Letter to Batch 22 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 22,

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

This is a period where many investors in Chinese Tech stocks are feeling edgy with the intervention of the Communist government on the workings of their most innovative companies. While local income investors have primarily been shielded from significant losses so far, I’m reminded of what the ERM program went through in March 2020. This is a reminder to stay humble when you invest and don’t laugh at folks experiencing a downturn.

The Ghost Month has also seen most of the ERM portfolios lose a little bit of their value, making it a good time for the students to engage in some bargain hunting. I hope you will see this as a golden opportunity to build your first portfolio if you have not done so yet.

As I tried to provide more practice for the class this year to review each stock pick qualitatively, you will find that our portfolio is quite extensive compared with earlier batches. We have a portfolio of 20 stocks for this run which will stretch the size of the portfolio I will build for this batch of students. This batch has also decided to be more adventurous with local tech counters.

Hopefully, Singapore’s COVID containment strategy will succeed. We will benefit from more travel receipts and tourists within the country, which will have a knock-on effect on some of our investments. This portfolio is also more aggressive given the more significant number of local tech stocks that were reviewed and approved for portfolio inclusion.

Lastly, I hope that Batch 22 would participate actively in the FB group.  In end-September, we will be conducting a community event where we will consider the ERM approach to investing in Chinese stocks for yourselves and members of the public to showcase material from the ERM course.

Hope to see you then!

Christopher Ng Wai Chung