Small Account Investing Update Oct 2025
So we are in the 2nd month of our small account and things are looking pretty good!
If you haven’t watched the first episode of our small investment account, I’ll leave the link in the description down below so you can catch up on.
But as a recap, the purpose of me running this small series is like a diary, tracking my investments and maybe one day, we can look back at this and decide if we made a right decision or maybe we didn’t.
Last month, we purchased A17U, which is Capitaland Ascendas REITs that look at a few different types of real estate around the world.
Small Account Investing
We bought it at an average cost of $2.76 and we spent a little more than our $200 budget per month, but we got a small win because right now, the stock is valued at $2.80 which means we got a profit of a little more than $5.
But this month or maybe the month of October has been rather busy. I haven’t had much time to really sit down to plan my thoughts, but but but.. I managed to squeeze out some to really pen down this episode.
And I’m thinking of making this really short and sweet, so for those watching you get the jist immediately and I'll also include my rationales of why I buy what I’m buying.
Then again, these stocks or investments I’m purchasing revolve around my life and my expertise, so do read up a little before purchasing.
Our Purchases in October 2025
For the month of October, I wanted to make things really simple because it has been rather busy and I believe most of you watching will probably have the same lifestyle.
So for October, I made the purchase of an ES3 or STI ETF. For the people new to investing, in the market, there are a few things you can purchase. You can purchase direct shares, index, ETFs, which are exchange traded funds, and options as well.
Like I mentioned, I bought the STI ETF or the Straits Times Index ETF. An ETF or exchange traded fund is a basket of assets put into and sold to investors like me and you. Think of it as a basket of stocks, commodities, options etc, put into one.
Another way to think of ETFs is like entering a restaurant, which is the stock market. Then the items on the menu are stocks, bonds, options etc. As a customer, you might be overwhelmed and might not be sure what to get.
But there’s a section where it shows a sampler plate. So now, instead of buying a burger, you can get a few sliders at a similar or lower price, so you get to taste a few things. Which for the regular folk, might be interesting because you might not want to commit to a single meal, not knowing if you will like it or not.
So with STI ETF, this ETF is built to track the performance of the Straits Times Index ot the Top 30 performing companies in Singapore. And if we go to Yahoo Finance, we can see the Top 10 Components of ES3 which are DBS, OCBC, UOB, Singtel, Jardine, SGX, Capitaland Integrated Commercial Trust, ST Engineering, Keppel and Capitaland Ascendas REITS.
And now, you might have a thought in mind. If the ETF consist of all these shares, won’t it be expensive? Though it consists of all these stocks, the beauty of the ETF is that you geta small exposure to all these.
So in ES3, for every 1 ES3 you hold you get 25% exposure to DBS, 13% exposure to OCBC 10% in UOB so now and so forth. This is good for passive investors who don’t have time to manage their portfolio, because the firm behind ES3 which is State Street Global Advisors Singapore Limited, they do the fund rebalancing for you at a small cost 0.3% or what people call the expense ratio.
Something I like about ES3 is the yield, which is currently at 4.13% and paid bi-annually in Feb and August. So if you have enough ES3, you essentially get a small bonus of dividend every Feb and August of every year.
Now the downside of ES3. Though it seems that ES3 might be the easier way to stay invested, there are also downside to it.
Down sides of ETFs..
And one of the biggest downside is capital gains potential. Since the ETF consists of 30 different companies, they are not weighted evenly. Looking at the breakdown by sector, Financial services takes up 53% of the ETF, which means, if there’s a financial crisis, ES3 will be heavily affected.
At the same time, if there’s a boom in sectors like property or technology, there will be very spike in the prices.
All in all, that’s what we bought for the month of October. This time, I stuck to our $200 budget and bought 44 shares which cost us $4.53/share or $199.32 in total.
And as of this video, our small account portfolio stands at $644.50, with $475 in securities and $155 in funds which I can cover in the next video!
As promised, short video, quick update. I would really appreciate it if you can hit the subscribe button and share this video. And as always. Stay safe, invest safe and I see you in the next video.
