melph - Part of Longbridge's Investor Led Community

it is encouraging to see the Straits Times Index trading near all-time highs, reflecting confidence in Singapore's largest companies. While valuations are higher than before, I remain optimistic about the index's long-term combination of stability, dividends, and steady growth.

As a Microsoft shareholder, I remain confident in the company's long-term outlook despite the shares recently falling around 3%. Microsoft has also raised Xbox prices, reflecting rising costs but also pricing power. Backed by strong cloud, AI, and enterprise businesses, I believe the company is well positioned for sustained growth over time.

As an OCBC shareholder, I appreciate the bank's strong balance sheet, steady dividend payments, and diversified business model. Its exposure to banking, wealth management, and insurance provides resilience across market cycles. While lower interest rates could affect earnings growth, I believe OCBC remains a solid long-term holding that can continue generating value and income for shareholders.

Own some Seatrium. It has benefited from stronger demand for offshore, marine, and energy-related projects. Beyond traditional oil and gas work, the company is positioning itself as a next-generation energy hub, supporting offshore wind, carbon capture, hydrogen, and cleaner energy infrastructure. While these opportunities could drive long-term growth, success will depend on project execution, profitability, and continued investment in the global energy transition.

Eli Lilly continues to benefit from strong demand for its diabetes and weight-loss treatments, which have become major growth drivers. The company also has a promising pipeline that could support future earnings growth. However, the stock trades at a premium valuation, meaning investors are expecting continued success in both its current products and future drug development efforts.

NVIDIA actually generates enormous cash from its AI business, giving it flexibility to invest and grow. Strong fundamentals support the company, though expectations remain high.

Palo Alto Networks remains one of the leading cybersecurity companies as organizations continue to face growing digital threats. Its broad platform strategy helps customers simplify security management and reduce complexity. The company has delivered strong growth over the years, but we need to remember that the stock already reflects high expectations. Future returns will depend on continued growth, innovation, and successful execution in a highly competitive market.

Google continues benefiting from its dominant search, cloud, and AI businesses. However, regulatory scrutiny and the challenge of monetizing AI investments remain key risks.

AMD is steadily expanding its presence in AI and data centers, leveraging strong product execution to challenge larger rivals. However, intense competition and high expectations leave little room for disappointment. Good to be cautious.

Semiconductor stocks continue benefiting from strong AI demand, but valuations remain a key debate. Can earnings growth keep pace with expectations, or is the sector due for a pause?

The S&P 500 remains near record highs, supported by AI optimism and resilient earnings. Not sure if investors are correctly pricing future growth, or are expectations becoming a little too ambitious

Meta is pushing aggressively into AI infrastructure, smart glasses, and advertising automation, betting that massive AI investment today will strengthen its ecosystem, user engagement, and long-term revenue growth.

AI memory demand likely is a real multi-year super cycle driven by AI growth, but markets have already priced in much of the optimism, leaving mixed upside.

A) Still bullish for now. NVIDIA’s moat comes from far more than powerful chips. Its biggest advantage is the CUDA software ecosystem, which developers and AI companies have spent years building around. Switching away from NVIDIA often requires major redevelopment costs and performance trade-offs. The company also benefits from scale, strong relationships with cloud providers, rapid innovation cycles and leadership in AI networking through Mellanox. Its GPUs dominate AI training and increasingly inference workloads, creating a self-reinforcing ecosystem where more developers, customers and software tools attract even more users. Competitors may catch up in hardware, but matching NVIDIA’s integrated ecosystem and developer loyalty remains extremely difficult. Hence still bullish for now until competitors catch up.

Singapore stocks could remain firm this week, led by banks, industrials and transport stocks, as investors focus on earnings resilience, stable dividends and improving regional sentiment.