You Probably Use Two or Three of the Seven Investing Styles Already. Here Is How to Tell

Value, growth, dividend, quality, index, momentum and contrarian, in plain words, with where each one meets your CPF, SRS and cash.

Two retirees in the same neighbourhood can both be investing sensibly and still disagree about what investing is. One buys a fund that tracks the market and seldom opens the statement, and the other reads every dividend announcement and notes each payment date. They are using two different styles, and most of us use two or three without ever having named them.

If you have invested for years, I think this will put names to things you already do. If you are only starting, it shows the choices in front of you before you commit any money. My husband described his approach to me recently as “buy the big ones and leave them alone”, and he was surprised that it has a name. I was a little surprised how many of the seven I use myself.

What This Piece Does

1. It describes seven investing styles in plain words, with the question each one asks and what the habit looks like in practice.
2. It explains why most investors use a mix of two or three styles, and gives six questions for finding yours.
3. It sets out where CPF, SRS and cash each suit or limit a style, and what a style cannot tell you.

This piece takes no view on share price direction. Nothing here is a recommendation.

This piece is free for everyone, and it stays with the styles themselves. Checking whether one particular holding fits a style, with the numbers behind it, is the work Iggy does in his full analysis on the channel and on Substack.

• The Seven Styles at a Glance
• The Four Styles Most Readers Will Recognise
• Dividend investing: where does the payout come from?
• Index investing: what are you choosing not to decide?
• Quality investing: how do you tell a strong business from a familiar one?
• Value investing: is the price low, or low for a reason?
• Angela’s Observation
• The Other Three: Growth, Momentum and Contrarian
• Growth investing: what are you waiting for?
• Momentum investing: what happens when it stops?
• Contrarian investing: how do you know the crowd is wrong?
• “But I Only Do One of These”
• Where CPF, SRS and Cash Meet These Styles
• CPF Ordinary Account money
• SRS money
• Cash
• Angela’s Observation
• What a Style Does Not Tell You

The Seven Styles at a Glance

These are my plain-word summaries, not official definitions, and people draw the lines between them in different places. I give the first four the most space below, because I would expect a reader holding money for the payout or for retirement to meet those first. The last three get less.

None of the seven tells you which company to buy. A style describes how you choose, and that distinction comes back at the end.

The Four Styles Most Readers Will Recognise

Start with the four that describe a way of holding money for years. Each one asks a different question first, and each one has a point where it gets difficult.

Dividend investing: where does the payout come from?

A dividend investor looks at the cash first. The question is how much a holding will pay each year, and the usual measure is the yield, which is the payout divided by the price. In Singapore this often means S-REITs and large companies that pay out regularly, and the money arrives as cash, which suits someone who wants income to spend.

A yield can rise for two different reasons, and the figure on the screen does not say which. Here is an illustration of mine, built for this piece and not a reported result. A holding worth SGD 100,000 pays SGD 5,000 a year, which is a yield of 5%. If the price falls to SGD 90,000 and the payout stays the same, the yield reads about 5.6%, which looks better. Across the year the holder received SGD 5,000 and the holding lost SGD 10,000 in value, so the holder is SGD 5,000 behind even though the yield went up.

For that reason I would pair the yield with two plainer questions. Has this payout been steady for several years, or has it moved? And when it changed, what did the company say was the reason? If you hold for the payout, do you know what you would do the first time one of your holdings cut it?

Index investing: what are you choosing not to decide?

An index investor does not pick companies. The investor buys a fund that holds a whole index, such as an index of large Singapore-listed companies, and decides only how much to put in and how often. Many people do this through a regular monthly plan, which also removes the decision of when to buy.

What you give up is the choice of holdings. The fund holds every company in the index whether or not you would have chosen it, and it falls when the index falls. Some of you will say that if you buy the index you have no style at all. I would say that choosing not to choose is itself a style, and it comes with its own question: how will you behave when the whole index is down? A fund that needs no stock-picking still needs a holder who keeps putting money in, or at least keeps holding, through a fall.

Some funds and exchange-traded funds can be bought with SRS money and, within limits, with CPF Ordinary Account money. I come back to that below. If the index fell for several months in a row, what would you do with the monthly plan?

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Quality investing: how do you tell a strong business from a familiar one?

A quality investor looks for businesses with steady profits, manageable debt and a long record, and then holds them for years. It is the style my husband described. Two difficulties come with it. The first is that quality has no single definition, so two investors can read the same company differently, and a name everyone knows is not the same as a strong business. The second is the price. A strong business can be bought at a price that leaves little room for anything to go wrong.

Quality and dividend often point at the same large companies, which matters when we get to mixing styles. For now, one plain question. Apart from the fact that you have heard of it, what would you look at to decide that a company is strong?

Value investing: is the price low, or low for a reason?

A value investor compares the price with what the business owns or earns, and buys when the price looks low against that. The difficulty is in the phrase “looks low”. A price can be low because the market has overreacted, and it can be low because the business has a real problem. From the outside, the two can look the same for a long time.

Here is a second illustration of mine, again not a reported result. A share that falls from SGD 1.00 to SGD 0.80 has lost 20%, and it needs to rise 25% to get back to SGD 1.00, because 20 cents is a quarter of 80 cents. A lower price is a better price only if the business is still worth what you thought it was worth. When one of your holdings falls, what do you check first, the price or the business?

🟠 Angela’s Observation

Writing these four down, I noticed that each one asks a different question first: how much does it pay, which companies am I choosing, is the business strong, is the price low. What I had not noticed before is that I can ask all four about the same company and get four different feelings. A company can pay well, be strong, and still be priced too high, all at once. I do not know whether that means the styles are four ways of looking at one thing, or four different ways of deciding that sometimes agree. When you last bought something, which of the four questions did you ask first?

The Other Three: Growth, Momentum and Contrarian

These three get less space, because each rests on a judgement about the future or about other investors, and that is harder to describe with facts. You may still recognise a habit of your own in each one.

Growth investing: what are you waiting for?

A growth investor buys a company for how large it may become, and accepts that it may pay little or no dividend while it grows. If the money comes back at all, it comes back as a higher price later. That matters in Singapore if you need cash income, because a holding that pays nothing cannot cover a monthly expense unless you sell some of it. How long are you willing to wait, and what would tell you the wait is not working?

Momentum investing: what happens when it stops?

A momentum investor buys what is rising and sells what is falling, on the view that a price moving in one direction tends to keep going. The habit often looks like buying a share because everyone is talking about it this week. The style depends on timing, so it asks for regular attention and a rule for when to leave. If you bought because the price was rising, what is your rule for selling when it stops?

Contrarian investing: how do you know the crowd is wrong?

A contrarian buys what most people are selling, on the view that a crowded exit can push a price below what the business is worth. It shares a difficulty with value investing, which is that the crowd is sometimes right. What would you need to see to believe the crowd is wrong this time, and what would persuade you that it is not?

Seven names are the easy part. The harder part is that almost nobody uses only one.

“But I Only Do One of These”

I expect some of you to say that you are simply a dividend investor, or that you simply buy the index, and that the other styles do not apply to you. That may be true. It is worth checking against what you actually bought, as opposed to what you call yourself.

Look at your last three purchases and ask six questions about each one.

1. Did I buy it for the payout? That is dividend investing.
2. Did I buy it as part of a fund, so that I would not have to choose companies? That is index investing.
3. Did I buy it because I trust the business to last? That is quality investing.
4. Did I buy it because the price had fallen? That is value investing if I judged the business worth more than the price, and contrarian if I judged the crowd was wrong.
5. Did I buy it for what it could become? That is growth investing.
6. Did I buy it because the price was rising, or because everyone was talking about it? That is momentum investing.

If your answers land on two or three of the six, you are using a mix, which is what I found when I did this for myself.

In the hospital, part of my work was checking whether two medicines on the same prescription were doing the same job, because doubling up raises the dose without adding anything. I think styles can double up in the same way. Dividend and quality often point at the same large companies, so holding both can feel like variety when the same businesses are behind each one. That is my observation, not a measured result. If two of your answers point at the same holdings, would you count them as one style or two?

Where CPF, SRS and Cash Meet These Styles

Cash in an ordinary brokerage account can be used for all seven styles with no extra account rules. CPF and SRS add rules, and they change how a style fits. What follows is as of 14 October 2026, so check the pages linked at the end before you act on any of it.

CPF Ordinary Account money

Under the CPF Investment Scheme, the CPF Board says you can invest Ordinary Account savings after setting aside SGD 20,000 in the account, and the approved products include funds and exchange-traded funds. Money you invest leaves the account, so it stops earning the CPF interest rate. That gives every style the same extra question. Would I expect this to do better than the rate I am leaving behind?

SRS money

The Ministry of Finance describes SRS as a voluntary scheme, says contributions can be used to buy various investment instruments, and says only 50% of withdrawals at retirement are taxable. How investment income inside SRS is taxed can depend on the type of income, so check IRAS before assuming anything. Two things follow for style. First, a style that asks you to trade often fits awkwardly with money that is meant for retirement withdrawals, and a style that asks you to hold for years fits it better. That is my reading, not a rule. Second, SRS operators say dividends and distributions are credited back into the SRS account, so a payout from a dividend holding stays there until you withdraw and does not become income to spend in the meantime.

Cash

Cash you hold outside CPF and SRS is the only money where all seven styles are open and no account rule applies. It is also the money you may need soonest. Which style you use there depends on how soon you might need it, and I would put that question before any of the seven.

🟠 Angela’s Observation

Before I wrote this, I would have said I do one thing. With the names in front of me, my own habits do not fit one. I am not sure whether naming them would have changed what I bought, or whether it only changes how I explain it afterwards. What I notice is that the account decided more than I expected. Money I cannot touch behaves differently from money I might need next month, whatever style I tell myself I am using. If you named your own styles today, would any of your past purchases look different to you?

What a Style Does Not Tell You

A style tells you how you choose. It does not tell you whether a particular choice is sound. Two dividend investors can hold very different companies. One may hold a payout that comes from earnings that repeat, and the other a payout that has already started to shrink, and both would describe themselves in the same words.

So naming your style is the first step, and the second is testing a specific holding against what it is meant to do for you. A quality holding should show its strength somewhere you can point to. A dividend holding should show where the payout comes from. A value holding should show why the price is low. Which of your holdings would you test first, and what would you look at?

Where the figures come from. This piece has almost no reported figures. The SGD examples are mine, built for illustration, and are not reported data. The seven descriptions are my plain-word summaries. The CPF Investment Scheme details come from the CPF Board page on investing your CPF savings and its page on how much CPF savings you can invest, and the SRS description comes from the Ministry of Finance page on the Supplementary Retirement Scheme. Scheme rules and limits change, so check each page on the day you read this.

If you want to see how that testing is done on a specific holding, Iggy does it on the channel.

YOUR FORENSIC VERDICT, ONE PAGE.

The full audit is above. This is the Iggy Forensic Audit distilled to one A4 page — every number that matters, every flag that triggered, one clear verdict. Save it, print it, pull it out when this stock crosses your radar again, or when you need to refer to these data points for your retirement planning.

Iggy’s Forensic Disclaimer

Angela’s content summarises publicly available market news, analyst research, and earnings data for informational purposes. Iggy provides The Investing Iguana’s forensic ratings and analytical verdicts. Angela’s role is to recap noteworthy developments across the SGX market without applying analytical filters or investment recommendations. Always read primary sources and consult a MAS-licensed financial adviser before making investment decisions.

This content is produced for educational and informational purposes only. I am not a financial advisor; I am a retail investor who applies forensic analysis to my own portfolio and shares that process publicly. Nothing here constitutes a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, and no specific target prices or personalised financial advice are offered. All data is sourced from public filings and verified sources; where data is unverified it is explicitly flagged. All investments carry risk, including the potential loss of principal, and past performance is not indicative of future results. If you are making investment decisions involving CPF, SRS, or personal capital, please conduct your own due diligence or consult a MAS-licensed financial adviser before committing funds.