If you had told a Singapore investor a year ago that DBS would touch $66 or that AEM would blast past $10, they would have told you to stop daydreaming.
The Singapore Exchange is historically stereotyped as a slow and steady dividend graveyard, where many stocks, including well-known blue chips, trade sideways for years. Even the better performers tend to slowly creep up by just a few percentage points a year, delivering double-digit percentage returns for investors only after dividends are included.
Yet here we are in mid-2026, and the numbers speak for themselves. The disbelief is entirely valid, this kind of explosive growth is rare in the local market, but a look under the hood reveals that these massive valuation shifts are not just empty hype.
| Stock | Ticker (SGX) | Price today ($) | Price 1yr ago ($) | % Change |
| DBS | D05 | 66.8 | 44 | 52 |
| SGX | S68 | 23.9 | 13 | 72 |
| ST Engg | S63 | 10.8 | 8 | 36 |
| Sheng Siong | OV8 | 3.2 | 1.9 | 69 |
| AEM | AWX | 10.6 | 1.2 | 772 |
1) DBS (SGX: D05)
Even at $65, DBS remains the ultimate stock for local investors. Its record-breaking net profits and strong capital management (including special dividends), fundamentally back its valuation.
Its capital strength, measured by its Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) ratio, the key measure of a bank’s financial health sits comfortably around 15%, which is well above regulatory requirements.
Because DBS has excess capital, they have been highly aggressive with rewarding shareholders, dishing out a steady stream of quarterly dividends and occasional special payouts. Even with the price soaring, the forward dividend yield still hovers around a very respectable 5% range.
DBS is also supported by its strong wealth management business, continued capital inflows, and a structurally higher-for-longer interest rate environment that has helped keep margins healthy.
2) Singapore Exchange (SGX: S68)
The market finally stopped treating SGX like a stagnant local stock exchange and started pricing it like a global derivatives powerhouse. When high-net-worth money flooded into Singapore over the last two years, institutional liquidity followed. SGX’s multi-asset derivatives (FX and iron ore futures) saw massive, record-breaking volumes as global traders used Singapore to hedge macroeconomic risks in Asia.
SGX has shed its reputation as a sleepy dividend stock because the global narrative on Singapore has shifted. A massive structural revival in market liquidity, major new derivatives products, and global capital shifting toward defensive, high-yield hubs.
It is no longer just about retail trading volumes. SGX has successfully diversified into a multi-asset hub (FX, commodities, and derivatives). With global volatility high, traders flock to SGX’s hedging tools.
SGX has a near-monopoly on local listings and derivatives and the business is doing incredibly well, but a trailing P/E pushing close to 40x means a lot of future growth is already priced in.
Investors are now paying for a best-in-class financial infrastructure play, not a high-yield utility.
3) ST Engineering (SGX :S63)
ST Engineering is a massive commercial aerospace recovery post-pandemic play, paired with an unprecedented global defence order book backlog amidst global conflicts.
The post-pandemic travel boom has left airlines desperate for MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) services and global geopolitical instability has caused defence budgets to balloon worldwide. ST Engineering’s record $33.2 billion order book provides visibility into revenue for the next 3–5 years.
ST Engg is considered a highly defensive stock because even in a recession, planes still need maintenance and governments continue to invest in defence.
The order book is at historic highs, though the sheer pace of the stock move has pushed their P/E ratio into expensive territory, shareholders are betting that management can execute on that massive backlog without inflationary cost overruns, while continuing to secure large contract wins.
4) Sheng Siong (SGX: OV8)
Sheng Siong’s share price didn’t spike because of hype, it rose because of steady execution.
In a world of high inflation and economic uncertainty, it became the safe trade with supply chain resilience, a successful footprint expansion into new HDB estates and consumer spending shifting defensively due to inflation.
As households grappled with stubborn inflation amidst rising living costs, consumers naturally downshifted their spending away from mid-to-high tier dining and toward home-cooked meals and essential groceries. Sheng Siong capitalised on this perfectly with its affordable house brands and aggressive pricing on fresh products.
Furthermore, they aggressively won commercial tenders for new HDB estate shop spaces, opening 12 new stores that started feeding directly into their bottom line.
Sheng Siong remains a cash-flow machine, though trading over $3 changes them from a cheap defensive bet to a premium-priced staple.
5) AEM Holdings (SGX: AWX)
AEM used to be a company that was overly reliant on Intel, a tech company that was in a structural decline. Intel has since begun its turnaround.
AEM has also successfully de-risked by moving away from being overly reliant on Intel. They are now a key partner for major AI/HPC (High-Performance Computing) players such as ASE. When AEM released its 1Q26 results, showing a 329% jump in net profit, the market realised that the AI turnaround was not just a story, it was real revenue.
AEM provides pure-play exposure to the AI hardware boom. If the global chip cycle continues to expand, AEM has significant room to run.
The growth is likely to have only just began, but semiconductor test handlers remain highly cyclical.
Closing statements
The collective gasp from the local investing community comes from valuation multiple expansion.
For a decade, blue chips were valued strictly on historical dividend yields. If a stock grew its price too fast, the yield compressed, and local investors sold.
What changed over the last year is that global money started looking at Singapore not just as a defensive bunker, but as a genuine growth and transition hub.
When stock prices double while earnings stay flat, it’s a bubble. But for companies like AEM (where profit quadrupled) and DBS (which has consistently posted record-breaking billions in net profit), the price hikes followed the cash.
The biggest risk now is perfection pricing. At these altitudes, any earnings miss will be punished severely. If you’re holding these from a year ago, you’re sitting on generational local gains. If you’re looking to enter now, you are buying at premium valuations that require these companies to execute flawlessly for the next 2 to 3 years.
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