Author(s): Dandy Chen, Ong Xien Fong (20th Corporate Communications subcommittee members)
NTUC Auditorium
This year’s Singapore Financial Conference (SFC) theme was “Starting Younger, Investing Smarter”. With the aim of equipping aspiring investors with the necessary skills for investing and networking opportunities with experienced professionals, SFC 2019 attracted a huge turnout on 8th March. This was a strong testament to the quality of the conference over the years.
We believe that investing in oneself is the best form of investment. This has been our primary motivation behind organising SFC throughout the years. As usual, our goal this year was to have our distinguished speakers share insights on the basics of investing. Apart from the talks, SFC included an opportunity for a free brokerage account opening and a career mentorship opportunity by Young NTUC.
Mr Sarjit, our guest of honour, presented the three key skills all aspiring investors should equip themselves with:
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It is salient to have basic accounting knowledge. Accountancy is the language of business and learning how to interpret financial statements is fundamental to any investor. For example, the Altman Z-score may be a good way to check a business’ health.
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Understanding economics is also very important. This is because all businesses are interlinked by the economy and investors should be able to understand how market fluctuations may impact their investments.
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Coding skills are essential. In the movement towards automation, being able to code will give investors an edge in the field of investments.
The three distinguished speakers for SFC 2019 were Mr Keshvani from Barclays, Mr Adrian Ho from Maybank Kim Eng, and Mr Stanley Lim, the co-founder of Value Invest Asia. Mr Keshvani gave market insights from the point of view of macro economics. He explored the issues of the trade war which has affected Asian currencies and bonds, especially in the emerging markets.
As an expert value investor, Mr Lim’s emphasis was on the importance of stock picking. His rationale was that stock picking could result in much higher returns relative to the general stock index. He shared a few important points on stock picking – choosing a growing company, a company with an economic moat, and having a large scale of business relative to industry and high branding power.
Mr Ho shared insights on the Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and how ETFs can be used to access assets such as wholesale bonds and commodities. He also shed light on the considerations of portfolio creation such as investment policy, returns objective, risk tolerance and investment horizon.
After the three speakers had spoken, we arrived at the highlight of the event – the panel discussion. As usual, we had plenty of questions from our enthusiastic audience. Interesting questions ranged from the market outlook (whether there was going to be a recession) to mitigating forex losses (if one diversifies overseas). The discussion ended off on a light hearted note with all the speakers and the guest of honor sharing their thoughts to the question “what would you say to your young self?”.
SFC 2019 was a huge success thanks to our sponsors, speakers, and event committee members who put much effort into the event. We hope that the audience enjoyed the conference as much as we did and we look forward to seeing everyone again next year!