CategoryGeneral News

Is your cash balance appearing as red/negative on StocksCafe? It should not be. I had a chat with a user recently and she thought that it is normal for cash balance to be negative when P&L is negative. Recall that cash balance is meant to easily tell you how much cash is available in that portfolio. Therefore, it should not be negative unless you want to use it to indicate that you are...

Update: This issue is now fixed. Many have reached out about HK data still stuck on 31 August. We are very sorry for the issue. This is caused by an issue on our data provider’s end and we are working with them to get this resolved as soon as possible. Meanwhile, we are also exploring alternative data vendors if our current provider continues to give us issues. However, to be fair, they...

TLDR; Do not worry, your stock position(s) in StocksCafe did not get impacted. This is more of a personal update. As many of you might know, I have always held a full time job while I built StocksCafe on the side. However, that has changed due to a dreadful email titled “Your Position Has Been Impacted” that I received just a few days ago. Unfortunately, I am one of the many that got...

TLDR; If you have some free time and wants to learn more about Evan Koh & StocksCafe, you can watch this interview (recommended to watch at 2x speed) I recently attended a networking event organized by Moomoo and had the good fortune of meeting Kelvin. Kelvin is a well-known YouTuber who runs the channel “Kelvin Learns Investing” where he covers various topics related to finance...

TLDR; If you are still using the StocksCafe mobile app downloaded from AppStore or PlayStore, we highly recommend you switch over to using web browser to access on your mobile phone instead. Why are we deprecating the mobile app? When everyone else is releasing mobile app, why is StocksCafe removing ours? There are a few reasons why. Too costly – Developing and maintaining three different...

First of all, we are glad to announce that StocksCafe family is expanding. We now have a dedicated person who will be managing StocksCafe’s Social Media going forward. Please join me in welcoming Yvonne Law! She will be focusing on using 3 main channels: YouTubeFacebookInstagram YouTube will mostly be about video tutorials sharing what cool things you can achieve with StocksCafe. Facebook...

Since I started StocksCafe (SGXCafe then), I easily spent over 90% of the time on building the product. However, for a company to be sustainable and grow, building the product is only part of the equation. It is equally, if not more important, to put effort into marketing and representing the product properly. This is especially true for StocksCafe. As StocksCafe becomes more feature-loaded, it...

StocksCafe first started as SGXCafe in 2015 as we only supported SGX then. Over time, more exchanges were added as requested by users. However, some users started sharing that they only needed SGX and prefer not to purchase a plan that included everything. It took a while to work out and make the changes, but today – on National Day – we are happy to announce a new plan that is solely...

StocksCafe participated in its first event – Seedly Personal Finance Festival 2021 last weekend! To those who attended StocksCafe’s workshop, a big, BIG THANK YOU! I was told that there are some of you who purchased tickets to the event just to show support for StocksCafe’s workshop…! Hearing that makes all the hard work on StocksCafe all worth it! Thank you so much! As...

By now, you might have heard about the Seedly Personal Finance Festival 2021 that will be taking place virtually on 10 April. There is an impressive lineup of speakers, which includes heavyweights like Catherine Wood and Jamus Lim, representatives from many popular blogs/websites and *ahem* your very own Evan Koh 🙂 Even though StocksCafe has been around since 2015, this is the first time I will...

New Data Provider for US and London If you do not own US or London stocks, feel free to skip this part. One of the limitations of StocksCafe is getting quality data at a reasonable price. While StocksCafe would love to support all exchanges and display all sorts of financial information, obtaining quality data and properly licensing them with a limited budget is extremely challenging. Therefore...

New Pricing StocksCafe will be revising its pricing from 1 Jan 2021. It will be SGD 5.5 / 45 / 115 for monthly / yearly / 3 years respectively. So if you are still considering whether or not to become a Friend of StocksCafe, this is your chance to get it before the price increase! Rationale Time flies. The annual price of SGD 39 was introduced 3 years ago on 1 Jan 2018. Back then, StocksCafe...

StocksCafe x Morningstar StocksCafe recently signed a deal with Morningstar. In case you have never heard of Morningstar, here is a wiki article about them. Basically, Morningstar is an established company that provides a wide array of products and services to both retail and institutional investors. With the recently signed deal, StocksCafe will now be getting financials data directly from...

Time files! Five years ago, I published the very first article of StocksCafe (it was known as SGXCafe back then). In the five years since then, we have achieved many things together. Today, I would like to take this opportunity to plan, together with you, on what we would like StocksCafe to achieve in the next five years! Please take this two-question survey to share what changes you would love...

In February this year, StocksCafe started a referral program where you can get a high quality limited edition StocksCafe T-shirt if you refer people to sign up with StocksCafe and become a Friend of StocksCafe. The program was supposed to end on 9th August 2019. I have received feedback from some users who are actively referring that they really love the T-shirt. Therefore, I have decided to...

Today is a special day for StocksCafe! After 1,604 days or (about 4 years and 5 months), we finally have our 10,000th registered user. That is about an average of 6.23 users/day. While this is not an amazing sign up rate, it is still an awesome achievement in my opinion considering that we have 1,265 users who have contributed to StocksCafe and 1,082 who are still contributing. A 10% active...

Happy Lunar New Year! As you might know, one of the main objectives of StocksCafe this year is to grow. So as you are sharing/talking about your financial freedom journey with your friends and family during this festive season, it would be great if you could also take this opportunity to share the tool/website that hopefully helped a little in your journey 🙂 Token of Appreciation For every person...

I am very sorry but as the title indicates, the last 3 days of data on StocksCafe Forum (forum.stocks.cafe) are lost. Please rest assured that this did not affect other StocksCafe systems and/or data at all as they are on independent servers. I am now glad that I spent the extra money to keep them separated. Why? The main reason is mostly due to my ignorance. I was trying to update the open...

Note: If you are already Friend of StocksCafe (when your subscription ends), price changes does not affect you. It will always be fixed at the rate (your personalized rate) when you first contributed and as long as you continuously contribute 🙂 Last year, when I announced the price change and switch to contribution mode in mid December, several users feedbacked that the announcement was too last...

I am happy to share that I have created a forum for StocksCafe. This forum will replace the Cafe feature in StocksCafe where users would post questions and start discussions. Why replace the Cafe feature? As the number of features in StocksCafe continue to grow, I am having a hard time maintaining all of them. Therefore, I have decided to “slim down” StocksCafe and maintain as little...

One question that I regularly receive is whether the lifetime friend program is still available. For those that do not know about it, previously, you could contribute a one-off amount between SGD 200-288 and become a friend of StocksCafe for as long as it exists. While I am very thankful for the strong support, it is a very heavy commitment and hence I decided to stop offering that option. What I...

One main feedback from new users of StocksCafe is that there are too many features and it can be too overwhelming to start using StocksCafe. Therefore, I have designed a simple landing page which hopefully will help new users warm up to StocksCafe. You can find the new welcome page here. 1) As you can see, there is still free space for more icons. Please suggest what other information you think...

Everyone is different and uses StocksCafe differently. This is why there are many ways to customize StocksCafe so that it best suits your usage. To make StocksCafe work the best for you, I strongly encourage everyone to go though the different customizable options available if you have not already done so. Here are the six main customizable categories, along with the recommended settings: Email...

March is the birthday month of StocksCafe! In the blink of an eye, StocksCafe has already been around for three years! Thanks to the support of many, StocksCafe would very likely be around for many more three years to come. Thank you! StocksCafe’s next goal is to be profitable enough so that Evan or someone else can be working on it full-time! New Features You might have realized that new...

Update: Please check this article! In short, referral program is now extended to lifetime (instead of just one year) Although StocksCafe basically takes up most of my weekday nights and weekends, it is becoming more enjoyable to work on mainly because there is a growing number of users who love StocksCafe. Beyond raising feature requests and bug reports, many users even share the worry of how to...

Happy New Year! Review of 2017 2017 has been an exciting year for StocksCafe. It started with the change of name to StocksCafe, which included the migration of domains as well as architecture change. I remember it caused many issues in the beginning and I truly appreciate your patience during those times. The main reason for all those changes was to prepare for expansion beyond Singapore. And...

2017 is coming to an end, and I hope this has been a good year for you and your investments. This year, StocksCafe continued to enjoy great support from users. More than 300 users have contributed, either monetarily, reporting errors, or suggesting improvements. Unfortunately, as it is costly to license financial data, StocksCafe will very likely end this year in the red again despite the support...

I would like to apologize for the email outage for the last three days. I have finally fixed the issue. All emails should be operating as usual from now on. Below is the reason why I had to manually activate accounts for new sign ups and why no daily market update emails were sent. The Short Version – My hosting provider, DigitalOcean, decided to block my SMTP port (needed for sending...

Recently, several users have independently highlighted to me the issue of delisting dividends. What are delisting dividends? I am referring to dividends that are given when the stock is delisted, redeemed, or cancelled. These dividends usually have a dividend yield of ~100%. However, note that not all dividends with ~100% dividend yield are delisting dividends, for example: 8Telecom’s...

The Short Version – Cannot login to my Apple developer account. – Cannot pay Apple. – Apple took down my app. – Wanted to re-upload it but it was excessively complicated hence gave up. – Please use mobile browser for now (possibly forever). The Long Story Recently, many users have been contacting me about the missing iOS app. Previously, I released a iOS for...

It’s been three weeks since my last article, but in case you think StocksCafe is going dormant, it is not! During these three weeks, I have still been maintaining StocksCafe, answering queries and fixing reported bugs, etc. It’s just that I did not have time to sit down and build a more sizeable feature that is worth mentioning. The main reason for this is because of my recent...

I am happy to share that after almost four months of effort, I have completed the integration for both Hong Kong & Malaysia. Almost every feature that is available for the Singapore market is also available for Hong Kong and Malaysia markets. A few exceptions are Dividend Strength, Future Yield (which is based on Dividend Strength) and Earnings Release. I will be attempting to build Dividend...

As StocksCafe is currently expanding beyond Singapore to other markets in Asia, I am now looking to feature financial bloggers from around Asia. If you are a financial blogger or if you know of any financial blogger that writes about stocks or financial related topics focusing on Asia, please let me know either via private messaging or by simply commenting on this article. In other updates, I...

If you looked at your portfolio report these past few days, you might have noticed an unreasonable increase (typically well beyond 1000%) in your portfolio time-weighted returns, as well as a sharp increase in ES3’s monthly volatility (>20%). Firstly, I am very thankful to users who took the time and effort to report this issue. Some users even went a step further to take screenshots to...

As the number of registered users in StocksCafe continue to increase, there are bound to be users who have registered but stopped using StocksCafe. Currently, I continue to update their portfolio and even send them the daily market update emails (if they have set it up that way). However, this is bad for everyone. For the inactive users, the daily market update emails are likely deemed as spam...

Slow Loading Due to my lack of experience with infrastructure configuration, for the most part of last week, the experience of using StocksCafe has been unpleasantly slow. I apologize for that and am thankful for your patience. Truth be told, it was rather stressful for me. I personally hate to use slow websites so I was waking up at ungodly hours (read: 4am) to configure the servers so as to...

Over the weekend, I have successfully migrated everything to the new domain, stocks.cafe, with upgraded software and hardware. However, the migration over the weekend did not proceed as smooth as I had hoped. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. On hindsight, I should not have tried to upgrade everything at the same time. There were numerous bugs and errors that I had to fix throughout the...

The migration of SGXcafe to StocksCafe will happen this weekend! This is more than simply the changing of domain names. When I first started SGXcafe, it was meant for myself hence I simply dumped everything onto a single server. That was easy and convenient, but certainly not robust nor scalable. I have spent the last few days designing and configuring a brand new multi-server infrastructure and...

The first article of SGXcafe appeared on 15 March 2015, hence I set this date to be the birthday of SGXcafe. On this day, let’s review the good and bad that happened in the past year. The Good SGXcafe has grown significantly in the past year; it currently has more than half a million pageviews every month coming from 30,000 unique visitors. More importantly, it has received support from 177...

As the amount of content in SGXcafe continues to grow, it is increasing hard for users to easily keep track of everything that is happening. SGXcafe wall is the first effort to make it easier for users to catch up with the latest happenings, especially on the go (via mobile view). Although the wall is customizable to your liking, only 42 users actually tailor it. Hence I would like to introduce...

Review of 2016 2016 have been a year with its ups and downs for SGXcafe. At one point, it is faced with the possibility of shutting down. However, with the support of many users, it managed to march on. I truly appreciate each and every one of you for using SGXcafe especially those whom also contributed financially and/or by sharing about SGXcafe. Looking back at the articles of 2016, I realized...

SGXcafe was originally built to help manage my own portfolio. I decided to share it freely when I realized it might be useful to many other retail investors like myself who do not have access to proper portfolio management tools. However, I was soon notified by SGX that SGXcafe requires appropriate licensing to continue operating publicly. At that time, under the encouragement of many users, I...

Each year, BigFatPurse organises a gathering for investors to check on their current year’s performance and to get new investing ideas for the upcoming year. It used to be opened only to their members. As more people heard about their gathering, they received more requests to open it up to the public. And this year, they have finally opened it. With a star-studded speaker line up made up of...

Several users have independently suggested that SGXcafe should have its own forum. Hence, I spent the last week building it and I am excited to share that the forum is live and ready for use! For a forum to be successful, it requires the active participation of the community. Currently, SGXcafe has several tens of thousand visitors every month, of which several thousands are heavy users of...

StocksCafe is constantly evolving, and as I continue to add features to StocksCafe, even I am starting to lose count of them. Therefore, I believe that many users – especially new users – might miss out on many features that StocksCafe offers. This article aims to record all the features available in StocksCafe, and this article will be updated as new features are added. I highly...

Long Story Short SGXcafe will continue to be free, but to cover for the high operating costs due to licensing, I would like to invite you to do one or more of the following if you would like to show your support for SGXcafe. 1) Help increase awareness of SGXcafe. You can do this via your blog, share SGXcafe’s articles on facebook, or simply via word of mouth to people whom you believe can...

It has been two weeks since my last update. I am happy to share that most administrative issues with SGX and third party data providers have been handled. Next on the list would be to tackle the technical issues of integrating data that I have licensed into SGXcafe. I have already started integrating dividend information, since this is something numerous users have been asking me about. At this...

It has been a week since the survey. Thank you to all who responded to the survey. The survey results are quite open to interpretation. If we simply look at the absolute number of people willing to pay to keep SGXcafe going, the logical choice would be to close SGXcafe as it is far from sufficient. However, if we look at the percentage of people willing to pay, it is quite encouraging as 42% of...

The first SGXcafe article was released on 15 March 2015, so SGXcafe officially turns one today! Many things have happened in this one year. One thousand daily visitors In this one year, SGXcafe has grown from just one daily visitor (me) to more than a thousand daily visitors now. I’m so glad so many people enjoy using SGXcafe. Thank you for your support! Invest using only SGXcafe I have...

When I started investing in Singapore stocks, I could not find any website that allows me to freely and easily access simple information regarding Singapore stocks or maintain my portfolio of Singapore stocks. Therefore, I decided to create SGXcafe to help myself and anyone else who faces the same predicament as me. There are currently two main ways you can use SGXcafe: 1) To gather information I...