DBS Chief Investment Office

Every investor has a different risk appetite. Your portfolio should be designed according to your individual needs including goals, preferences, time horizon, and risk tolerance.

The Core-Satellite Approach, advocated by DBS CIO Hou Wey Fook, aims to help you balance risk and reward.

To provide stability, the main ingredients of your Core Portfolio should be:

• Multi-asset to decrease overall volatility: bonds that are your carbohydrates for stable cash flow, equities that are your proteins for richer returns, and other assets that are like vegetables in your main course to diversify the risk
• Global for access to best-in-class assets and foreign investments
• Long-term because timing the market is difficult

These have the additional benefit of helping you to avoid emotional binging that can sway your investing decisions. By keeping you invested for the long-run, the Core Portfolio makes it less likely that you sell the “winners” prematurely when hungry for profit. Regular rebalancing also makes it less likely that you cling to “losers” in the hope of recovering losses. And so, you can ride out the markets’ ups and downs.

Every investor has a different risk appetite. Your portfolio should be designed according to your individual needs including goals, preferences, time horizon, and risk tolerance.

The Core-Satellite Approach, advocated by DBS CIO Hou Wey Fook, aims to help you balance risk and reward.

Your Satellites complement your steady Core. They are:

• Opportunistic which means you can add them to enhance returns by taking advantage of trending themes and sectors
• Typically, short-term or sometimes medium-term investments
• Inclusive of technical factors and valuations

With the Core-Satellite Approach, you enjoy the rewards of both stability and seasonality.

A barbell portfolio strategy helps you build a resilient investment portfolio in challenging times. This strategy helps you capture superior returns from long-term, irreversible growth trends on one hand, while generating stable income on the other hand to mitigate short-term market volatility.

The barbell approach is a flexible one. Investors can tailor the strategy to suit their respective investment goals, risk appetite and time horizon.

As the world transforms into a digital economy, the DBS Chief Investment Office advocates investors to ride on the long-term, secular Growth trends underpinning these irreversible changes.

Our Barbell Strategy enables investors to capture this in its Growth part.

But how does one know which companies and sectors will emerge as winners in this new digital world?

Think I.D.E.A.

We have coined this acronym to encapsulate the champions of this brave, new world:

• I – Innovators: Constantly doing things differently to challenge the status quo
• D – Disruptors: Create new products and services which displace mainstream leaders
• E – Enablers: Empower innovation and disruption to be successful
• A – Adapters: Traditional companies that successfully adapt and transform their business models

Digital innovation has truly engendered a huge and very promising opportunity set for investors. Build I.D.E.A. into your portfolios.