My Dividend Portfolio

I started building this portfolio 18 months ago.  Its been a wild time!  From an "high-and-dry" market in late 2019, where I'd be desperately scrounging around for something to buy like an animal in the desert, to the liquidity crunch in March, where you would buy something a deep value, get punched in the face by Mr Market dropping it 10% in a few days, then repeat again...to the breathtaking recovery which no one believed.  

I was lucky that covid occured when it did.  If you can't build a portfolio when a once-in-50-year pandemic occurs and the end of the economic cycle, you never will.  My timing wasn't great.  I only bought 10% of my portfolio in March.   You can make a lot of mistakes in this business, but as long as you manage risk and don't buy shit that goes to zero, you'll make more than you lose.

My dividend portfolio is now worth SGD 670K, after the last few weeks market hiccups, and can probably pay me SGD 2.7K per month.  Here it is:

What next?

• Keep grinding away at my day job, plow all my salary back into the market.  Its still fairly valued, I can find things with a 5% yield.  No need to time the market too much.
• The portfolio is weighted heavily towards Singapore REITS.  Try to diversify away from this.
• Reits and Utilities weight it heavily towards companies that benefit from low rates.  At some point of the economic cycle, we start expecting higher rates.  Look to buy dirt-cheap banks to balance this out.  "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."
• Keep learning to trade.  I have a small trading portfolio (~SGD 120K), where I learn to trade by following Hedgeye.  Commodities look like a good bet now.  There may come a time when I can't add to my dividend portfolio (like late 2019), and I may need to learn to trade at different points in the economic cycle.