We’re well into August now and that means the nerfs to the DBS Woman’s World Mastercard and UOB Lady’s Solitaire Card are in full force.

Reduced 4-mile-per-dollar (4mpd) caps for both cards means less miles. However, there’s another card where the monthly 4mpd cap was actually increased – but not in an entirely good way.

The UOB Visa Signature now allows you to earn 4mpd on up to $2,400 of spending per statement month.

While this monthly cap used to be $2,000 on either contactless/petrol or foreign exchange (FX) spend, the new $2,400 cap is being split equally between the two categories.

What does that mean? Well, besides more maths and tracking of your spend, it results in a $1,200 4mpd cap on local contactless spend and $1,200 4mpd cap on FX spend.

But (and it’s a big but), the minimum $1,000 spend remains in place for you to earn the 4mpd. So, in effect, you have to stick to between $1,000 and $1,200 on contactless and FX spend to utilise the full cap.

For most people, it will be easier to just stick to the local contactless spending cap. In that sense, the UOB Visa Signature’s 4mpd cap has been nerfed from $2,000 to $1,200.

Do remember that your card’s “statement month” can be different from “calendar month”, depending on when you applied for the new card and when it was approved.

The new 4mpd caps for the UOB Visa Signature are effective starting from the statement period ending on or after 1 September 2025.

“MARKETS AT ALL-TIME HIGHS” and “GLOBAL RECESSION AND MARKET CRASH AROUND THE CORNER” are common headlines right now in the news.

The more surprising thing, for investors anyway, is that this isn’t anything new. Yet these headlines always make us stop and pause. They instill uncertainty into us.

Do we keep investing? Or do we stop and wait until a crash? In other words, should we time the market? Obviously, the answer to that is “no”.

But there’s also a lot of data out there that show us exactly why investing at “all-time highs” doesn’t actually yield vastly different results from doing it at any other time.

For example, according to Factset data for the benchmark S&P 500 Index in the US (from 1975 to today), if you had invested only at all-time highs, your average return after 12 months would be around 10%. That’s only marginally lower than if you had invested at any other time.

The 3-year return of investing at all-time highs gave you a positive return of 32% compared to 37% for investing at all other times.

And that difference becomes even less remarkable over 5 years, with a 60% return for those investing at all-time highs. That compares to a 63% 5-year return for investing at all other times.

What does it show you? Well, if markets are hitting all-time highs, there’s usually momentum behind them. Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t fall in the next few months.

But if we are investing for the long term (like retirement), the returns over the next 12 months should not be a focus.

It’s also important to put returns into perspective. Over the past decade, the S&P 500 Index has hit 300 new all-time highs – with each new high accompanied by a litany of reasons and headlines of why markets can’t continue to march higher.

So, what do we do? It’s important we stay disciplined, remain focused on our long-term goals and continue to “pay yourself first” when it comes to our monthly/regular investing.

By doing this, we can resist succumbing to the temptation to “time the market” because all-time highs are really not much help in determining where the market is headed in the short term.

US President Donald Trump extended the tariff deadline for China by 90 days, pushing back the date which was originally set to come into effect on Tuesday (12 August).

Negotiators from both countries had met in May to reduce those original triple-digit levies down to 30% for Chinese imports into the US and 10% for US imports into China.

Tim’s Take: The tariff war back-and-forth has made the market almost desensitised to whatever trade news now comes out of the Trump White House.

The “Trump Always Chickens Out”, or TACO, trade has become a favourite turn of phrase for investors on Wall Street to characterise Preisdent Trump’s trade strategy. But the bigger question is what the medium-term impact of tariffs will be on the US consumer.

An elevated Produce Price Index (PPI) reading earlier this week – basically inflation for producers of goods – spooked stock markets as it becomes more clear that higher tariffs are finally starting to feed through to input costs for companies.

Yet what’s driving the current market right now is Artificial Intelligence (AI) and companies involved in that space still appear to be on a strong footing.

Of course, tech stocks won’t be immune from a consumer slowdown in the US but strong earnings from the Big Tech cohort of companies in their most recent results have given succour to investors who are still bullish on further gains for the tech-driven market.  

Regardless of where markets go from here, it appears likely that the US Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its meeting next month. Whether that alone will be able to help stave off a potential US recession is another question entirely.