Finance

What Our Payslip Tool Will Not Tell You

Our payslip decoder describes 39 lines across Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia and declines to give you a figure in 6 of them. Three of those refusals are overtime, in all three countries, for one reason: the rates move and nothing here could keep them current.

15 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Business

Applied Materials Had a Record Quarter. The Shares Fell Five Per Cent.

Revenue of US$9.12 billion, a beat on earnings, guidance nearly US$700 million above consensus - and the stock fell. China has gone from about 35 per cent of sales to 28 in a year, and this is the other end of the policy that has SMIC raising prices.

15 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Finance

Anthropic Gave Its Revenue a Number. Its Profit Got an Adjective.

Preliminary second-quarter revenue of more than US$11.5 billion, a fourteen-fold rise, and the first quarter of positive adjusted operating income. Revenue got a figure; profit got a direction. The US$559 million everyone is quoting is the May projection, not the result.

15 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Finance

What Actually Happens to Your Bonus

The tax on an extra $1,200 is identical whether it arrives as salary or as a bonus — we computed it at five salary levels through the same engine our own calculators use, and it never differed once. What does differ, above $8,000 a month, is CPF: a raise escapes it entirely while a bonus still attracts it, worth 20 percentage points of cash in hand on the same money.

11 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Finance

Google Will Hold Your Child's Money. It Is Not a Bank Account.

A stored balance for under-18s, controlled through Family Link, with real-time visibility of every transaction. What it removes is friction, and also the furniture that comes with a deposit.

11 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Finance

OpenAI Bought $7bn of Its Own Shares at a Valuation That Has Not Moved

OpenAI bought back $7 billion of employee stock using its own balance sheet, at the same $852 billion valuation as March. A buyback is not a price discovery event.

11 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Finance

How to Compare Unit Prices When the Shelf Makes It Hard

The large pack is usually cheaper per unit, and checking is one division — but the shelf is arranged so you cannot do it. Different units, hidden multi-buy counts, and the case that cannot be solved at all: comparing a jar sold by weight with a bottle sold by volume needs a density the label never prints.

11 Aug 2026 · 5 min read

Finance

Should I Pay Off My Loan Early? The Date Matters More Than the Amount

An extra payment does not buy a fixed amount of anything — what it buys depends almost entirely on when you make it. On a $300,000 loan at 4.50 per cent, the same $10,000 saved $26,696 paid in month one and $5,347 paid in year twenty. Here is the mechanism, the three things the arithmetic cannot settle, and what happened when we checked our own calculators against an independent model.

11 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Finance

MAS Wants a 21-Day Path for Complex Funds. In May It Dropped the Advice Requirement.

MAS has proposed an Alternative Funds Appendix that would let a derivative-heavy or undiversified retail fund be authorised in about 21 days, once a category has been established over roughly three months. Consultation closes 10 August. Read alongside May's removal of mandatory advice for complex products, the direction is consistent.

8 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Finance

GIC Says It Chose a Lower Return. Its Twenty-Year Number Fell to 3.4 Per Cent

Asked why the rolling twenty-year real return dropped from 3.8 to 3.4 per cent, the Finance Ministry pointed to a deliberate lower-risk posture. The window arithmetic is not separated out.

8 Aug 2026 · 8 min read