As a step towards further collaboration in investor education for teachers, SGX and the financial literacy and investment training arm of NIE, the Citi-NIE Financial Literacy Hub for Teachers (FinLit Hub), jointly organised the inaugural NIE-SGX Value Investing Symposium for teachers, held today in the Lee Kong Chian Lecture Theatre at Nanyang Technological University.  

About 700 NIE-trained teachers attended the symposium, where SGX Academy trainers gave talks on topics such as value investing, building an income portfolio, the role of CDP and brokerage firms and tools and resources to aid investments.

This is a first-of-its-kind investment symposium created for teachers. To be held annually, the Value Investing Symposium aims to impart fundamental analysis skills to educators as well as enable them to apply investment analytics in identifying value stocks and constructing simple investment portfolios.

This is an extension of the NIE-SGX partnership announced on 20 March 2015, with the objective to increase financial literacy and investment knowledge among teachers. Since then, SGX Academy and FinLit Hub have jointly developed a comprehensive eight-module investment programme, covering areas such as fundamental analysis, building investment portfolios and utilising publicly available online resources such as SGX StockFacts and SGX MyGateway. A total of about 800 teachers have benefitted from the NIE-SGX partnership. 

Dr Koh Noi Keng, Chair of Citi-NIE Financial Literacy Hub for Teachers, NIE, said “There are compelling reasons for financial education so that people learn how to save, invest and manage resources wisely. While we know we have to stay invested, we often lack the knowhow and may not be well informed. So this seminar will hopefully pave the way for our educators to start on the journey of reading up and asking more about different choices available before making investment decisions”.  

Dr Koh, who is also the NIE-SGX Programme Director reported, “Last year, in our inaugural partnership with SGX Academy, more than 600 educators signed up for the 8-module course on Managing Personal Finance and the feedback was very encouraging. Our educators were very motivated and wished they have had attended such a comprehensive course earlier. We will continue to empower our educators to be equipped with financial information so as to make informed decisions. Moving forward, we hope to upload some of these courses on the clouds so as to provide better accessibility to all educators in Singapore.”

Lynn Gaspar, Senior Vice President and Head of Retail Investors and Intermediaries at SGX, said, “As an advocate for investor education, we believe in empowering individuals to achieve financial independence through investing. We are encouraged by the results from the partnership with NIE thus far, and are delighted to take this further through the inaugural NIE-SGX Value Investing Symposium.”

“We also see the importance of equipping educators with investment knowledge as they play a pivotal role in imparting knowledge and shaping future generations, and could potentially educate and mould students into tomorrow’s confident investors,” she added.