For air miles lovers in Singapore, one of the most overlooked cards out there is the DBS yuu card.

Remember that while it does have a limited number of merchants, even if you spend half of the monthly minimum on yuu merchants ($300), your miles-per-dollar rate will still be decent.

Spending the full $600 on yuu merchants bags you 10 miles per dollar (mpd) so even if you split it 50/50 between yuu and non-yuu merchants you’ll be able to earn an average of just over 5mpd on $600 of monthly spend.

The more important thing to remember is that the DBS yuu card comes in two types; the Visa and the Amex. And you can get both.

That effectively doubles your cap (yay!) to $1,200 per month, with each card requiring that $600 minimum spend.

So, with the upcoming miles nerfs on 1 August 2025, it’s worth checking out the DBS yuu card to pick up some of the slack.

I was at Moofest 2025 on Saturday 12 July to check out all the offerings for investors. While there were some great panel discussions, there was also a lot of the typical “product-pushing” going on.

In the financial industry, that’s normal. And while every investor will have their own individual fund and stock holdings outside of basic, broad-market ETFs, we do need to question the fees on these.

One great example was a popular Singapore Equity Fund run by a large asset manager.

Singapore’s stock market, dominated by banks, telcos, and REITs, is one that is not that easy to consistently beat because you need to take sizeable “off-benchmark” positions as a fund manager.

Indeed, this fund has S$900 million in assets under management (AUM) and an annual management fee of 1.50% per annum (p.a.).

Bu what about its performance versus the benchmark – which is the Straits Times Index (STI)? Severely lagging.

Over the past year, the Equity Fund delivered 18.8% while the STI gave investors 23.0%.

Annualised 3-year and 5-year annualised returns for the Singapore Equity Fund were 9.5% and 12.3%, respectively. The STI? It delivered an annualised 11.8% and 14.3% over those same timeframes.

So, it does beg the question of why investors continue to put their money into them when the straightforward SPDR Straits Times Index ETF (SGX: ES3) would deliver the benchmark’s returns – minus the 0.28% p.a. management fee.

For investors, I see the performance figures as a welcome reality check.

It’s definitely worth checking out our fund (unit trust) exposure and questioning whether the management fees we are paying are justified over the long term versus a simple benchmark ETF.

By the way, the above figures for the Fund were underlying fund performance. That means excluding the litany of fund charges applied so with the whole host of fees applied, the performance picture becomes much, much worse.

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US President Donald Trump slapped a 93.5% tariff on Chinese graphite earlier this week.

Graphite is a crucial component that’s needed for producing electric vehicle (EV) batteries but the US has accused China of graphite “dumping” in the US market.

Tim’s Take: Another day, another tariff. President Trump doesn’t seem to be too concerned about how tariffs are dished out as this one goes against the very idea of producing in the US.

China dominates globally for graphite processing and exporting as the former (processing) is actually extremely dirty from an environmental perspective.

Similar to “rare earths”, the processing part is where the country has excelled – often at the cost of the environment. Yet China has carved itself out as a dominant supplier of many raw materials that go into things like EVs, electronics, solar panels, and wind turbines.

The ironic thing is that US producers of graphite produce nowhere near enough to fill demand for it (nor in the required purity) and it will take some time for them to catch up.

Of course, for investors, these periodic targeted tariffs against China are likely to be the “normal” state of affairs for the foreseeable future given President Trump has another 3.5 years in office.

Whether they actually work or not is another question entirely.