2025 Year End Review

2025 Returns: 142.55%

Highest Point of Return this year 199.28% (August)

Unfortunately, with this retracement of 57% since August, i finish the year below 1m.

If i look at it on a whole year's view, i think there is no denying that i have done well.

If i look at the -57% since August, i think its about time i put my head down in disgust and apologize to anyone who reads the blog / thinks this blog actually has substance / actually enjoys reading / supports the blog.

So it goes both ways. Personally, i have to accept that i am not someone who can always sell high and then reinvest and quickly generate returns again in short timeframe. My process will have flaws but i believe that if i learn from my mistakes and make future analysis more robust and think through the pros / cons / chances of being right / wrong , i would be able to recapture and surpass the imaginary '1m barrier' again.

I felt that i have been too eager internally to want to impress myself that i am more than a 1 stock wonder and i want to kinda do well even more after already doing well so i can take a good long break for good. That eagerness prompted me to think that it might be ok to do many 50/50 40/60 30/70 decisions as long as i do many of them, it should average well. Ended up it did not do as well.

This year's draw down is larger as i usually try to maintain 10% of my assets as ready money for my living / k-pop / travel expenses

If i were to be honest, i feel like i have done way lesser research compared to previous years. The only time where i felt i have done a lot more research was end march up till may whereby the tariffs on many countries created uncertainty.

The research portion was assessing if other countries would be competitive as substitutes and i had an equity research job friend to helped me as well as we had a good chitchat. We were kinda certain that deals was able to be made as some countries just cannot afford to lose and have to protect their export industry at a huge cost. Similarly, it is just tough to move large amount of productions in short time just to mitigate this tariff. Neither it is possible to relocate all back to the home country (US). A bit of A-level and Uni Economics came into better understand certain concepts.

So yeah the rest is history. Still i am glad that i have divested most of my Dream International Shares.

At highest point this year, i held 346 000 shares. 

If i really think about it, the 7 to 10 HKD loss from Aug to Oct.......yea that definitely set me back away from the target as it is easily 130k SGD minimally. On the bright side of thinking, current price is actually below all my sell.

Side tracking

I remember i posted in late October on 5 companies in this post

Well, unfortunately, i did not follow through hard enough so once again, i did not benefit as much from the above.

Considering the HSI returned 0.28% in the same time frame. I would say this average return of 12.30% is decent. I might take a look at the watchlist and see if i can do something similar for the upcoming round of results.

With that , i have come to the end of this year review. 

As usual, K-POP Photo Spam Time (End Of Year so heavy spam)

If you have scrolled over to here, i will share my current portfolio thoughts below (will not sound polished at all)

Infinity Dev - Will just await the AGM and meanwhile observe customer / export data / shoe demand general info as mentioned in previous post that it is World Cup Year in 2026.

Nam Lee - Will await the EGM Questions and Answers as well as the AGM.

Hor Kew - Await Results, value stock but will see if earnings can beat FY 2024 and what is the prospect/commentary given. Then if both earnings / commentary tick the box, will ask about the msia land sale update progress (if any) and latest valuation (if any)

Mainland Holdings - Current Inclination is to add but need to think if anything is worth selling or is it advance usage of dividends / reducing current cash pile. Will still have to see the cap export to US as well before making a decision. In my mind it has always been a 2026 year stock.

XMH - Probably 1 of the stocks that i won't mind letting it go if it goes up to 1.6 or 1.7 levels to switch to Hor Kew for the 2026 Feb/March Results Frontload.

Chuan Holdings - If earthwork margins sustain or improve, its cheap. If it chooses to suddenly pays a dividend, there is upside. Apart from that, i think that the company's fundamentals has improved and also has a dorm that has more space than its own total amount of workers. In terms of vertical integration, it has done well. But it does not pay a dividend currently and had tough previous years which led to rights. In recent months, it also won a 31 million dollar contract despite not being the lowest bidder.

Dream Intl - I think margins is still my concern and in their factories in Vietnam, they raised salary 3 times in 2025. While this is a good sign of business being well, it might also eat into profitability.