Early Retirement Masterclass Portfolio of ERM
The Early Retirement Masterclass portfolio is a collection of 40 portfolios invested over the past 6 years by nearly 700 alumni across 40 instruction batches. The portfolios are buy-and-hold, with no rebalancing, giving us a rare glimpse of how low-beta, high-dividend Singapore stocks have performed over the years.
This portfolio has a long history of surviving the COVID crisis and the Fed’s interest rate hikes in 2022. The portfolio turned positive in 2024 but continued to underperform as it has a large number of REIT positions.
As interests have risen since 2024 and 2025, the overall performance of the portfolio has improved, but it has still lagged slightly behind the bank-heavy STI. XIRR was only 6.44%, having risen from 3.3% last year, with time-weighted returns of 57.27%. With a capital injection of about $692,000, the portfolio has paid out $174,000 in dividends since its inception. Finally, the portfolio has a low beta of 0.63, so the risk investors take is about 37% before that of the market.
2025 was excellent for local investors. This is primarily because the Fed lowered interest rates, and families with low floating-rate mortgages eventually gained some breathing room to build up their investment portfolios. The ERM portfolio, being 50% allocated into REITs, still underperformed the index very slightly but was still up about 22.8% this year. Star performers like PropNex did well. AEM, on the other hand, dragged the portfolio down.
2026 should be a decent year for the ERM portfolio, with REITs expected to shine. The Equity Development Plan from MAS is also likely to boost investments into mid-cap counters that would benefit REITs, given that about 42% of the SGX Next 50 Index is covered by this asset class.
The course is also pivoting more aggressively into Singapore Depository Receipts (SDRs), as higher-yielding dividend counters from Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong reach SGX.
All-Weather Portfolio or AWP
The All-Weather Portfolio is a different beast from ERM. The underlying principles are the same as we continue to optimise high-risk-adjusted returns. Still, we do this using a Python-based computer program to place our trades, so while ERM is geared towards fundamental analysis, AWP is firmly in the technical analysis camp, as we use trend-following and mean-reversion algorithms to target 8% gains every year, with a standard deviation well below 4%.
The AWP portfolio earned about 24% over 30 months, but this was also done with very low risk, perhaps a quarter of what is experienced by folks who invest in the broad equity indices.
The first broad component of AWP is a trend-follower that produced an XIRR of 15.35%. The performance is primarily driven by broad trends in the cryptocurrency market backed by US equities.
The second component of AWP, which targets oversold US blue chips, did not perform as well, with an XIRR of 4.2%.
The final portfolio snapshot before the 2nd January rebalancing is as follows. Do note that, as all of these decisions are dynamically determined by a computer algorithm, please refrain from replicating this portfolio:
2026 should not be too different from 2025, as the algorithms were tuned to ignore market cycles. As I’m satisfied with its steady performance, I will allocate some of the dividends I collect into this portfolio.
Look forward to 2026
There is a lot of excitement over how the investment training will evolve this year. We started to ditch analyst reports as LLMs have now evolved to be much better at bottom-up analysis of local stocks. We will closely examine Thai and Indonesian dividend counters to diversify our cash flows further.
Even if 2026 is quite middle-of-the-road, the dividend yields should provide a pretty good year ahead.
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