Don't mess with the Gods of Wealth

I just want to share the spate of bad luck that has I have experienced over the past 3 days.

If you'll indulge me in a spate of superstition, the thing started with me plundering the spare cash I've been keeping behind my altar of deities because I needed some spare change. While I am an atheist but I collect Gods of Wealth from countries I visit, I populate my altar with the deities along with characters from Pop Culture like Tywin Lannister, Batman, Ironman and Ozymandias.

These are, after all,  various gods and icons of wealth, after I took $100 from their stash, shit started to happen :

a) APTV

I keep APTV not because it's part of any quantitative model I have.

APTV is a legacy holding from my yield pig days before I started upping my investment game after gaining access to unlimited Bloomberg terminal use in SMU. APTV's fundamentals have been deteriorating for a while and my main motivation is to extract it's ridiculously high dividends and to provide a nice kicker to my leverage account.

APTV burned a lot of investors because we had this fantasy that dividends may just be by 50%. We did not expect such a drastic reduction a few days ago. Details on what happened to APTV can be found in other blogs and I lost $20,000 in one day.

This loss is manageable because I can channel it to other REITs which have been battered by the markets.

While $20,000 is painful, it can be earned back quite easily.

I was actually more worried about another counter which I owned.

b) UMS

UMS made me a lot of money over the years because it just kept splitting and spinning off dividends. The music had to stop one day because it is a cyclical business.

I have a cluster of manufacturing counters which have been 2-3 baggers in the past and given the fact that Trump will carry on this trade war with China, I could not hold onto these counters at a meaningful allocation anymore. Thus, I unloaded 90% of my UMS and Valuetronics. This is a painful decision as I think the long term view on these counters may not be as safe as higher yielding REITs in the market.

Rearranging my investments this way was painful. As I removed all the stocks that would give me bad sleep at night and replaced them with the more steady dividends counters, I also lost the potential for a rebound next January.

But I doubt holding onto UMS and Valuetronics may be the right move in the medium no matter how much I liked them. And as it turns out, Advanced Materials just had an earnings miss yesterday.

c) Spent 4 hours in NUS A&E last night

It got worse from there.

Yesterday, my daughter fell on the floor and hit her head. Five hours later she vomited. At midnight, she complained of a headache. We ended up going to NUH A&E last night to ensure that there was no serious concussion.

I was glad that was a false alarm but it clearly ruined my day today so I am not going to do any work today.

Also, I have since returned the $100 I took from the altar.

You can accuse me of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy but I will not taking a lot of risks moving forward, but taking money belonging to Tywin Lanister, Batman, Ozymanidias, Daikokuten, Lakshmi, Frey and other assorted gods is a bad idea.