Don't talk cock, just tell me what stocks to buy

One group of the population that investment course providers cannot win are folks who think that there is a magical list of stocks that, when bought, would make people millionaires, so there is no need to pick up some fundamental skills in finance.

This video shows how I deal with folks who corner me in social situations to ask for stock tips. 

You will find that this is worth your time. 

 

Personal Update - Three priorities moving forward

 

As of last year, I made adjustments to my social engagements and gained some clarity about how and with whom I should spend my time. I took this detox much further by reducing my binge-watching and stopping looking for games outside my home.  Now, I can clarify what I must do as I take a semester break from teaching at a local Poly.  

Beyond my training business, I will focus my time on the following:

a) Artificial Intelligence Apprenticeship Program Foundation course

This is not the AIAP program, but the course that equips students with the skillset. This program is very challenging as it's not conducted by a human but simply a set of instructions, after which you're thrown into the deep end with data you need to clean and process independently. I enjoy the freedom to explore a complex problem, but I'm not advancing as quickly as I did in classes in the past, as I want to thoroughly master the skillset before the semester ends. 

This effort may lead to an application for the actual program, but I expect the dividends to be paid to my ERM code base, and even my YouTube viewers may see some code very soon.

b) AI course for kids

Another project I'm developing is an AI course for kids aged 9-14 with a tuition centre in the East. If you have kids free during the June holidays, you can write privately to me to enquire. I really want to leave my comfort zone, find new sources of regular income, and learn new skills that I have not developed so far, and there is no better way than to create an AI course from the ground up.

c) YouTube Channel

This is the equivalent of my gaming hobby. One of my biggest regrets is that I should have built up my influencer street cred when I started conducting investment courses, because the feedback on viewers and responses can be addictive! My problem is that I'm a long way from monetisation, but the secondary effect is that some of my materials will reinforce my course materials after further enhancements. 

My next step is to find more creative ways to get viewers to pay me, and you will discover considerable developments in this space. I intend to engage viewers three times a week. 

The underlying theme is that I'm undergoing another transformation. 

This volume of work has been impossible to do in the past, as I lacked a strong AI tool backing me up in the bad old days. AI now improves my marketing copy, debugs my code, improves my slides, and corrects my grammar. I must spend six months trying to use AI to give me an idea of the kind of person who can make me obsolete. The hardest part is to resort to asking Chatgpt every time I'm stuck on something, and it's clear that there are so many obstacles for me. 

With all these breakneck changes and the impending doom that can come once Agentic AI is ready to take on the world, I have no idea what kind of profile a person needs to have to make a living in this world. 

It does not matter because with the proper domain knowledge, a person can become a one-man army and run an entire business operation independently. 

On Singapore Savings Bonds

 

For our next how-to video, I will discuss the importance of Singapore Savings Bonds and why retail investors need to track their returns. 

Watch long enough and I'll even show everyone how to purchase SSBs on the DBS website.

A crash course on the meaning of life in the context of FIRE

 

We almost had a personal finance festival, but the May elections forced the event to be postponed. In such events of late, financial institutions have been pushing an alternative to FIRE, implying that people in the FIRE movement experience a life with little meaning and that somehow paying expensive annual management fees can lead to a more meaningful existence.  

To counter such forms of propaganda, I spent a decent three weeks of my life decoding the meaning of life, devouring Roy Baumeister's book Meanings of Life. This article summarises the book's most fundamental ideas.

To start, we need to break meaning down into four parts. We need to pursue each part to have a meaningful life:

• Your life must have a purpose - Why do you exist?
• Your life must have value - You must bring value to others or society
• Your life must have efficacy - You need control over events.
• You must have self-worth - You need some way to feel superior to others.

Once you lay down these four foundations, you have meaning in life, and it produces a few effects :

• First, you connect all these positive and negative events together to respond differently to them.
• Secondly, this response will increase the stability in your life and help you cope with changes better. 

And that's basically the gist of everything else in this formidable volume.

If you examine FIRE within this meaning definition, then FIRE is intensely meaningful. 

• Purpose - We exist to be free of our golden handcuffs. We play roles like child, spouse, and parent rather than just a cog in the economy. 
• Value - A financially free person can give up a job to someone else who needs it more and pursue a calling rather than a job. 
• Efficacy - Passive forms of income give us a powerful sense of control over financial obstacles. 
• Self-worth - And trust me, you will definitely feel superior to others. 

That's all I have to say. 

I hope readers will use these ideas to challenge financial institutions with so-called more meaningful approaches to financial planning. It's not meaningful to be a source of commissions to these institutions.

Instead, just buy the stock, collect the dividends, and speed up your journey towards financial independence. 

About the High Cost of Living in Singapore

With the elections approaching, a JC pal asked me to make a video about Singapore's high cost of living. 

This should be the last of this channel's experimental content phases, and I will soon create content that would better suit viewership.

 

CPF-SA or CPF-IS ?

The following video taps into the popularity of content on CPF. 

I hope you guys enjoy it.

[I apologise if there are audio issues on this feed, even though I've given up on video filters. My cheapskate decision to use freeware might ultimately be to blame.It will be a long way before I become fully competent in this.]

 

It's very hard to become a financial influencer

 

After two weeks, I have some idea of what works on YouTube, and clearly, this space can be quite brutal and rewarding depending on what kind of content you intend to build. 

The video on how to think about investing in local banks was a clear winner in our series. The content most similar to what I teach in class would add the most significant number of subscribers and views to my channel. But we've yet to compare it with a video about CPF, so that's what I will be trying to launch over the next few days.

Another learning is that free tools like Da Vinci Resolve can be very hard and counterintuitive to use. I will find a way to subscribe to a new tool once I have a ready means to monetise the channel, but I suspect that this already has a positive impact on business. At the moment, I'm stubbornly trying to make do with freeware, but like other areas in a person's life, you actually get what you pay for. 

But I can't go through life with a large stack of software tools that nickel and dime me every month. Some influencers take more than a year to take off. 

I'm closing in on 600 subscribers, so I need 400 more to unlock Google AdSense. However, I need a total of 4000 hours watched over a year's look-back period, and I've watched about 300 hours so far. 

Some pals suggest we do more coffee-shop talk like Mr. Loo of 1m65. Still, I should develop my unique data-driven style in my presentations, as I'm ultimately responsible for my investment course business and personal branding. Next week, I would also like to use these upcoming elections to develop my unique perspective on Singapore's cost of living. 

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