Iggy's Journal: Why Your Real Benchmark Isn't the S&P 500
5 September 2026, PM
Podcast Release
This episode is built around something Chris Watling at Longview flagged recently, six signals he thinks point to a possible stock market pullback within the next one to four months. Weak technical follow-through, record-low cash buffers, earnings expectations stretched thin, that kind of thing. Most of that is US-market noise as far as your SGX portfolio is concerned. But two of the six actually matter directly for you, rising bond yields and credit spreads that are priced for perfection, and together those tighten the math on yield and refinancing for anything you hold here in Singapore.
That's the real point of this episode. If you own REITs or dividend stocks, your benchmark was never really the S&P 500, it's the Singapore government bond yield, and that yield has been climbing. When the safe alternative gets more competitive, the hurdle for everything else rises with it, even if nothing about your company's actual fundamentals has changed. That distinction, market noise versus the one number that genuinely moves your hurdle rate, is what the video and Substack piece walk through.
One housekeeping note, this was meant to go out yesterday but hit a YouTube upload error partway through, so it's landing as tomorrow's, Sunday's, release instead.
My Personal Take
Genuinely one of my favourite kinds of episode to make, the ones where the headline scare (market crash warning!) turns out to matter less than a boring number most people scroll past (bond yield up two basis points). That's usually where the real risk actually lives. Annoyed about the upload delay, but the argument doesn't go stale overnight, the yield math holds up whether you watch it today or Sunday. Catch it tomorrow.
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