Month: July 2010

An Europe ETF to consider

There’s a good article on Euro ETFs in the Business Times today.

If you personally think that Europe will pull out of its current financial problems but you don’t like the fact that it might be a long term play where your funds might be locked for a period of time, you can consider purchasing Euro ETFs from the NYSE instead of SGX.

When I last checked about 2 months back, the Euro ETFs on offer at SGX capitalised income instead of distributing them. If you prefer an ETF that does provides dividends, you can take a look at the SPDR DJ EURO STOXX 50 (FEZ). Unless you want to do dollar-cost averaging, please note that I’m not telling you to buy NOW, but you should keep this in your watchlist to go long when the time is right!

Close shave with a snake

There I was, deep in the jungles of Brunei on Jungle Survival Training with a bunch of other trainees. Our objective for the day was to navigate our way back to base camp from the middle of nowhere, sharing between the 7 of us one set of combat rations that was meant to feed only 1 person.

As our weary legs trudged through the various slopes and terrain that the Brunei jungle could throw at us, the guys behind me came to a sudden halt. When I looked back, I could see that a few of them were terrified and their gaze was affixed on a tree branch.

Coiled around the branch that I had just walked past was a big green snake. Not sure if it was venomous, but if one of us had just got bitten, there would have been no way to do an emergency evacuation since we did not have a way to accurately describe where we were.