I am a workshop trainer now. Hear me roar !

During the past 2 days, I started on my new life as a Financial Workshop Trainer. Under the guidance of Dr Wealth, I was able to craft a compelling preview and managed to have a successful first run of the Early Retirement workshop with 33 students.

At a personal level, starting this journey allows me to earn equivalent to about 60% of my previous take home pay which is significant more than how much a rookie lawyer can earn on a smaller/medium sized outfit putting more than 12 hours a day in a law firm. The effort after creation of the slides(which was actually super tiring) is only about 20% of a normal day job, so I have the capacity to grow my investment skills and pick up some AI capabilities in 2019.

After the course yesterday, I started to think about the problem of alignment of interests between a workshop trainer and participant. I think this is a significant gap that is missing from the current financial education landscape. I can fill this gap because I want to be consistent with what Nicholas Taleb has said about having "some skin in the game."

As a result of this, I wrote the following letter to all my workshop participants.

Here is the letter I sent to my course participants this morning. Unfortunately, to be fair to the participants, the valuable annexes to this letter cannot be shared on this blog.

Dear Students of Batch 1,

It’s been a great honour and privilege to be able to conduct a 2-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.

This has been a very enriching experience for me and I’ve learnt a lot from you. This is no accident because we did not limit ourselves to just sharing some investment strategies. You were able to come up with something unique on your own throughout these two days.

One of the questions I have been asking myself since yesterday evening was how to align my success with yours and the answer came to me this morning as I had my first cup of coffee in my life after a 5 day break from my usual daily shot of caffeine.

As an instructor who has enough from passive income, it is my duty to ensure that I eat my own cooking with the profits I earn from this course. 

Since many of you were candid enough to share your living expenses data with me, I will also be very candid with you, because new I count you as a friend. On average, an instructor makes about $10,000 to $20,000 from running a course. So I can put $10,000 of my proceeds from this workshop into markets and leverage to the point whereby the amount of investments I have in my margin account will exceed my revenues earned from teaching you in this class.

And I will proceed to do so.

This is best way to ensure that I am able to eat my cooking and keep my workshop standards high. There is no greater honour than to put this money into  the portfolio you guys have painstakingly built  yesterday.

You will find the composition of this inaugural Batch 1 Portfolio in Annex A of this message. It has 8 counters and I will be using an equity multiplier of 2 when I construct this leveraged portfolio. Annex B contains the other pieces of useful information you have constructed over the last two days on Business Trusts.

It has been fun teaching you guys and co-creating new leverage portfolios together as  a class !

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

Let this be a signal that I have now arrived into this industry and openly challenge all financial trainers to put some more skin in the game to benefit their paying customer. Don't just invest in your own portfolio, if your students are meant to succeed after attending your training, you should be putting your money in their investment decisions.