Last month, I sat across from Kenny, a software engineer in his early thirties, based in Singapore, someone who reads financial news, has a brokerage account, and thinks carefully about his money. I asked him about his portfolio. He listed: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, and Amazon.
I asked about Singapore stocks. He paused. “I don’t really look at those,” he said. “I just feel like I understand tech companies better.”
He uses an iPhone. He uses Google Maps. He watched the Netflix documentary about Enron. He follows Elon Musk on X.
He does not follow Singtel’s earnings calls.
He was not investing in what he understood. He was investing in what felt familiar. Those are not the same thing.
The data behind the anecdote
We work on an AI-native portfolio intelligence platform. Over a recent two-month period, we analysed 82 anonymised retail portfolios submitted by investors across Singapore and Vietnam. What we found was not what conventional financial theory would predict.
The three most frequently held securities across our sample were Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), and JPMorgan Chase (JPM), appearing in 32.9 per cent, 32.9 per cent, and 30.5 per cent of portfolios respectively. Gold (GLD) and long-duration US Treasuries (TLT) each appeared in 29.3 per cent of portfolios.
Not a single SGX-listed security appeared in the top 30 most commonly held positions.
Read that again. In a sample where the majority of users are Singapore-domiciled retail investors, no Singapore-listed stock was commonly enough held to crack the top 30.
Behavioural finance has a well-established concept called home bias, the tendency of investors to overweight domestic stocks relative to the theoretically optimal global portfolio. French and Poterba documented it in 1991. It has been replicated in virtually every market studied since. The academic consensus is that investors buy what is local, familiar, and proximate.
Our data suggests something has changed, or at least, something is changing at the leading edge of digital investor behaviour in Southeast Asia. These investors are not exhibiting home bias toward Singapore. They are exhibiting a different bias entirely: anchoring to the US mega-cap companies whose products they use every single day.
We call it reverse home bias. And it carries risks that standard suitability frameworks were not designed to catch.
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The mechanism: You invest in your ecosystem, not your address
This is not simply the observation that technology has lowered the barriers to international investing, though that is true. The question is not whether you can buy Apple from a Singapore brokerage; the question is why one in three retail investors in our sample have chosen to.
The answer, I suspect, is cognitive availability. Apple is not a foreign stock to someone in Singapore. It is the company that made the phone in their pocket, the laptop on their desk, and the watch on their wrist. It appears in their social media feeds, in the financial content they consume on YouTube and TikTok, and in the investment discussions on Reddit and Seedly. JPMorgan appears daily in financial news. Microsoft is their workplace operating system.
This is the availability heuristic, a concept from Tversky and Kahneman’s foundational work on cognitive bias, operating across national borders. What you can easily imagine tends to feel safer. What saturates your attention feels like information, even when it is not.
The Singapore investor who holds Apple is not making an informed bet on AAPL’s earnings trajectory relative to its valuation. They are making a bet that feels safe because they cannot imagine a world without iPhones.
Why this is a problem worth naming
A portfolio concentrated in US mega-cap technology and financial stocks is not a balanced, internationally diversified portfolio. It is concentrated exposure to: US equity market risk, Nasdaq sector concentration, US Federal Reserve interest rate sensitivity, and USD/SGD currency risk.
None of these risk factors appears on a standard retail investor suitability questionnaire. Brokers ask whether you are growth-oriented or conservative. They do not ask: Does your portfolio move in lockstep with Nasdaq? Are you exposed to a single country’s monetary policy? Do you hold any asset that is genuinely uncorrelated with US equities?
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The scoring system of DNA Score, a composite behavioural risk metric computed from portfolio position data, flagged meaningful risk differentiation in the sample. Portfolios in the Speculative Investor archetype, which held high-momentum narrative stocks like MicroStrategy (MSTR) and Palantir (PLTR), scored a mean of 53 out of 100. The more diversified archetypes scored in the mid-80s.
The investors with the low scores were not taking conscious speculative positions. They were following communities, chasing stories they had absorbed on financial social media, and concentrating on names that felt exciting and familiar in equal measure.
The most dangerous portfolio is the one that feels safe and is not.
What the AI era changes, and does not
There is reason to think reverse home bias will intensify, not diminish, as AI-assisted investing goes mainstream. When a retail investor in Singapore asks ChatGPT which stocks to consider, the names most represented in the AI’s training data are overwhelmingly US large-caps. When TikTok’s finance creators in the region discuss their portfolios, they discuss Apple, Nvidia, and Tesla, not Keppel or ComfortDelGro.
The infrastructure of financial information has globalised faster than the infrastructure of financial advice has localised. The result is that millions of first-generation retail investors in Southeast Asia are being guided by content optimised for engagement rather than advice optimised for their specific risk profile, currency exposure, and financial goals.
This is not an argument against holding US equities. It is an argument for holding them consciously, knowing why you own them, what risks they carry, and whether your overall portfolio is as balanced as it feels.
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What you can do right now
Run your portfolio through a behavioural diagnostic. Not the risk tolerance questionnaire your broker sent you when you signed up; those are designed to satisfy regulatory minimums, not to give you genuine insight. A real diagnostic looks at what you actually hold, computes your concentration, identifies your factor tilts, and tells you which behavioural biases are embedded in your current positions.
A true behavioural finance system processes your portfolio and returns a DNA Score, a breakdown of seven behavioural bias flags, and a regime-aligned action plan. It requires no broker credentials, no passwords, no transaction data, just your positions.
And the question is worth asking: when you look at your portfolio, are you seeing a strategy, or are you seeing a reflection of your screen time?
Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing views from the community. You can also share your perspective by submitting an article, video, podcast, or infographic.
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