yes... you can collect 3 years worth of wht then claim one shot... like a lot of folks collect saman for whole year then wait for pdrm 50% offer...

For your amount, going with a local roboadvisor like Stashaway will be cheaper for you in the short term. Going by @Medufsaid's calculation, 1.6% can cover 5 years of SA management fees. Once you accumulate a sizeable amount then you can consider to withdraw from Stashaway and re-buy on IBKR to avoid the management fees of SA. You will have to be the judge yourself whether the effort is worth it.

The Swiss National Bank announced a surprise cut to interest rates on Thursday, in a sign of policymakers’ confidence over falling inflation.

The SNB reduced its headline rate by 25 basis points to 1.5 per cent, making it an outlier among western central banks. Others, such as the European Central Bank, are still fretful over inflation and have kept rates steady in recent decisions.

The Swiss franc fell 1.2 per cent against the US dollar after the move.

Swiss inflation fell to its lowest level in two and a half years in February, at 1.2 per cent. This is within the SNB’s mandated target range, helped by a weakening franc.

Two law professors claim Sullivan & Cromwell put its own interests before that of FTX’s stakeholders, reviving criticism over the law firm’s role in the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange’s rise, collapse and unwinding.

The firm’s “apparent conflicts of interest permeated FTX’s bankruptcy filing and every aspect of the case”, Jonathan Lipson of Temple University and David Skeel of the University of Pennsylvania wrote in a paper published online earlier this month.

The two academics focused on the 20 M&A and regulatory assignments that S&C worked on for FTX, for which it earned just under $10mn in the months leading up to the exchange’s November 2022 bankruptcy filing.

Through that work, “S&C knew, or was in a position to know, that FTX was co-mingling customer assets”, the professors contended, referring to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s misuse of account holder funds.

The paper comes ahead of a hearing on Thursday at which Bankman-Fried is set to be sentenced after being convicted of masterminding the looting of FTX customers’ accounts.

The criminal case will not be the final word on FTX’s collapse: earlier this month Robert Cleary, a former federal prosecutor, was appointed as an independent examiner in FTX’s bankruptcy to provide a detailed report on the events leading up to its implosion, including the work of its advisers.

John Ray, the chief executive appointed to oversee FTX, said in a statement on behalf of the company and its advisers: “The paper is simply not research but uninformed and unsupported allegations,” which “grossly mischaracterises the facts”.

The involvement of S&C, which represents the FTX estate, has been controversial from the start. S&C lawyers had assisted the company in the chaotic days leading up to its bankruptcy filing — including preparing its petition and appointing Ray, a restructuring expert its lawyers knew well, as its new chief executive. A former S&C partner, Ryne Miller, was FTX US’s general counsel.

The office of the US Trustee, a part of the Department of Justice which represents the public interest in bankruptcy cases, initially objected to S&C’s retention, arguing that the law firm had failed to properly disclose the full extent of its connections to FTX. Several US senators also voiced concern.

But the trustee eventually lifted its objection after the law firm provided more details of its previous work, and the court approved S&C’s hiring. According to court filings, S&C has reaped a total of $184mn in fees, including billings and reimbursements, between November 2022 and January 2024.

The professors criticised business decisions made by FTX during the course of the case including the failure to revive the FTX exchange, selling the LedgerX unit for what they deemed an inadequate amount and choosing not to sue Binance for withdrawing $2bn from FTX in the fall of 2022, a move that helped precipitate FTX’s bankruptcy.

The professors further contended that “S&C may have violated ethical duties of confidentiality, candour, and loyalty by reporting allegations of these crimes to prosecutors . . . by duping Bankman-Fried into giving control of FTX to Ray”.

“For well over a year, S&C and Ray had free rein to marshal and manage conflicting claims about the public and private interests at stake as they saw fit,” the professors wrote. “These conflicts appear to have reduced recoveries, even as they have enriched S&C.”

People close to S&C and FTX noted that all the company’s actions had to be approved by the bankruptcy court with the consent of the US Trustee and creditors, and pointed out Bankman-Fried had several lawyers personally representing him in November 2022. Moreover, they said account holders could potentially receive the full amount of their claims by the time the bankruptcy is finished.

Lipson and Skeel said they ran into each other last fall during oral arguments before an appeals court over the examiner’s appointment. They decided afterwards to collaborate on the article about the duties of lawyers, which is to be published in the Stanford Law Review.

They said there was a “firewall” in place so Bankman-Fried’s parents, who are Stanford law professors, had no knowledge of the article prior to submission. Skeel said he had no interaction with the Bankman-Frieds and handled all interactions with the Stanford publication. The pair did not call S&C or FTX prior to publication but said they welcomed any feedback.

Lipson said while he was not friends with the Bankman-Fried’s parents, “I have spoken to Sam and his mother, Barbara [Fried], on a number of occasions, which is how we came by much of the material we have”.

“Candidly, I was pretty sceptical of [Sam] Bankman-Fried’s claims at the time, and it was only after a fairly sustained effort of putting pieces together — some from them, but most in public — that it came to appear that S&C may have some problems,” Lipson said.

A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.

thanks... do you know what is their carry trade formula and base rates they used?

sg and my have quite close rates, so 5.72% is much higher than the rate differential i was expecting... just wanna understand the numbers...

Hi sifu,

Can I know what is the current cheapest way to deposit fund into IBKR. I have been using the WISE-IBKR integration method since this feature was introduced. However, recently I stumbled on one of Ziet YT Shorts where he suggested that, for people that have a CIMB SG account, can save some money by doing the following:

1. Transferring MYR from CIMB MY to CIMB SG (receive in SGD)
2. Transfer from CIMB SG to IBKR (receive in SGD)
3. Convert SGD to USD on IBKR

After some research, I have also saw that a Redditors on MalaysianPF mentioning the same thing, quoted "Cheapest method will be CIMB MY (during working hour)> CIMB SG > IBKR. Easiest method will be through Wise directly.".

Anyone have any experience or insights comparing WISE-IBKR integration method with this method?

Thank you in advance!

Yeah. For moving into CIMB SG, Money match is cheaper than Wise and CIMB itself

U can always do the comparison yourself.

HouLeiiShytt do take note that if you want to open CIMB sg acct, you cannot use Wise anymore. can only do through these

• deposit S$1k from CIMB MY (expensive)
  
• deposit S$1k from other sg banks
  

so, unless u are ok with the expensive fees to transfer that S$1k, open a MBB (or OCBC) sg bank acct first. open CIMB sg when you want to transfer back to Malaysia

MYRSGD comparison post as of today afternoon

RM 3.494792 market mid-rate as verified by Wise

S$850 (closest approximiation of RM3k DuitNow Int transfer, since not allowed to key in MYR for DuitNow Int Transfer, only SGD amount)
S$8562 (simulate RM30k)

	S$850	S$8562
DuitNow	RM2979.32	RM30010.52 (for comparison only, since can only remit RM3k daily)
MoneyMatch	RM2978.22 + RM5	RM29999.43 + RM5
sunway money	RM2987.23 + RM8	RM30077.13 + RM8
wise	RM2991.41	RM30135.65
bigpay	RM2995.79	RM30135.54

finally got time to do non-office hours comparison

RM3.4955 market mid-rate as verified by Wise

	S$850	S$8562
DuitNow	2982.46	30042.11
MoneyMatch	2992.40 + 5	30142.28 + 5
sunway money	2993.45 + 8	30140.09 + 8
wise	2991.81	30140.80
bigpay	2988.15 + 4.5	30099.39 + 4.5

HouLeiiShytt do take note that if you want to open CIMB sg acct, you cannot use Wise anymore. can only do through these

• deposit S$1k from CIMB MY (expensive)
  
• deposit S$1k from other sg banks
  

so, unless u are ok with the expensive fees to transfer that S$1k, open a MBB (or OCBC) sg bank acct first. open CIMB sg when you want to transfer back to Malaysia

The writer is an FT contributing editor

Passive funds are, by construction, price-insensitive bundles of financial securities, weighted to replicate the performance of market indices. But the indices themselves are not entirely passive. And decisions made by index providers are increasingly shaping capital allocation.

By the time Tesla was included in the S&P 500 index, it had already become the sixth-largest US company by market capitalisation. Tesla’s stock had been left out of the S&P 500 despite satisfying each of the published criteria in the index methodology, but the Index Committee had used its discretion not to include it until December 2020.

Rob Arnott — founder of Research Affiliates — estimates that between the committee’s announcement and index rebalance day a month later, index funds needed to buy about $78bn of Tesla stock. A frenzy of activity saw almost a quarter of outstanding Tesla shares trade on the final day of the period, by which time its price had increased by 57 per cent.

The use of discretion by index committees such as S&P Dow Jones’s is rare. Most large providers have an almost algorithmic approach to membership decisions. But the rules themselves are not static.

In 2019 the JPMorgan index committee, following a consultation process, changed rules that had prevented high-income gulf states from having their sovereign bonds included in the EMBI Global range of benchmarks. Debt issued by Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates was phased into the index, and by the end of the year constituted almost 12 per cent of the benchmark. These countries’ bonds were transformed into assets that passive funds would be compelled to buy, and on which active managers would need to spend large amounts of portfolio risk to avoid. At around the same time, FTSE Russell changed its recognition of Saudi equities, moving them into the FTSE Global All Cap index — a popular global equity index. Absent these moves it is unclear whether investors would have actively chosen to allocate in size to Middle Eastern sovereigns and companies.

Perhaps most striking have been the series of index changes that have driven capital flows to China in recent years. Between 2018 and 2020, MSCI and FTSE Russell began to include portions of the onshore RMB-denominated A-Share market in their global and emerging market stock indices. Over the same period China’s sovereign debt entered the Bloomberg Barclays Global Aggregate Index, one of the most tracked bond benchmarks. And since 2021 a phased inclusion of Chinese debt into the FTSE Russell World Government Bond Index has been in train.

The IMF estimates that these benchmark changes will have cumulatively driven about $380bn of capital flows into China. They expect that portfolio investments attached to index inclusion are likely to become an important source of financing for Beijing’s current account in the future as its current account surplus turns to deficit.



Index providers are naturally exposed to political scrutiny. Last summer, the House of Representatives Select Committee on the Chinese Communist party launched an investigation into MSCI, arguing that “as a direct result of decisions made by MSCI . . . Americans are now unwittingly funding PRC companies that develop and build weapons for the People’s Liberation Army”. But in the US the providers sit in regulatory limbo.

Gregory Campbell, a financial services assurance partner at PwC, tells me that while EU regulators believe index providers should operate as independent, objective data providers, their US counterparts have questioned whether this is even possible. Given the providers look after index methodologies, they are indirectly responsible for directing investment flows. In 2022 the SEC consulted on whether the providers should be regulated as investment advisers. Since then, they have made no overt move to regulate them.

With the seemingly perpetual growth of passive investing, the importance of index committees grows every day. In the UK, The Investment Association estimates that passive accounts for a third of all assets under management, and index fund assets eclipsed those in actively managed funds in the US market at the end of last year. Decisions as to which securities this money tracks have huge mechanical consequence given their price insensitivity.

The idea of creating a neutral index representing the market is seductively simple. In reality, the challenge of describing and then policing the perimeter of a market is significant. As arbiters of the rule-books defining a market, index committees have become among the most powerful allocators of capital in the world. They deserve scrutiny in accordance with this position.

For currency trades executed under the auto currency conversion service, IB will typically add or subtract (at its discretion) 0.03% to the exchange rate that would otherwise apply. Please note that IB does not separately charge a commission on these auto-conversion trades.

if you buy <U$6666.66 worth of shares manually, u can let IBKR auto-convert for a fee of 0.03% https://www.reddit.com/r/singaporefi/commen...ibkr_supported/

Try to apply here https://www.cimb.com.sg/en/personal/forms-a.../fastsaver.html

Wise is really expensive. If I transfer RM100k I'll have to spend RM596 in fees. However, if I use Moneymatch, I can easily have a 30% discount on that. It's still worth the effort.