Why I Stopped Trading Stocks and Put Everything Into Syfe Instead
A Singaporean investor’s honest account of ditching stock-picking — and why I haven’t looked back.
I used to think picking stocks was the smart thing to do.
You read the annual reports, follow the news, track the earnings calls. Buy low, sell high. Simple enough in theory. And for a while, it felt good — the thrill of watching a position move, the satisfaction of a green day.
Then reality set in.
About a year or two ago, I made a decision that felt uncomfortable at the time but has since given me more peace of mind than any individual stock ever did: I stopped trading altogether and moved everything into Syfe. Specifically, Syfe REIT+ and Syfe Core.
This is the story of why — and what I’d tell anyone in Singapore who’s still on the fence.
The honest problem with picking stocks
Here’s what nobody tells you when you open a brokerage account: you are competing against people who do this full time.
Fund managers, analysts, quant teams — they have Bloomberg terminals, proprietary data feeds, direct access to company management, and decades of experience. And even they consistently fail to beat the index over the long run.
I was trying to do this in my spare time, after work, with whatever I could piece together from SGX announcements, annual reports, and the odd forum thread.
The deeper I got into it, the more I realised something uncomfortable: I couldn’t tell how much of my returns were skill and how much were just luck. When I made money on a trade, was it because I’d done the analysis correctly? Or because the broader market happened to go up that month? I genuinely couldn’t tell. And that bothered me.
The other problem was diversification — or rather, the lack of it. When you’re buying individual stocks with a normal salary, you can realistically hold maybe 5 to 10 positions. That’s not diversification. That’s concentration. One bad earnings call, one piece of regulatory news, and a meaningful chunk of your portfolio takes a hit.
I didn’t want to be in that position anymore.
Why I chose Syfe over just buying an ETF myself
The obvious alternative to stock-picking is just buying an ETF — something like the S&P 500 via a brokerage. And that’s a perfectly reasonable choice.
But I found a few things about Syfe that made it work better for me personally.
Fractional investing. This was a bigger deal than I expected. With Syfe, I can invest any dollar amount — $50, $200, whatever I have that month — and it gets fully deployed. No leftover cash sitting idle because I couldn’t afford a full unit of something. For someone investing regularly from a monthly salary, this matters a lot.
Automated, hands-off investing. I set a recurring transfer, choose my allocation, and I’m done. I’m not logging into a brokerage every month to manually place orders. The less friction between me and investing consistently, the better.
Syfe Core for broad market exposure, Syfe REIT+ for Singapore REITs. I split my portfolio between the two. Core gives me global diversification — exposure to equities across markets. REIT+ gives me Singapore-specific property income, which felt like a natural fit given that as an HDB owner, I already have a view on local property.
I won’t pretend I’ve run the perfect analysis comparing every possible option. But for my situation — a working Singaporean who wants to invest consistently without spending hours each week on research — this combination made sense.
What I gave up (being honest about the trade-offs)
I’d be doing you a disservice if I made this sound like a pure win.
I gave up the upside of getting lucky. If you pick the right stock at the right time, you can massively outperform an ETF. I gave up that possibility. With a diversified portfolio, I’ll never 5x my money in a year on a single bet. That’s the trade-off I consciously accepted.
I gave up the excitement. Stock-picking, for better or worse, is engaging. Watching positions move, reading reports, having a thesis — it’s interesting in a way that a Syfe dashboard frankly isn’t. If you genuinely enjoy investing as a hobby, passive investing might feel boring. For me, boring is now a feature, not a bug.
I still don’t know if my allocation is “optimal.” Am I splitting the right amount between Core and REIT+? Should I be putting more into CPF instead? These are questions I’m still working through. What I do know is that I’m invested, I’m diversified, and I’m consistent — and that combination beats a perfectly optimised plan that never gets executed.
The question I get from friends
When I tell friends I’ve moved away from stock trading, the most common response is: “But don’t you feel like you’re leaving returns on the table?”
My honest answer: maybe. But I was also leaving returns on the table when I picked the wrong stocks, held too long, sold too early, or simply didn’t have the information I needed to make a good call.
The benchmark isn’t perfect stock-picking. The benchmark is what I was actually doing — which was making decisions under uncertainty, with limited time and information, hoping skill outweighed luck.
Against that benchmark, consistent passive investing in a diversified portfolio wins. Not because it’s exciting, but because it removes most of the ways I could hurt myself.
Should you do the same?
I can’t tell you what’s right for your situation — I’m not a financial advisor and this isn’t financial advice. But here’s the set of questions I’d ask myself if I were making this decision today:
- Do you genuinely have the time to research companies properly — not just read headlines, but really dig in?
- Can you honestly tell, looking back at your trades, how much was skill versus luck?
- Is your current portfolio diversified enough that a single stock going badly won’t materially hurt you?
- Are you investing consistently, every month, regardless of market conditions?
If the answers make you uncomfortable, passive investing might be worth a serious look.
For me, the switch to Syfe wasn’t about giving up on investing. It was about being honest with myself about what kind of investor I actually am — and building a system that works for that person, not some idealised version of a full-time trader I was never going to be.
I use Syfe REIT+ and Syfe Core for my own investments. If you sign up through my referral link, you’ll get a fee waiver for the first few months — and I earn a small commission at no cost to you. I only recommend platforms I personally use.
This article reflects my personal experience and opinion. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research before making any investment decisions.
