The STI Is Up 23%. REITs Are Down 12%. The Question I'd Ask About the Payout Thu 1 Oct 2026 | Evening The Numbers Angela's video today starts from the index gap I wrote about this morning. The Smart Investor puts the STI about 23% higher this year and the iEdge S-REIT Index about 12% lower, both on a price basis. Her question is whether a REIT's payout would still exist if the trust sold nothing, raised no new money and had to refinance debt at a higher rate. She puts it to three Singapore REITs. Sasseur REIT shows a trailing yield of about 9.3% at S$0.695 on 20 August, with gearing of 25.6% and interest cover of 5.6 times as reported by the manager. CapitaLand Ascendas REIT brought gearing down to 39.7% after a S$900 million equity raise. My Personal Take This morning I wrote that I could

Anthropic Lost $42 Billion. Only About $8 Billion Came From Running the Business. Wed 30 Sep 2026 | Evening The Numbers Reuters reports, citing Anthropic's IPO prospectus, a net loss of nearly US$42 billion in 2025. Roughly US$34 billion of that was a valuation-related accounting charge. The operating loss still widened to US$8.06 billion from US$2.98 billion in 2024. Anthropic had US$20.28 billion in cash and short-term investments against US$518 billion of future cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations, and nearly a quarter of 2025 revenue came from two customers. Today's video asks which of those figures is firmest: the loss, the obligations, or the customers. My Personal Take My first reaction to US$42 billion was that it had to mean the business was failing. What I almost miss

MAS S$20 Million for Market Makers, Explained Tue 29 Sep 2026 | Midday The Numbers MAS announced S$1.45 billion for fund managers and S$20 million for market makers today. Only the smaller number reaches your trading account. The S$20 million pays firms to quote tighter bid-ask spreads on around 80 small and mid-cap stocks until 31 December 2028. The spread is a cost on every trade: a 2% gap on a S$10,000 purchase costs about S$200 round-trip, against S$100 at 1%. Today's episode covers what the grant does to that gap, and why it is not a price safety net under those stocks. My Personal Take My first reaction to the S$1.45 billion was that it was the headline and the S$20 million was a footnote. What I almost missed is that the footnote is the only line that touches a retail trading screen

Where to Park Your Cash for Higher Yield: T-Bills vs Fixed Deposits vs SSB (Updated for 1.92% T-Bill Yields) Mon 28 Sep 2026 | Daily Long-Form Today's long-form is the ⭐ Members Edition, made free for everyone. The Numbers The 6-month T-bill just cleared at 1.92%, its highest print this year. Most fixed deposits are still under 1.70%. CPF OA pays 2.5% for October to December 2026, but that money cannot be touched in an emergency. At S$100,000, DBS balance bands can cut the effective FD rate on anything above S$20,000. Syfe Cash+ Enhanced shows a 3.0% projected return, but the data behind it is dated 17 November 2025, so I treat that figure as stale.(Correct me here if you have updated data, so that we can share with the community). My Personal Take My first reaction to 1.92% was to compare

Iggy's Journal: US Treasury Yields Just Hit Their Highest Level Since 2007. Your CPF Statement Won't Show It. 27 September 2026, Evening Video Release The question I kept coming back to this week wasn't why US Treasury yields reached 5.22 percent. It was why my own CPF statement barely reacted to something that size. That gap is the whole story. The Numbers This is a genuine global bond shock, the kind of move that reprices risk everywhere it touches. But Singapore's transmission mechanism runs differently, CPF Ordinary Account still sits at its guaranteed 2.50 percent regardless of what Washington's bond market does, and this week's 6-month T-bills yielded between 1.70 and 1.92 percent, both untouched by the headline number. The risk hasn't vanished just because your statement looks calm,

Iggy's Journal: The US Just Shrank Most of Singapore's Tariff Edge Over China. Almost Nobody Noticed. 27 September 2026, Morning Podcast Everyone's been talking about the Trump-Xi summit this week. I don't think that's actually where the important change happened. It happened months earlier, and it took me a while to connect the two. The Numbers A US Supreme Court ruling removed much of the emergency tariff structure that had made China look dramatically more expensive relative to Singapore and other alternative manufacturing hubs. The summit itself mainly extended the existing truce, it didn't rebuild what the ruling took away. The "China plus one" story isn't dead, companies are still diversifying supply chains for reasons beyond tariffs alone, but its tariff foundation is now much thinn

Iggy's Journal: From October, DBS Gets Ten Times Cheaper to Buy Into. Here's What Lower Lot Sizes Actually Do to Trading Volume. 26 September 2026, Morning Podcast SGX just cut the minimum lot size from 100 shares to 10 for 11 blue chips, DBS among them. The affordability headline is real, but I don't think it's actually the interesting part of this story. The Numbers Those 11 names already drive roughly 35 percent of all trading on the exchange. That matters because the liquidity premium from a smaller lot size is mostly earned at the illiquid end of the market, where a high minimum ticket genuinely keeps people out. Making an already-liquid stock slightly easier to enter doesn't create the same effect. If DBS sits near S$75, your minimum ticket drops from about S$7,500 to about S$750 onc

Iggy's Journal: UOB Kay Hian Puts an $11.85 Target on City Developments. Its Operating Profit Doesn't Cover the Interest Bill. 25 September 2026, Evening Video Release I keep coming back to one number on this one: 0.99 times interest coverage. CDL's RNAV story may well be real, but paper asset value doesn't pay an interest bill, and that's the gap between the target price and what the balance sheet is actually telling me right now. The Numbers UOB Kay Hian's $11.85 target depends on actual, fairly priced disposals happening, not simply on a strategic review headline being announced. The numbers underneath tell a harder story. Gearing sits at 69 percent, nearly double the 35 percent ceiling I use as a hard gate. Net debt to EBITDA is at 15.7 times, well past the 10 times mark I treat as a r

Iggy's Journal: T-Bills Jump to 1.92%. What It Means for Your CPF and SRS Cash. 25 September 2026, Afternoon Podcast The surprising part of this auction wasn't simply that yields rose again. It's that they rose despite genuinely strong demand, which is usually the thing that's supposed to hold a cut-off down, not push it up. The Numbers The auction drew S$15.8 billion in applications, real demand, plenty of investors competing for allocation, and the cut-off still jumped 22 basis points in two weeks to 1.92 percent. That combination tells me the auction is clearing at a genuinely higher price for short-term cash right now, not just drifting because supply happened to be thin. For CPF Ordinary Account money, the comparison is straightforward: 1.92 percent still sits about 60 basis points be

Iggy's Journal: The Real Price of a Debt-Free $4,500 a Month in Retirement Is $711,000, Not $1.8 Million. 25 September 2026, Evening Video Release The biggest distortion I found in this comparison wasn't the retirement target itself. It was treating CPF as though it contributes nothing, then asking a portfolio to fund the entire S$4,500 a month alone. The Numbers Once CPF LIFE is actually counted, the FRS to ERS tranche produces an estimated 9.04 percent annual payout ratio, a genuinely strong number, but it comes with a real cost: that money stops being liquid capital the moment it goes in. At the Enhanced Retirement Sum, the remaining portfolio gap falls to S$1,060 a month, which requires S$270,638 at my 4.7 percent yield hurdle. Add that to the ERS itself and you land at roughly S$711,0

Iggy's Journal: Three Out of Four Singapore REITs Trade Below Book Value. Here's Why Almost Nobody Is Merging Them. 24 September 2026, Afternoon Podcast The average S-REIT trades at 0.77 times book value. If markets worked the way textbooks say they should, that gap alone would trigger a wave of mergers. It hasn't. The count sits stuck at 39. The Numbers External managers earn fees on the size of the REIT they run, so a merger that fixes the discount also erases someone's income. That's why consolidation only happens within the same sponsor's stable, fees never actually leave the building, they just move from one entity to another under the same roof. The pressure on the sector isn't easing either. DBS just cut target prices by 9.6 percent after the Fed hiked to 3.75 to 4 percent, adding a

Iggy's Journal: Three Out of Four Singapore REITs Trade Below Book Value. Here's Why Almost Nobody Is Merging Them. 24 September 2026, Afternoon Podcast The average S-REIT trades at 0.77 times book value. If markets worked the way textbooks say they should, that gap alone would trigger a wave of mergers. It hasn't. The count sits stuck at 39. The Numbers External managers earn fees on the size of the REIT they run, so a merger that fixes the discount also erases someone's income. That's why consolidation only happens within the same sponsor's stable, fees never actually leave the building, they just move from one entity to another under the same roof. The pressure on the sector isn't easing either. DBS just cut target prices by 9.6 percent after the Fed hiked to 3.75 to 4 percent, adding a

Iggy's Journal: The Fed, the ECB, and the Bank of Japan Are All Raising Rates. The UK, India, and China Are Not. Here's What That Means for Your CPF and SRS. 23 September 2026, Morning Podcast Everyone assumed hiking banks are the hawks and holding banks are the doves. That's the wrong frame entirely, and it took me a minute to see it too. The Numbers The BOJ hiked to 1.25% even though Japan carries one of the most indebted governments in the world, while China held for a sixteenth straight month despite industrial production actually strengthening. The real split isn't hawkish versus dovish. It's whose demand needs restraining versus whose credit demand is too weak to justify tightening at all. MAS doesn't set a policy rate the way the Fed or ECB does, but SORA mortgages, T-bill yields, a

Iggy's Journal: EP1828 - Singtel's Yield Looks Like 4.3%. Strip Out the One-Off Dividend and It's 3.1%. 22 September 2026, Evening Video Release UOB Kay Hian's $5.50 target and my 4.3% yield reading aren't actually disagreeing with each other. One is pricing a Nxera transaction that hasn't happened yet. The other is measuring the cash Singtel is paying out right now. The Numbers A stock can clear the first test and fail the second at the same time, and that's exactly what I found when I ran the current numbers. Strip out the one-off Value Realisation Dividend and Singtel's core yield drops to 3.08%, below what CPF Special Account already pays with zero equity risk attached. The balance sheet itself isn't the issue. Gearing sits at 23.3% and interest coverage at 19.0x, both clearing with wi