Saving account
Standard Chartered Bank Privilege Saver Account
For fund to meet various short-term needs in daily life, I chose to keep them in Standard Chartered Privilege Saver account. With some easy-to-fulfill conditions, this account provides interest on par with short-term fixed deposit. If you are interested to know more, feel free to check out my article written previously here, detailing out how I use this account in combination with its credit card and BigPay e-wallet to get the most out of it.
BigPay Referral code to get RM10 credit: GXK7NWIZR1
Fund investment
For emergency fund enough to maintain at least 6 months of my family expenses, I put them in bond fund through Fundsupermart. I also invested small amount of money in PRS fund (private retirement scheme) through fundsupermart, purely for tax deduction purpose.
To know more about bond fund, feel free to check out my article here.
Personally I prefer to manage my finance online without having to deal with any personnel unless really necessary. That’s the primary reason I decided to invest through fundsupermart over other channels, which everything can be done online.
Stock investment
Referral code to get 500 RT points: c4ffTBKXCH
I only started to use Rakuten Trade from year 2020, and so far I am quite happy with it. The reasons I decided to move from previous platform to Rakuten Trade initially were：
- Its low brokerage fee
- It allows deposit and withdrawal of money through mobile apps, rather than having to go through remisier or web application.
- Easy and quick registration process
Having say that, Rakuten trade is not flawless. During first half of 2020 when trading volume of stock market spiked unexpectedly, its server cannot handle the volume and many investors had issue placing orders. However since its upgrade subsequently, it is much better now. Plus, I’m not a trader who typically looks at short-term trend and trade frequently, so it did not cause much hassle to me back then.
The closest rival of Rakuten Trade is probably M+. However I have not tried M+, so I am unable to give a good comparison between the two.
Here are few other shortcomings of Rakuten Trade from my experience
- Nominee account, not a direct account. i.e., Rakuten holds the shares on behalf of customer.
- Due to nominee account, has to inform Rakuten in advance if want to attend AGM
- Due to nominee account, corporate action/exercise has to be done through Rakuten platform. More importantly, the expiry date would be earlier to take account of Rakuten’s processing time. For instance, for a dividend reinvestment plan (DRP) dues on 15th December, Rakuten may set expiration date through its platform on 5th.
- Due to nominee account, there will be few days of delay for Rakuten to pay dividend, compared to payment date announced by company. Also dividend will be paid to Rakuten account rather than bank account.
- Does not support IPO subscription
Shortcomings above does not bother me much, except for earlier expiration of corporate action subscription. I would need to set reminder on my phone to ensure I don’t miss the due date, so this is the point annoys me the most. I hope Rakuten can improve on this point in the future, such that the expiration date is much closer to official expiration date.
I think this is the most popular free apps for investing in Malaysian stock market, so I won’t elaborate. Personally I use this more often that trading platform to check the price movement, company announcement etc.
Not sure how popular is this website. It is free to use, and personally I like to use this website for checking historical movement of P/E ratio of a particular stock.
Although P/E ratio is easy to calculate, calculating manually to have P/E trend over a certain period is very tedious. With this website, you can get P/E ratio trend of any stock for free.
Favorite blogs
There are many stock investment bloggers out there. Here are the reasons why I think these bloggers are different from others.
First, many bloggers are probably making more money from their blogging business (e.g. selling course) than investing. While the knowledge taught could be true and valuable. I personally like to have opinion of someone who has proved success in stock market.
Second, to ensure the content is “eye-catching”, many bloggers would focus on recommending stocks that could make profit in shorter term. Personally, I believe in “long term is king”, and bloggers below are undoubted long-term investors.
MercuryChong (Chinese blog)
A vey inspiration blog for dividend investors. As a normal salary earner, he is highly disciplined, following his own pace to slowly build a portfolio to generate dividend as passive income. Used to be active on facebook, but has decided to quit facebook in 2020 after reaching milestone of RM100K of annual dividend.
However he is still active on original online blog, which link is given above. His blog actually talks very little about actual investment technique, such as picking or evaluating a stock. Rather, his blog is fully of inspiring stories of himself and his readers.
For anyone being long enough in stock market, it should be clear that altitude can be as important, or even more important than technical skills. And this is the value the blog brings to its readers. Also the blogger Chong has demonstrated that dividend investing actually works, if you have the right altitude and patience.
Windscopo (Chinese blog)
A active blogger, focusing on value investing.
From a low salary earner to successful investor, his own story and experience is inspiring. He is one of the bloggers who has more disclosure (non-direct) on what he is actually investing in. He usually publishes blogs shortly after publication of financial result of stocks that he is watching. At the end of blog post, he also unselfishly share his personal opinion on that particular stock. I guess that is the part that gets the most attention from his readers.