Why Singapore's IPOs Keep Going Underwater and the Stock Market Flounders: The Tools Are There, But the Bureaucracy Just Doesn't Have the Will

Two SGX listings landed with a thud in the past two months. JustCo closed its first trading day almost 18% below its offer price. Foundation Healthcare, backed by Temasek's SeaTown, had to settle for the floor of its price range despite becoming the largest healthcare IPO since 2012. Read in isolation, both look like evidence that Singaporeans just aren't excited about Singapore stocks.

Read differently, they're evidence of something narrower and more fixable: Singapore doesn't have a returns problem. It has an awareness problem.

The Numbers Nobody's Advertising

The Straits Times Index rose 23% in 2025. In my own writing last month, I ran the actual math comparing a S$1,000,000 unleveraged basket of ten SGX REITs against the same S$1,000,000 used as a 25% deposit on a 75%-geared, rented-out condo. The REIT basket returned a blended 6.68% a year in cash — tax-free, no mortgage, no stamp duty, instant liquidity. The leveraged property, even under generous interest-only assumptions, nets closer to 5.2% after financing and tax, and that's before roughly S$200,000 in stamp duty and legal fees paid just to enter the trade. Over ten years, the gap compounds to hundreds of thousands of dollars in the REIT basket's favour, on identical starting capital.

That's not a marginal result, and it isn't a secret either. MAS has been quietly building the institutional case for Singapore equities for over a year — S$6.5 billion allocated to asset managers under the Equity Market Development Programme, new rules requiring family offices under the Global Investor Programme to deploy meaningful capital into SGX names, board lot sizes cut from 100 to 10 units specifically to make it easier for small investors to buy in. All real, all sensible, and all invisible to the average Singaporean scrolling their phone.

Why the Message Never Reaches Singaporeans

Property has an entire content industry built around selling it: short-form videos, "your tenant pays your mortgage" calculators, agents with six-figure follower counts making the leverage story feel intuitive and inevitable. Nothing on the stock side competes with that, because nothing is designed to. Retail investors don't lack access — brokerage accounts are a five-minute sign-up. They lack a version of the property pitch that's been made for stocks, in the same format, with the same repetition, using real numbers.

That's a solvable gap, and MAS and the Ministry of Finance are two of the few institutions with both the credibility and the reach to close it. A short-form social campaign that simply states, plainly, what a diversified SGX REIT basket returned this year against what a leveraged rental unit actually nets after stamp duty and tax would do more for retail participation than another tax incentive aimed at fund managers — because it fixes the actual bottleneck, which is awareness, not capital supply.

The Catch

Here's the trade-off. A campaign that credibly shows stocks beating leveraged property is also a campaign that talks down the primary asset class of Singapore's most established wealth — households and family offices still holding much of their balance sheet in real estate, with real influence over how economic policy gets discussed and shaped. It also unsettles a newer cohort: professionals who leveraged into a second or third unit specifically to rent to expatriates, and who've built both a balance sheet and an identity around that bet. Hearing, on an official channel, that the math was against them the whole time isn't just an inconvenient fact — it's a status challenge from a source they didn't expect it from.

There's a subtler tension too. CPF and HDB upgrading have spent decades reinforcing housing as a retirement asset for the median household, not just the wealthy. A regulator pushing consumers toward equities and a housing system that depends on property values holding up aren't fully pulling in the same direction, even before anyone's politics enters the picture. One ministry's social media campaign may anger one or two other ministries' political office holders.

So the billions keep flowing quietly to institutions, and the board lots keep shrinking to lower the entry barrier — real progress, but all on the supply side. The blunt, retail-facing version of the pitch — REIT yield next to rental yield, tax-free against taxed, no stamp duty against six figures of it — still hasn't been made. It is up to MAS and MOF to have the (iron) will to speak up. As for Singaporeans, they lose a voice which raises their awareness in helping to build for their financial future.