Here is Lea Salonga, a guest on PBS’ Finding Your Roots. It turns out she descended from a German academic named Pedro Malhabor (a naturalist) who migrated to the Philippines in the early 19th century. Who knew?!

The Philippines is somewhat a melting pot of people, an east meets west type of place. We were never homogeneous to begin with. Compared to our neighbors who tend to be purists (Malay vs Chinese vs Indian like in SG and Malaysia), we in the Philippines are a mixture races and our families could no longer trace our heritage. We always had an open door policy, especially when it comes to refugees (White Russians, European Jews, Chinese escaping the communists, Vietnamese, Syrians, and Ukrainians). It was only Duterte who denied the request for asylum for Afghan refugees fleeing the Taliban rule in 2018.

One example of the diversity of our heritage is local actress Dawn Zulueta, whose grandfather is a Palestinian who escaped the conflict in Israel and sought refuge in the Philippines. Duterte’s ex-wife is a Zimmerman whose family emigrated from Germany in the 1930s via the US then resided in the Philippines.

I am visiting my bank soon. I will modify my letter of instruction to the trust department of my bank to tell them to dial down my PSE feeder fund UITF investments and instead start putting my money into the S&P 500 UITF.

I just realized that I had been investing in the PSEi (either through a feeder fund or an index fund) for nothing as it has been flat for 10 years! I have to face the reality that we won’t be trading at almost 20x P/E again, like in 2016-2017. We’re only doing 12.2x these days. 😭

My global balanced mutual fund has been giving me better dividends every month—more than my local ETF has ever done in my 10 years putting my money into it.

Fuck. I lost a lot of capital gains because I didn’t diversify into offshore funds. 🥲 But then, it wasn’t my fault that some funds (such as US and global funds) were not available to me at the time I started boosting my investments. Maybe I was so arrogant, thinking I will be fine because I was/am a stock market reporter so more or less I know how it works.

Wrong.

I didn’t count that Duterte would happen. That the pandemic would happen. That I will live through another Marcos presidency.

The PSE is so shitty nowadays that I’m enticed to put my money on crypto—which goes against everything I believed in investing on fundamentals. 😑

Fuck.