Daily Briefing: Ex-Traders in Singapore Guilty of Cheating Deutsche Bank, HSBC; Hong Kong housing curbs may give Singapore property some relief

And here's everything you need to know in investing stocks in Singapore.

Two former currency traders from Deutsche Bank AG and HSBC Holdings Plc were convicted of cheating the banks by making false trades. Former HSBC senior dealer Ivan Chng and ex-Deutsche Bank trader Toh Hway Khuan pleaded guilty in separate hearings in Singapore’s High Court on Wednesday. The men both admitted to using their banks’ accounts in 2009 to get preferential rates on the dollar. The cases are unrelated and the men will be sentenced at a later date. Chng, 48, was charged in 2015 with 149 counts of buying and selling about $800 million and unlawfully making about S$230,000 ($160,000). He pleaded guilty to 25 of the charges. Toh, 51, was also charged in 2015, with 39 counts of buying and selling more than $250 million and unlawfully making about S$140,000. Read more here.

Singapore’s three-year decline in home prices could see relief from an unexpected quarter in 2017: Hong Kong. So says Cushman & Wakefield Inc., which expects the slide in the city-state’s home prices to end this year as foreign investors turned off by Hong Kong’s move to increase the stamp duty for overseas buyers look to Singapore instead. Desmond Sim, head of research for Singapore and Southeast Asia at CBRE Ltd., said Singapore house prices are approaching their trough, with a forecast price move of flat to minus 2 percent. Savills Plc forecasts Singapore prices will rise 1 percent on average this year. “The fallout from the stamp duty could be beneficial for Singapore,” said Sigrid Zialcita, managing director for Asia Pacific research at Cushman & Wakefield. “Singapore is always seen as a place where you can preserve capital and we are expecting interest from foreign nationals to come back.” Read full story here.

If you are a new investor who is just starting out, aside from mutual funds, one of the first things that you would probably be interested to find out more about is likely to be stocks, or otherwise known as equities. This is because it is widely-believed that a well-planned out stock investment strategy is a viable way to accumulate wealth in the long term. Trading stocks also happens to be a less intimidating way to dip your toes in the world of investments as it is relatively convenient and inexpensive these days. Get to know the full story here.