I just updated my Google Sheet numbers for the end Jan 2022 cash, securities, robo-advisors, cryptos, CPF-OA and liquid assets positions. It’s not looking good but that is to be expected given the recent bad performance in tech stocks and crypto markets. I invested more of my spare cash manually into these markets and even increased my dollar-cost averaging amounts. But that’s not enough to offset the fall in their values. For the first time in the past 2 years since Covid hit (bear market in Mar 2020 and a quick recovery after that), my liquid assets has gone down significantly to the point where monthly capital injections failed to make any difference.
It was already getting close in the past few months but my regular capital injections had kept my liquid assets afloat by keeping the investment portfolio value steady. This time around, the fall in both the tech stocks and cryptos markets (where I have bigger positions in now) was too much to buffer against. That being said, I should expect higher volatility given my exposure to tech stocks and cryptos. But it’s another thing to experience the wild swings in value on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Learning how to stomach the higher volatility and timing the capital injections is still something I’m getting used to. Anyway, here are my end Jan 2022 liquid assets breakdown.
Cash: S$32,000 (-S$4,000 and -11.11%)
This went down by quite a bit as I used up the savings from my monthly salary income and drew down on my cash buffer to do capital injections into my tech stocks and cryptos portfolio. I didn’t want to get too aggressive as it might be a prolonged downturn in these markets and I rather slowly feed the funds in instead of doing it too early at one shot. Especially when it seems like we are just at the beginning of this volatile period.
Securities: S$818,563 (-S$23,437 and -2.78%)
Ouch, not much to say other than it’s not fun to watch my securities value drop every month for the past 3 months. Each fall has been more than S$20,000. The recovery in the Singapore market was not enough to offset the losses in the tech stocks and cryptos markets. Tough times but I’m going to stick with my investing strategy of allocating more funds to these markets.
Robo-Advisors: S$106,560 (+S$60 and +0.06%)
Flat for the month despite regular contributions. The robo-advisor portfolios are more diversified so the values didn’t drop as much as my securities portfolio value. But I have also made them more tech-focused in the past year so they took a beating as well.
Cryptos: S$172,800 (-S$15,625 and -8.12%)
Urgh, worst monthly fall in cryptos portfolio value since I started investing in it. An even more volatile asset class than tech stocks. I injected the most capital into this and it had the bigger percentage fall across the various components of my liquid assets.
CPF-OA: S$147,400 (+S$6,900 and +4.91%)
The only bright point in this dismal monthly liquid asset update. A combination of CPF interest and higher CPF contribution (due to my wife’s bonus) led to a jump in CPF-OA balance.
Liquid Assets: S$1,277,323 (-S$35,742 and -2.72%)
Wow, liquid assets for the month went below S$1.3m with such a big drop. S$1.3m is a psychological threshold for me since that is what I started with after paying the downpayment of my private property purchase last year. I was making some progress with each month in terms of financial recovery but I’m basically back to the starting point. A disappointing revelation but a necessary reminder that such stress tests of my liquid assets are important in ensuring the longevity of my investment approach.