Iggy's Journal: A Week of Small Numbers Adding Up to One Story

27 September 2026, Morning

Looking back at the week, I don't think any single piece was the story. The story was underneath all of them, and I only really saw it in hindsight, once I lined the numbers up next to each other.

The Numbers

It started quietly with a fee comparison, ETFs costing 0.03 percent against unit trusts front-loading 5 percent in upfront charges. That felt like a standalone piece at the time. Then the T-bill auctions started climbing, 1.60 percent, then 1.70 percent, then 1.92 percent, three prints in two weeks, each one a little sharper than the last. By midweek the 10-year US Treasury was retesting a 2007 high, and the Fed, ECB, and BOJ were all hiking while the UK, India, and China held. Singapore's own core inflation ticked up for a third straight month to 2.2 percent, its highest reading in two years. None of these happened in isolation, they were the same pressure showing up in five different places.

What struck me by the end of the week was how differently individual names handled that same pressure. City Developments couldn't absorb it at all, 0.99 times interest coverage means its operating profit doesn't even cover the interest bill, landing it in Zone 5. Singtel's headline yield looked fine at 4.3 percent until you stripped out a one-off dividend and found 3.08 percent underneath, a real number wearing a flattering one. The REIT sector's 0.77 times book value discount turned out to be a structural problem, not a temporary one, external managers earning fees on size have no reason to fix a discount that a merger would erase. Meanwhile DBS's lot-size cut and the retirement math piece, S$711,000 versus the naive S$1.8 million figure, were reminders that not everything this week was about stress, some of it was about access and about correcting a distorted comparison.

(2000 character limit so I will post the rest in the comments lol)