President Trump has made investing even more of an emotional roller-coaster than it needs to be. That’s mainly down to unpredictable actions and a clear lack of any long-term policy.

The upshot of that is that markets are even more volatile than normal. The main reason? Markets hate uncertainty.

Besides the recent surge (and then huge pullback) in both gold and silver, one other consequence of President Trump’s scattershot policy has been a weak US Dollar.

Indeed, for Singapore-based investors, the strength of the local currency has been more pronounced than usual in the past few years.

It does beg the question; do we want more of our portfolio in assets that are priced in Singapore Dollars and that aren’t exposed to US businesses?

As I outlined in one of my latest Instagram posts earlier this week, the options here for investors are rather limited.

Besides investing into Singapore-listed stocks and ETFs, priced in Singapore Dollars, one other option is to buy a SGD-hedged version of a Global Equities fund.

One such option is the iShares Developed World Index (IE) Fund that’s available on Endowus. With over 70% of the fund exposed to the US market, it does mean being exposed to a lot of securities priced in US Dollars.

Buying an SGD-hedged version allows you to mitigate some of that impact by being exposed purely to the percentage return of the assets in the fund and neutralising any currency swings.

But it does also come with a cost – hedging by the fund manager (using forwards and FX derivatives) can be expensive and will cause a small drag on long-term returns.

Beyond that, the SGD-hedged version of the iShares fund is a little bit more expensive – at 0.14% p.a. – than the original. And it also comes with an Endowus platform fee of 0.30% p.a. that we can’t escape.

Whether we want to allocate more to assets not priced in US Dollars is something many individuals and institutions alike are certainly considering, not only here in Singapore but worldwide too.

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As the air miles game in Singapore becomes of a strategic minefield, it’s worth utilising tools that can ease that “mental load” of spending caps and sub-caps.

That’s particularly applicable to UOB credit cards, that have now seen specific spending caps proliferate.

Enter HeyMax’s spending cap tracker for specific credit cards. HeyMax issues MaxMiles and the platform is a travel and loyalty service that’s meant to maximise credit card rewards and help you earn bonus miles.

The only big downside to the platform is that you can’t transfer your earned MaxMiles into KrisFlyer Miles, although the platform does allow you to transfer miles to 25 different partner airlines’ loyalty programmes.

Buying vouchers at HeyMax, with something like the UOB Preferred Platinum Visa, can also reserve your online spending caps for other cards.

Regardless, one of the best features of HeyMax is that it allows you to link a selection of credit cards within the app so you can track spending on them. The official name of it is the HeyMax Card Maximiser.

It’s most useful for the UOB Visa Signature and UOB Preferred Platinum Visa cards, which both have two sub-caps for 4-mile-per-dollar spend while the former also has both a minimum and maximum spend requirement.

That can be a total pain but this tracker makes it a lot easier to understand how far away you are from hitting minimums or if you’ve already exceeded that 4mpd cap.

For anyone continuing to earn 4mpd on UOB credit cards, it’s an easy “win” that will lessen the mental gymnastics from month to month.

If you’re not on HeyMax yet, just sign up with my referral code 1804C1BB and get rewarded with 200 Max Miles when you sign up, verify your phone number and make a voucher purchase.