The thoughts going through my mind as I try to update the Ng's Family Portfolio.

I had wanted to update my portfolio to include those from my wife's. In fact, I started the excel spreadsheet about a month ago, but never get to with it as I ponders over what are the information to include in the spreadsheet and also, due to the hectic schedule, I left it as it is.

I will just include the companies we had, no spreadsheet, in order of capital vested, if I remembered correctly. (^ Means owned by both accounts, * means by my wife account)

^Sembcorp Industries

*APTT

^ST engineering

*HPHT

*M1

*LKH

*SPH

MIT

Singapore Shipping Corp

*Ascendas Hospitality

Since my last update:

I have sold Singapore Shipping, ST engineering, CMPH twice, Venture and Ascendas Trust with profits.

I have cut losses with LMIR and Sembcorp Industries.

She has sold Singapore Shipping Corp, SIA with profits.

There are plenty of thoughts swirling in my mind as I think of how to write the blog post, in fact, it keeps swirling in my mind as I go to sleep. I hope it gets clearer as I blogged about it now. Pardon me if it is still incoherence.

I want to be clear, what I am saying now it just my own clear understanding of myself, I am not insulating anything against what other bloggers are doing when they share their portfolio

First, how should I track my portfolio?

My previous tracking is in terms of portfolio size and the unrealized profit and loss every quarter including dividends.

This do not satisfied me anymore as any portfolio size value will move with the market. A positive or negative value now serve no purpose.

With this, I asked why I am investing. I am clear about this, I want to build a retirement nest beside CPF, if by any stroke of luck it gets big earlier and I might "escape", that is good, if not, at least I do not want to be working beyond retirement age without a choice.

So tracking dividends like what some bloggers are doing might be a better gauge.

However, I believe in keeping a big warchest and also a big emergency fund now. I believe the more sustainable dividends given will be the ones bought at "wretched" prices. I hardly think there are many "wretched" counters now. So, I might take profits off tables if they give me dividends "in advance" for the next 3-5 years. I already got 6 years dividends from CMPH. I do not like increasing "principal size" for the sake of it  so that "dividends" increase and then getting worries about "how long and higher can market go".

So perhaps, XIRR tracking is sound? But that is too technical for me to understand ask cw  I cannot even understand why capital injection and profit taking should be -ve and +ve

It then dawn on me that I have a piecemeal approach to my end goal, shouldn't I be a bit more consistent in income investing?

Then I go back to why I track my portfolio.

I have several honest answers, that are mine alone.

1) I want to show off to the bloggersphere that I made a lot of good calls to "buy" and "sell"

2) I want a post that has good view counts.

3) I want to see if anyone had any opinions about the counters I owned, and since I also use others portfolio as a basis of radar to do first cut screening, I want to return this favor too.

However, looking at my own list above, it is very obvious that the list do not include "under-covered" counters, most have been talked about highly in forum or blogs, any value adding if any, should be more in dept analysis of individual companies so that I might add new perspectives. Hence the top 2 reasons are main reasons which hardly should be called a "good reason". As for 3) simply listing the counters should suffice.

One positive did emerge from this exercise.

After realization of the piecemeal approach to tracking, I realized I do have  an approach just that it might not be nice to be tracked/ presented and that it is not robust enough

I want "insurance" in terms of cash, and I want to build a big portfolio when the market is lower. Read here.

Both my wife and I are more than 50% cash.

This is not the time for full investment, although we can slowly "trade" when a counter is momentarily low and harvest in advance 2-4 years of dividends as we wait again. Such an "trading" mentality should be "lesser" in my wife account.