While I appreciate your sharing of a good personal investment track record, when discussing policy you need to put on a macro hat, think at a strategic level and detach yourself from personal achievements and disappointments. It is also difficult to have clarity if you are mixing multiple issues loosely correlated and then attempting to do policy analysis at the same time. I will try to be brief as you brought up many areas that are not easy to go through easily on a forum.
- On the recommendations benefiting financial industry, I agree it's likely the case. Personally, I am against the CPFIS in the first place for reasons articulated earlier, so this new direction isn't really addressing the heart of the issue for me. But to be fair to the government, we have to bear in mind they are not forcing anyone to invest. Participants are more than welcome to leave their pension savings in the CPF without doing anything. It is in fact the default action if you choose to do nothing.
- It is good that your personal investments have been positive, but like mentioned earlier, this really isn't the consideration when it comes to policy discussions. Also do take note that rough rule of thumb in financial statistical analysis indicates you need 25 +/- years of track record before you can say with 95% confidence interval what you are experiencing is more attributable to skill then luck, 5 years is too short. The US market has been on a prolonged bull run from 2011 to now, you are in fact benefiting from a significant tail wind. S&P 500 + DivReinv has more than doubled and if you have owned individual small caps 3-5x return over the period is quite common as well.
- On experts working for CPF, we must bear in mind the CPF was not set up as a traditional pension fund with an in house fund management arm investing all over the world to generate real returns. There are no professionals working for the CPF doing fund management with a mandate to generate superior returns. For better or worse, the CPF invests all its proceeds in Singapore sovereign securities . This has the effect of lowering credit risks as opposed to broad based investments adopted by some other pension arrangements at the expense of having lower returns comensurating from a very conservative allocation. Whether this is the optimal approach is debatable, but it is inaccurate to characterize that CPF has a throng of investment professionals on the payroll and doing nothing while generating 'lousy' returns.
- On your forex management 'techniques', they are rudimentary but fit for purpose in your case. Like I said, this isn't really the point of discussion. On a professional/academic level, it is incorrect to compare straight forward returns of 2 completely different entities without context and anyone with a basic CFA/CIPM education will agree.
- Bottom line is CPF generates a low return which to date roughly matches the long term inflation rates. They are not fantastic, but neither are they sub-par unless the intention is to generate real returns which is altogether another frame of discussion.
- Just like any nation wide policy, there is bound to be a myriad of different opinions on how best to manage retirement savings on the national level. I wish there were more discussions on the committee and advisory level on the mission and purpose of CPF and its propostion as a tool for retirement. Currently it seems that the government is dictating a mandate that the underlying philosophy will not change and simply ordering a bunch of experts to suggest policy tweaks here and there. On the layman level, there's hardly any serious discussions ongoing except the usual clamoring for "higher returns" and wild conspiracy theories.
