift in gradient starting in 2008?