Excel Dynamic Arrays
Over the course of a nearly 10 year long investing journey, I have racked up a rather messy and complicated Excel workbook tracking the trades and performance of the portfolio. Yes the fault is entirely mine, without a structured approach to workbook planning this was bound to happen.
Bad Excel Habits
My investing preference has always been dividend focused, seeking out undervalued or stable dividend payers listed on SGX. This meant that each time there was a corporate action, be it a dividend payout or rights issue, I had to manually track that in the workbook. This is not really a major problem, just a few minutes of work every month or so at the beginning. The story changes as the portfolio scales up, instead of 1-2 companies in the portfolio, this slowly grew to double digits. Making things worse was that a majority of S-REITs have a quarterly payout, but on the bright side I get a tidy bit of cashflow every 3 months.
In order to track the dividend payouts, I had a simple table which listed the XD date, the stock name, DPS and payout amount. Each stock would have its own little table tracking the cumulative dividends paid to date, to help with graphing the ROI trend. A macro manages this aspect. Next, there is a separate table which records the “Hall of Fame”, top dividend payers per corporate action. This was calculated using a LARGE formula to automatically sort out the dividend value by descending order, another column then runs a INDEX-MATCH to locate the stock which paid that amount along with the XD date. The major flaw with this approach is that if we have 2 stocks paying the same amount down to the cent, this solution would incorrectly double count one of the company and ignore the other. I had this concern when designing the table, but went ahead with it thinking what are the chances that we have 2 companies payout the exact same amount?
How wrong could I be? I ended up with 2 separate occurrences of duplicates, but this was temporarily solved by replacing the duplicated formula with a XLOOKUP which sorts in an inverse order to pick up the lagger. One minor drawback is that this inconsistent formula will have to be manually adjusted each time I have a new joiner to the “Hall of Fame” which re-orders the ranking.
Continue reading “Excel Dynamic Arrays”March Site Migration
Long has it been that I wanted to migrate this site to a clean new slate. Response time was slow as a crawl and often the SSL certificate provided by the webhost broke down, presenting visitors with the dreaded warning page to turn back. What finally counted as the final straw was the increasingly frequent server downtime sending all traffic to the webhost’s own landing page.
So started the plan for a site migration. What will be some decent webhosts? Any of them offer cPanel? Shall I also get a domain name instead of using the subdomain provided by the webhost? It is not a fun job to migrate from one webhost to another, should there be a hiccup I might lose all the content/backups. Therefore the solution has to be resilient and also reduce the need for further migrations in the future.
Gears kicked to the next phase as I received an unexpected text from an old friend with a webhost recommendation. Upon checking out the site, I was stoked. The search is now over, I have a new home for my site. If you’re reading this, thank you for introducing 2 of the best webhosts I have used in the entire history of this blog. My other choices of webhosts were terrible in comparison and borderline nightmarish. I also made the decision to order a domain and here we are, live on the internet as of 6 March 2022.
Noticeable improvements over the previous webhost
- Better responsiveness/lower latency
- SSL that actually works
- Minimal server downtime
- More generous disk quota/host resources (migrated some resources from external third party hosts to the webhost)
- Other quirky conflicts (non critical) no longer a concern
Photo Dump
Packing Up
Protected: Private Post 9
Partisanship and Polarization
Jan 2021
Updates
– Fixed URL link in top menu “Home”
– Forced SSL and https redirect for all pages
– Fixed buggy lightbox implementation
Bugs
– latency has increased dramatically, could be linked to either the webhost or one of the plugin updates
Update (14/2/2021):
Identified embedded Youtube videos as the cause of the increased latency. The videos from Youtube was loading additional JS files which dramatically increased loading times before the page elements became visible. A page break has been introduced before the videos to fix this issue.
Gallery
Album below is restricted to 16 photos to avoid clutter. Click on the “View More” button to load the remaining photos
Now Reading
Started on The Phoenix Project and completed 25% so far. At this rate, it’ll take another 3 days to finish this novel, though I doubt I will have the time to read once the weekends are over. Borrowed this book through overdrive and the book was sent directly to my Kindle. A relatively simple and efficient process(although the kindle sync took some time to download the book), let’s see if the book is automatically removed once the due date reaches.
Continue reading “Jan 2021”July 2020 : Quarterly Summary
What a year. It has been 3 months since the last public post, much has occurred in this duration.
Graduating into a recession
Pre-Covid19, it was almost certain that the world economy would lose steam in 2020. We were nearing the the end of the long term debt cycle, it was merely a question of when the recession will strike. Is it possible to avoid a recession entirely? Theoretically it is possible, although like all cycles, a recession merely corrects the faults that have build up in this period and remove the ineffective firms so the healthy ones can progress on. To avoid a recession would be kicking the can down the road, protecting firms which no longer contribute to the economy except to leech off resources.
The Final Semester
What I had not expect, was the emergence of a worldwide pandemic to accelerate the situation and send the world into a shutdown. My final semester in “school” would thus be mostly spent in the comfort of my own room. Not that I had to spend much time in campus anyways. By aggressively pilling on modules early on in Year 1 and 2, I was left with only 3 modules in the final semester.
The plan was to allocate the final semester solely to completing my Final Year Project, instead of sharing precious time with other core modules. This gamble did not produce the results I had expected, as the first few years of modules cramming resulted in lower than expected grades and the final semesters becoming too “free”. Final exams were mostly cancelled, with one modules being graded solely based on the results on a single test. A test which I scored 90% on. The A+ grade was all but certain for this module.
Job Hunting
The Aviation industry had a rather gloomy outlook early on when the pandemic struck. With countries on lockdown and fears of importing the virus forcing air travel to a minimum, there was no doubt the industry would not fare well in the coming months and years. This meant there wouldn’t be much job opportunities in the MRO or manufacturing sectors, if any at all. Job cuts seemed very probable as well.
To counter this, I had to focus my attention away from the industry, into companies and career paths which was outside my area of expertise and plans. The entirely job hunting period was stressful and bumpy, but thankfully short and fruitful.
The Telelens
Ever since I took my first moon shots a couple of years back, I knew I wanted to try again sometimes in the future with better equipment. A better camera and a better lens. What defines a better camera and a better lens? A camera with more megapixels for cropping and wider dynamic range definitely helps, as my initial setup only managed to hit an equivalent of 300mm, producing a photo with the moon taking up a small white speck on the frame. It was torturous to even get the focus right at that size. Next would be a lens which had a longer telephoto focal length with image quality sufficient to capture the fine details of the moon craters instead of capturing a photo which can pass off one taken with tiktok face smoothing filters.
The ideal telephoto lens would be a decent 70-200 f2.8, but it’s expensive and not entirely suitable for moon shots or wildlife photography. A 100-400mm lens fits the role better but suffers from poor low light performance and less attractive bokeh. At half the cost of a used 70-200 the price-performance value the 100-400 presents in unbeatable, though if money is not a consideration getting both would be the solution.
The photos above are taken with the Sigma 100-400 lens in good lighting conditions. Focusing seems to be limited by my camera, although with only one body I am unable to confirm the suspicion. The lens performs decently well although it seems to have a tendency to lose focus and get stuck on the far end without being able to refocus back to the subject automatically. The focus ring is also stiff and a little grindy when turned, almost as if sand got into the focus ring.
