Ahhh yeah, monthly if you only started in this month they'll calculate on a pro-rated basis based on the number of days invested this month and give you dividends in 2nd week of next month.

This post has been edited by DragonReine: Feb 17 2021, 09:00 AM

Haha, unfortunately not really how money market funds like Simple work, they're mutual funds so they calculate dividends based on their earnings through investing your investment, which is dependent on the performance of the fund in that particular month. As you see from attached pic, it's not a guaranteed fixed amount, which is why SA Simple's advertised earning rate of 2.4% is a "projected" rate, not a guaranteed one like fixed deposit or savings/current account interest.



This post has been edited by DragonReine: Feb 17 2021, 09:33 AM

It's just a limit set for direct debit mandate through your linked bank account to SA, no worries veli normal. basically they just set a maximum you can debit if you decide to fund SA through direct debit mandate

1) Time in the market > Timing the market. As last year's Covid-19 dip and recent surge in profits from KWEB proved, it's not really possible to time the market accurately unless you can see the future. However the irrefutable truth is that every day you delay putting investments in order to wait for a dip is losing a day where your money can work for you.

2) Lump sum vs ringgit/dollar cost averaging (splitting the whole sum over several payments) is mostly a question of your ability to withstand volatility and how secure you feel about investing a large sum knowing that it might lose value in short term. If you're the kind that feels uneasy about giving a lump sum to the point you lose sleep and you get anxiety, then DCA. If you have a heart of steel and aren't afraid of short term losses because you're aiming for long term profits, then lump sum on average usually profits more than DCA.

note: setting aside part of your monthly income to invest monthly is not DCA, DCA is for those who already have a sum of cash on hand but split up payments.

This post has been edited by DragonReine: Feb 17 2021, 02:04 PM

IMO it's not accurate when it comes to the psychology behind the investment strategy of DCA.

Monthly contribution from income or earnings from that month is actually a form of lump sum, but because it's steady contribution at fixed periods, its considered averaging (you don't time the market, but contribute regularly without caring the performance of the unit on the particular day you invest). However because it's money you don't have on hand until you get your income, it's not fitting with the strategy of DCA.

I'll try to illustrate what I mean by this.

Investor A earns monthly RM2k. Every month when he received income, he sets aside RM200 to invest on the 1st day of next month. The RM200 isn't deducted from existing savings or sums of money he might be keeping, so it's lump sum.

Investor B received RM6k in the form of a commission bonus. Because she feels that she'd rather put the money all to work at once, she invests the full sum of RM6k immediately. This is the lump sum strategy that most people are familiar with.

Investor C also received RM6k bonus. However because she doesn't feel comfortable with the idea of investing the entire amount in one go, she puts the RM6k in Simple which is low risk to earn dividends, and sets up a monthly deduction of RM200 to deduct from Simple into her investment portfolio, periodically topping up Simple when she gets bonuses or extra money. This is "true" strategy of DCA, where the investor slowly deducts from a pool of money that they planned to invest because they don't trust the strategy and risk of lump sum investment.

===

of course this is all semantics, in reality it's a psychological and financial safeguard to prevent yourself from investing at a bad time and/or panicking when your investments have a bad time Monthly income contribution or monthly deduction from savings pool, both work to make you invest regularly and to average out your investments so losses are minimised and it doesn't go beyond your risk appetite.

Just invest smartly and within your means, and within your comfort zone

This post has been edited by DragonReine: Feb 17 2021, 07:15 PM

Oh yes, recommend this, is a very good video 👍 watched last year and gave me some good insight

If you strictly only want to withdraw profit amount, ETFs doesn't really work that way.

When you withdraw, you redeem units, it's not like taking out a sum of cash from savings account. SA actually sell the units, and get the cash from selling the units. So when you withdraw it they sell an amount of units whose total value is equivalent to the amount you want to withdraw.

The only "true" way to get nett profits only is as lee82gx say, you sell all, then reinvest the money you initially invest and keep the money that's equal to profits. The obvious disadvantage to this (and overall long term loss) is that doing so you buy back units at higher price, so at the end of the day you have less units than before, although total value is same.

They usually put order to sell first day of risk adjustment, then buy new units for new ETFs over next 1 to 2 days

I think SA all portfolios have 1% cash asset weight allocation? I've noticed some of the converted USD remains as cash to meet that 1% target weight

It's not bad considering its a platform that's targeted at Millenial retail investors with low capital and deals primarily in ETFs which are low cost and easy to buy with AI. A lot of their human resources seem to be concentrated in IT, marketing and customer service since it's mostly online-based, so theoretically speaking it's a lot cheaper to run than a standard mutual funds wealth management company. At only 150+ employees (based on owler site report) it's not very high number of people to pay.

Total I think, including Singapore, Thailand, HK, Dubai (this is from Glassdoor on their office locations). Owler tends to collect based on whole company including branches overseas for smaller startups.

This post has been edited by DragonReine: Feb 19 2021, 10:18 AM

very slightly. Barely any impact on my portfolios at least. Back up slightly again.

Yeah, they do show you which ETFs they buy when you open portfolio.



However you cannot pick and choose which ETFs you get and/or how much weight you assign to each ETF.

when opening new portfolio, you can click directly on each of the type of asset class during the page where you choose risk (scroll to bottom), they also tell you which ETFs they invest in, with a detailed description of each ETF.

However they do not provide statistics on performance or current NAV.



This post has been edited by DragonReine: Feb 19 2021, 01:51 PM

👍👍👍

Visual here in case you're wondering:



the circled area you can click on each asset class to see breakdown

Actually, objectively speaking they're doing not bad at all if you at their funding timeline:



They only officially received over 10million funding injection in mid 2019, which was when economy was already showing signs of slowing down with the US-China trade war getting increasingly heated, and after that in 2020...well, pandemic hit.

Smartly didn't really get enough funding and their high management fees didn't help. I would argue that calling them "leading" back then is not really the same as leading now. Sure, one of the early pioneers of robo-advisors in Singapore, but they simply cannot keep up with lower fees and higher venture capital by other robo advisors.

SA's lucky that they have founders with investment banking connections which is probably why they're doing "better". Smartly and other early robo advisors paved the path for them, they just came in at the right time and just enough money driving them hahaha.

Like I mentioned, SA came in at the right time and got the right people doing the marketing+funding Pandemic only spurred further interest in the concept of AI and doing things via phone to most investors with deep pockets. Malaysia and Singapore society are both very conservative in general especially when it comes to finance and wealth management. Majority of the big money movers are more likely to invest in mutual funds, real estate, or shares. SA's target market are mostly Millenial generation who can't yet provide the high amounts of investment the way that older people can, unless they're the lucky few with rich inheritance or have made a successful business early.

Whether they'll be able to succeed and survive is still up in the air, and hopefully other people who use them as an investment platform knows that. Even studying banking history or recent fintech companies like e-pay/e-wallets etc., it takes years before can see if a company makes enough to survive, much less profit to the startup investors. Eventually market will start to consolidate and mergers/takeovers will happen etc.

Four years is really too early to predict or decide if something as new as robo-advisors in the ASEAN region is going to do well or not.

This post has been edited by DragonReine: Feb 20 2021, 01:12 AM

Automation is the key word here.

When something is automated, it's a form of AI. Still a crude form of it, but AI nonetheless. It becomes AI when it's able to "learn" from data it picks up, automatically adjusting its actions based on data.

Robo-advisors collect information from clients online, and then use this data to provide financial advice or invest client assets with moderate to minimal human intervention. Using AI, they work based on mathematical rules or algorithms.

StashAway's ERAA is a programme that analyzes data and makes decisions based on parameters keyed in by SA's analysts and investment team, where after receiving instructions it then operates without human intervention (mostly), continuously analyzing and observing market conditions to make decisions based on the data collected and the market movements. The buying and selling of your units whenever a transaction happens on the robo-advisor is done by the ERAA.

Part of why robo-advisor companies claim to keep costs low is how AI goes the grunt work of going to market to buy and sell, so they don't have to hire humans to do that for the company.

This post has been edited by DragonReine: Feb 20 2021, 09:59 AM

Fair enough.

Commodities going up and there's suggestions that global inflation might return, so it's possible that the bull run on equities might slow down?