Tag Archives: Investment

It costs $2.5 million and it takes 2 years.

Our reader questioned why some are experiencing losses despite reports that most CPF Investment Scheme members are raking profits.

Netizen Andrew Loh has had enough with the fluffy questions directed at Halimah Yacob and prefers for people to ask her serious, Presidency-related questions like Singapore's reserves and investments instead. Do you agree?

The GIC’s performance is not much worse than other sovereign wealth funds.

Temasek Holdings has increased its net portfolio value from $242 billion (US$180 billion) to $275 billion (US$197 billion). This means Temasek's Total Shareholder Return is 13.4% this year, a bounce upwards from a 9% decline from a dismal performance last year.

The recent announcement that the GIC stood to lose in excess of $5.6 billion comes as no surprise. The Swiss bank had been plagued with problems and the SDP had warned on at least five separate occasions against the GIC investing in it.

As to “said the scheme’s uptake is encouraging” – does it mean that the scheme’s utilisation was only about 6.3 per cent (126,000 divided by 2 million)? Isn’t this rather low as it represents only about one in 20 eligible Singaporeans?

Numbers, sometimes, tell the best stories – whether they are about foreign policy, trade or the economy in general. These latest tables published by the Singapore Department of Statistics reveal that the United States and Japan are the biggest foreign investors in Singapore, their $250b accounting for almost 25% of all our foreign investments (Table 1

Everything went well for the first 3 months until just before the maturity date, when she informed us that our investment had incurred a loss and advised us to hold it until it recovers. We had no access to any stock exchange or share price information, until the 7th month when we received a wealth report from the bank indicating, to our horror, that our investment value had dropped by more than half, and is now worth almost nothing.

Temasek divested a record S$10 billion plus in 19 listed US companies from September to December last year. As at 30 Sep 2015, Temasek had 20 positions worth about US$10.5 billion/S$14 billion. Some of these investments were held for years, others only a few months. At the end of Q4 2015, 19 positions were closed out. These 19 investments were valued at about S$11 billion at the end of Q3.