Fleeting joy, divergent expectations and reconfigured intimacies: The visits home of Filipino migrant care workers in Singapore

For Filipino migrant care workers in Singapore, visits home are highly anticipated and longed for, but only as long as they remain brief. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, this paper examines such visits as emotionally complex events that bring intense joy as migrants reunite with dispersed family members, but also reveal divergent expectations and feelings of loss and betrayal. These experiences are especially felt among migrant women given the gendered constructions of their migration journeys that demand strenuous relational work on their visits and far beyond. Visits home, nevertheless, are important moments through which migrant care workers re-orient their priorities and aspirations as migrants and as women over time, often leading to prolongations of their ‘temporary’ absences. The paper further examines how migrant care workers, many of whom are on temporary work contracts in Singapore, fear and anticipate the moment when short visits ultimately become permanent returns

Applying Data Analytics to Improve Multi-Asset Portfolio Performance

The number of casual investors allocating funds into financial exchanges has surged due to the increased availability of trading accounts on multiple platforms. These investors quite often invest only in one type of asset, stocks. Stocks are known to experience sudden market shifts and extreme volatility based on factors that the investors may not be able to control. Existing applications of data mining stocks perform well, but if the entire stock market performs poorly, investors can face severe losses. This study utilized a data mining tool that evaluates two other classes of investments: the commodities market and the currency exchange market. Three avenues of data mining were implemented as solutions, a neural network, logistic regression and a decision tree, to classify the buying and selling of investments. The results presented that unless in a bullish market scenario, utilizing a multi-asset portfolio with backed by a data mining tool can prove beneficial to an investor. In a bearish market, this study outlined how the performance of the multi-asset portfolio is drastically better than investing using a standalone stock classifier or investing in an index tracked product. In a volatile market, results showed that a multi-asset portfolio is competitive with a standalone stock classifier and in many scenarios even out performed. Overall, the data and resulting analysis provides a good basis for further research

The temporal borders of transnational belonging: Aging migrant domestic workers in Singapore

Amidst public debate about the need for migrant domestic workers to assist with eldercare in Asia, we hear little about the futures of the workers themselves. This paper focuses on low-wage migrant domestic workers of different nationalities who have spent decades in Singapore, and how they imagine, prepare for, or avoid discussion of their aging futures. Singapore’s immigration regime enforces mandatory retirement and return migration when domestic workers reach 60 years old. These impending displacements evoke mixed emotions as migrant women re-evaluate questions of care, home, and the relationships they have developed with employers, kin back home, and communities abroad. In this paper, I explore how temporal borders operate alongside spatial borders to shape migrant women’s futures, illuminating uneven intersections between citizenship, gender, and care over the lifecourse. I further trace how the women navigate, ignore, push back, and bridge the anticipated ruptures of temporal borders