Hey everyone,

So, the S&P 500 just notched its ninth straight week of gains, its longest weekly winning streak since December 2023. Surely, it’s due a sell-off/correction of sorts soon, right?

Actually, an FT columnist recently ran an opinion piece titled "Party time for stock markets cannot last for ever."

Read the headline on its own and you'd want to sell everything, particularly with markets sitting at all-time highs. But the financial media is permanently obsessed with calling the next correction, and history tells us that bull markets tend to run for far longer than anyone expects them to.

For me, Peter Lynch said it best: “Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections than has been lost in corrections themselves.”

Nobody knows when the next one is coming, so I don't position around it. I just keep buying every month, like clockwork. A few things this week:

The one fee check most people never run and what it could quietly be costing you. There’s also my latest video on why "is the market too high?" is completely the wrong question to be asking youself.

And finally, the ETFs vs. dividends debate I had on air, plus where I land on it.

Let's get into it.

Here's the action this week. Go and find out the actual fee you're paying on every investment product you hold and not the headline rate. The all-in number so any management fees/platforms fees + total expense ratio (TER) of underlying funds.

Most people have never checked. And it's the most expensive blind spot in personal finance because fees compound the exact same way that wealth does, just in the wrong direction.

The maths is brutal. Take a 2% p.a. all-in fee versus a 0.2% p.a. UCITS ETF. Over 35 years, that can cut your final capital pot by 30% to 40%. On a $500,000 outcome, that's $150,000 to $200,000. Gone, not to a crash but fees.

The reason it slips past everyone is that it never shows up as a loss. There's no red number on your statement or withdrawal from your bank account. It's skimmed quietly off the top every single year, so you never feel it leaving.

So pull up what you own. The ILP. The endowment plan. The managed or robo portfolio. The unit trusts the bank relationship manager sold you. Find the percentage figure, and compare it to what a low-cost ETF would have cost and whether it even beats that low-cost ETF on a 3-, 5- or 10-year basis (after fees).

Fix the fees first, before you touch contributions, allocation, or anything else. It's the highest return-on-investment (ROI) change most people can make, and it takes one afternoon.

Every morning, financial news follows the same script. Headlines panic, coverage catastrophises, and somewhere inside the noise is the story that actually matters — the one that tells you where the opportunity sits, not just where the fear is pointing.

Most sources have stopped looking. The alarm is easier to sell.

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You've been watching the market hit record highs for weeks. Every time you open your brokerage app, you get that uneasy feeling. Not quite fear an not quite greed. More like guilt.

Like you missed the moment and getting in now is too late. Yet, that feeling has cost investors far more money than any crash ever has.

In my latest video, I show why "is the market too high?" is the wrong question entirely. A few things that might surprise you. Since 1950, the US market has hit an all-time high on roughly 7% of all trading days. That's about one in every 14.

Vanguard ran the numbers on a hypothetical investor who put money in at the worst possible moment every single time, right before each major crash, and over nearly 30 years he still ended up comfortably crushing the returns from cash. Your timing doesn't have to be perfect to easily beat sitting on the sidelines.

The real risk for most Singapore investors isn't a crash. It's $100,000 sitting in the bank losing value to inflation while you wait for a dip that comes after many years. Yes, corrections are inevitable but timing them is one of the worst things you can do for your wealth.

I walk through the three questions to ask yourself instead, ones that work whether the market is at a high, in a correction, or somewhere in between.

I did a live radio debate recently on MoneyFM 89.3. ETF investing (me) in one corner, dividend investing (with the great Willie Keng) in the other. And one question came up that I get asked all the time.

Aren't ETFs actually risky, because you own everything, including the bad companies? It sounds logical but it's also backwards in terms of how to think about it.

When you own a broad ETF, you own the whole index; good and bad. And the index rebalances. The best companies rise to the top and you get more exposure to them through higher weightings.

The worst ones? They shrink and eventually drop out but the beauty is you don't have to pick them or stress about who’s going to “win”. The index/ETF does it for you, every three/six months, automatically.

There's a well-known study showing that a tiny fraction of stocks, roughly 4%, account for essentially all of the net wealth the market has created over the past century. If you're picking individual stocks and you're not in that 4%, you're either treading water or getting crushed.

With a broad ETF, you cast the net so wide you're guaranteed to hold them. To be clear, this isn't an either/or situation. I also own individual stocks, mainly dividend names in fact. The thing nobody talks about with stocks, though, is position sizing.

If 70% to 80% of your wealth sits in a broad ETF core, owning a handful of individual stocks on the side is completely fine and complements it well. What doesn't work is saying "I'm invested" while you're 90% in cash because that's not really being invested at all.

So here's where I land. Build the core with a broad, low-cost ETF. Size it like you mean it. Then if you enjoy picking individual companies, do it with a small satellite. Just don't confuse the satellite for the core.

If there's a topic you'd like me to break down in a future edition, hit reply and let me know. The best ideas in this newsletter come from your replies.

Until next week,

— Tim

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