Growing your Tree of Prosperity is an introductory investment guide written specifically for Singaporeans who wish to take their first step towards financial independence.
I don't have a lot to talk about this week, but I did manage to create videos for the entire week.
Firstly, I will discuss the latest attempts by Dr Koh Poh Koon to compare CPF-Life with rental income from a piece of property this weekend. I think Dr Koh means well, but there's a better way to present this piece of information:
On Tuesday, I will take a brief look at Bumitama Agri. There will be a torrent of shallow dives because I'm building an OpenAI agent to automate research for me, and the agent needs tuning. Once it is mature, I will share it with students of my Early Retirement Masterclass.
On Thursday, we will explore a deep value strategy involving Negative Enterprise Value as featured in this week's The Edge magazine. Using Quants Cafe, I refined the approach to generate superior performance. The final form may be taught during the December run of the Early Retirement Masterclass.
Finally, over the following weekend, we will review Yong He Eating House's offer to sell their business for $300,000 and discuss how to approach it.
A significant portion of the R&D work I do for my Early Retirement Masterclass is now being featured in my videos. The age of AI will have a profound impact on this business, and my tools and techniques must be updated to reflect this new reality.
You can come for a preview by following the link in the sidebar of this blog.
Last month ended bitterly as a classmate from my secondary school just passed away suddenly from pneumonia. I come to the realisation that I've probably expended two-thirds of my life by now, and if I do not make some changes to the way I lead my life, a lot of the effort I've put in so far would come to waste.
It is with these thoughts on my mortality that I slowly enter into my birthday month in December.
At the work level, I suspect things are stagnant and in long-term decline. I have three very small priorities: continuing my training with Dr Wealth, teaching law at Temasek Polytechnic, and a new role with SIAS, which I hope will launch in January 2026. I will do everything possible to maintain this level of work engagement, but I expect 2026 to generate negligible revenues. It is very tempting to pursue a mid-career skills diploma to earn some extra income, but I'm not pursuing it as I believe that in my 50s, my life priorities have shifted.
Of course, this pivot cannot happen without the solid market performance of 2025. Beyond the millionaire per capita status of the family, I've probably had enough capital gains to send my kids to university by now; however, our expenses remain relatively low. I've also used the polytechnic break well to recycle tenants to my family property and even start a monetised YouTube channel.
This peak financial stability opens up new avenues to redesign my life.
My most significant personal breakthrough may be what I suspect is my most foolish personal move of 2025. To exhaust my Skills Future credits, I signed up for the ACLP, a trainer's certification. It was initially defensive as I feared someone might create a WSQ Dividends Investing programme and render my courses unmarketable at its price point. But weeks into the program, ACLP holders had their rug pulled as the government now wishes to tie employment outcomes to SkillsFuture funding. Although my risks disappeared overnight, along with my prospects of monetising the certificate later on.
I really did not enjoy studying the ACLP. The materials do not reflect the current high-tech disruption from AI, and I disagree with most of the material taught, feeling that I was merely parroting instructions to pass my modules.
However, what ultimately won the day was not the certificate, but my classmates. As the environment is not curve-driven, everyone just wanted everyone to make it through, and I've made good friends.
One of my classmates owned a music school, so I made it a point to support her course previews. It was an eye-opener on how tricky the business is once you leave the investing domain. I signed up for 10 private singing lessons, making this the most phenomenal change I've made in my life, targeting Golden Age Talentime as my personal goal in my 50s.
At age 51, my social life has been completely overhauled - I'm now too old to tolerate negativity in my life, and I've tuned out a lot of the noise on my Facebook feed as well. And my hobbies got overturned as well, with my YouTube channel overtaking my gaming and singing, to constantly bring change into my life.
The remaining time I have is to focus on my mum, who had a stroke early this year, and find more avenues to travel with my wife and kids once the opportunity arises.
More updates will arrive in December.
For my YouTube channel, my latest video is on Sabana REIT :
I'm launching a new series on Intergenerational Wealth and raising money-savvy kids. First installation arrives shortly this afternoon :
The last blog article did really well, and I hoped it was circulated amongst ACS alumni. It's time to broaden our discussion to explore what privilege is, as sociologists like Teo You Yenn should consider studying it in greater detail. We are so obsessed with poverty and inequality. Still, privilege exists at opposite ends of the spectrum, and greater equality can emerge if we address both privilege and poverty in society.
Singapore was a British colony that gained independence and has a Chinese majority, so it comes as no surprise that Singapore is all about academic excellence, as it is something that both Anglo-Saxons and Chinese are highly valued. Similarly, privilege is centred around schools.
ACS-MGS is just one of the spheres of privilege, but so is RI-RGS and HCI. So, a hypothetical scammer could be from any of these spheres. In that case, it should be fair game for the press to mention schools, because when privileged members of society commit crimes, it's an area of significant public interest.
Consider this imaginary scenario: Suppose a man was caught fornicating with an alpaca in the Kazakhstan steppes. Would it be of great public interest if he also turns out to be the brother of Lady Gaga? At the very least, the news would capture eyeballs.
How does privilege operate?
Better resources and access - I was privileged enough to give a financial talk at both RI and ACS-I, and I find their campuses to be lovely, far surpassing those of other secondary schools. And what a great privilege for them to have access to me before their O-levels! Other adults pay thousands to listen to me.
If we can be serious, RI's gap semester is one of the best programs a teenager can access.
Symbolic Power - Doctors and lawyers who continue to wear their secondary ties are projecting the symbolic power of their brands. The schools I mentioned have ridiculous band power. You think parents will stop their kids from going to ACS because of one Cambodian scammer?
Network Capital - Being part of the right old-boy networks can provide access to lucrative jobs in highly sought-after sectors, such as the finance sector.
Intergenerational Continuity - Alumni can enrol their children in the appropriate primary school, where it is easier to utilise affiliation bonuses to secure a place in the secondary school. In this sense, RI-RGS is the only privileged sphere that does not grant affiliation any advantages (Thank god!).
With these four features, privileged institutions can propagate through culture and class.
With these points, I will address the classic defences that privileged friends tend to erect when the news of Finan Siow comes up.
But I did not use my privilege to get to where I am today.
Just because you did not use the networking power of your privilege does not mean that you did not utilise the other aspects of privilege I mentioned here. If your child is enrolled in your own primary school, you are trying to extend your legacy. You put ACS in your Tinder profile, you're projecting symbolic power. However, even if you never exercised any privilege, it still exists as a real option (yes, like a Black-Scholes financial option) that can potentially "come into the money" in the future.
Why does the journalist not mention the other schools of the other scammers?
Since the other schools are not systems of privilege, the research would not be worthwhile. It is simply not in the public interest to know that a scammer is from Changkat Changi Secondary School if that wer the case.
The funny thing is that the ACSOBA is doing everything wrong to address the issue. Every day, an older boy of higher status wades into the conflict, which just demonstrates how privileged they are as a group.
If I were in charge of public relations, I'd hire an undischarged bankrupt who is part of the gig economy to discuss why ACS privilege is not a significant issue.
In my own family, there are at least two ACS alumni who have criminal records.
Ok, back to my YouTube channel, we are discussing DBS's projection for the Singapore economy in 2040. We are looking at whether SGD will reach parity with USD in this video.
A couple of months ago, this guy who bullied me and a bunch of smaller kids in the landed property estate I grew up in died of cancer. He was about a year older than I was.
Bullying was quite typical for folks in my generation, and I'm not here to recount my personal trauma or seek pity. The bullying was actually relatively mild compared to what some other kids had - I was shamed because the ET BMX bike I rode was allegedly an imitation. Much more seriously, my bully organised "field trips" and invited his ACS classmates to shoot other kids in the estate. The weapon they employed was an air pistol called a Thunderboy, which shot light blue 7mm pellets from a high-pressure chamber, and it really hurt like hell.
I was never able to confront my bully. The karmic burden would have been too much - do I really want to go after someone who has survived multiple bouts of cancer? Apparently, according to his social media, he graduated to organise trips to actually shoot and kill animals in Africa and was a famous shooting coach before he passed on.
Today, I console myself that my bully grew up to be a nice guy ( but not to the animals he shot ). At least that seems to be the case, given the comments on his Instagram after he passed away.
As I get older, I have begun to count the cost of the bullying I experienced.
The immediate effect of this was that, despite scoring 255 in the PSLE, I qualified for ACS but chose to attend the school next door, Swiss Cottage Secondary School. I told my dad that I don't think I will do well in a brand-conscious environment; they will probably despise me, and I wouldn't be able to go around canvassing for donations every year - it would be awkward. I also played too much D&D to endure those religious sessions in a Methodist school.
As I got older, I began to realise what a terrible mistake it was to avoid a branded institution just because of a small roughing up I experienced as a kid. I met fund managers, who are ok people, and they told me that it was much easier to get a foot in the door because they also have an ACS senior in the industry.
Worse of all, I started to meet friendly and warm people who came from ACS. NJC in my year "Headhunted" their head prefect, who became student council president for my year and is an all-round great guy, and I have since met the alumni of their wargaming clubs who are keeping one of my hobbies alive today. This realisation hurt most of all: there are great people from ACS with whom I could have connected really well if I had chosen that school.
So parents now know this - while every school is a good school, not every old boy association can open the same doors for you.
Reading books about the sociology of privilege and class confirmed my suspicions even more.
ACS-MGS is a system of privilege, not unlike elite high schools in the US, such as St. Paul's or Eton in the UK- it exists to solidify privilege among a particular group of Singaporeans. To do so, invisible barriers need to be erected. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would term this the habitus of ACS. So, donation cards, a certain cockiness, big cars at the drop-off area, strange religious rituals, and a great-sounding English accent actually keep smart Channel 8 heartlanders out.
Where ordinary Singaporeans do gain entry, they are likely to be relatively intelligent and ambitious, which helps maintain the sense of privilege associated with the institution. And I have evidence - Look no further than the AL score differentials between affiliated primary schools and everyone else. You want access to this old boys' club, you need to be either generally speaking, very smart or very rich.
So now with a neutral perspective, someone asked me what I thought about election candidate Jeremy Tan, who performed exceptionally well in the last election.
As impressive as Jeremy Tan is, his ACS credentials can provide me with a specific insight into how to approach this class of very prominent men. Imagine different men from different schools. If a boy's school is exposed to materialism and wealth. A subtle shift happens.
A boy will either be very chill and classy because he is old money, or he will literally die trying to make sure that he does not land at the bottom of the totem pole the next time the alumni meet.
So what happens?
We can express this mathematically!
I spoke about an old equation called the Merton share, where the investor's risk appetite is represented by a variable that looks like an inverted y or gamma. In most cases, this variable is approximately 3; we tend to be risk-averse and take only a third of the risk associated with the optimal equity portfolio. Seasoned investors have a gamma of about 2. Individuals who are confident or very cocky, such as Sam Bankman-Fried, tend to have a gamma of 1.
For every Jeremy Tan who excels in crypto and comes from ACJC, you will find ACS alumni like Finan Siow, featured above as a Cambodian scam operator, and Mitchell Ong, a financial advisor turned murderer.
All men exhibit a high willingness to take risks and a gamma tending towards 1. As lambda tends towards 1, all I can say is this:
The best is yet to be, but the worst is yet to come.
So, if you ask me whether Finan Siow should not have been given the ACS label when his buddies are all criminals, I would say, for the reasons I stated in this article, that I support what the editor (probably an RI boy-troll from a rival privileged habitus) did.
However, my ACS pals do not need to feel aggrieved - so long as the old boys' network continues to nurture the cultural and social capital of the alumni, this is something to be proud of. None of the neighbourhood schools can do this, not even PM Wong's school. But RI and Chinese High networks come close.
Okay, let's digress to my YouTube channel, where I'll be talking about STI reaching 10,000, which can be accessed here. Enjoy!
I put up this article on my FB and questioned why the mainstream media is celebrating the Liangs' efforts to get out of the education arms race in Singapore. People were very puzzled about my position, so I decided a blog article was in order.
In summary, the article discusses the Liangs who left Singapore for Thailand and later Malaysia. Their daughter can barely cope with the education system here, so they decided to leave the system. After leaving the system, the Liang kids thrived, and the daughter got the world's highest Maths score under the iGCSE system. The mainstream media views this as vindication of their decision to pursue an alternative lifestyle.
Like most readers, I praise the Liangs for taking a bold move to exit the system here. If the article had merely mentioned the steps they took to leave and how they managed their lifestyle elsewhere, I would have been fine.
But the Liangs deserved a fair bit of opprobrium for leaving the education arms race only to try to win it in a different environment. So losing under Singapore's regime is bad, but winning in another regime is great. And it's worse that mainstream media is trying to celebrate this fact.
So the moral of the story is - It's clear that you can take a person out of Singapore, but you can't take Singapore out of the person.
To elaborate on my point further, let's talk about what a lunchbox is in the context of the Korean blockbuster Squid Game.
In season, the contestants came out with the concept of a lunchbox. A lunch-box is a loser that gets beaten up and designated as a sacrifice so that everybody else can advance into the next level of the Squid Game. In the show, the contestants drew lots and managed to find a lunchbox, but the person refused to play the sacrificial lamb and committed suicide, leaving the group to hunt for another sacrifice to clear the level.
This is a potent metaphor for our education system today.
No parent will voluntarily produce a child to become another child's lunchbox in our education system. I have relatively average kids that I love to death, and I'm broadly aware that my kids are up against kids of assortatively mated couples, like that sweet couple who are both summa cum laude in law school and lovingly texting each other as fellow JLCs (they might still ad this blog) or the kids of my two professors who fell in love in SMU. It goes without saying that I have a financial arsenal prepared for my kids to survive in the future economy, because, otherwise, I'm not playing this Squid Game, either.
You see, the problem with the Liangs is that they left the Squid Game only to participate in another one where their kids can emerge winners, and our mainstream press wants to celebrate them for it. The Liangs know it's not fun to be the lunchbox, but it's fine to play a game where someone else, in the international iGCSE system, plays the lunchbox instead.
Suppose the newspaper article describes a family that left mainstream education, and now the kids are working in a circus or have successful careers as windsurfers. In that case, it is absolute freedom and a true moral victory against the Singapore system. You escape the arms race into a totally different thing that might not even be a race.
This is why parents should be rightfully upset about the article. To a certain extent, unless our kids are going to be President's Scholars, we volunteered for reasons of our own to keep playing this Squid Game in Singapore and risk letting our kids become the lunch boxes of other kids. I play because it's not that bad to be 50th percentile in Singapore.
Claiming to stop playing the Squid Game and then proceeding to win it somewhere else is the most incredible hypocrisy — and ultimately the MOST Singaporean thing to do!
I still have a nagging cough after my flu episode, so I'm not producing videos at 3 times a week yet. My latest video summarises the different positions on investment-linked policies.
The worst thing about the flu is that I lost my voice, so course previews, a singing course try-out and the making of YouTube content would have to stop temporarily. Of course, having a low-productive week due to my illness is no joke.
So I don't have much to talk about this week. I'm in the middle of a book on Culture that I will review next week.
Otherwise, before I recovered, I was able to produce this video for your enjoyment.
Better material should be headed our way this upcoming week.
Unfortunately for me, my flu lasted longer than a week, and I have to do the unthinkable: stop creating videos because I have no voice. I can't sell courses either, as my previews last 2 hours and will make my recovery even slower. So my YouTube video is just injecting shorts at a rate of once a day until I am ready to create videos again.
But this means that I can create a blog article in the middle of the week, so today I'm going to talk about possibly the best book about China vs the US at the moment, which is Breakneck by Dan Wang.
Dan reframes the entire contest between two superpowers not as a struggle between Capitalism and Communism, but as a contest between an engineer-led society versus a lawyer-led one. China's engineer-led approach can uplift millions out of poverty, and decision-making is quick. But literal-minded engineers can also mess up terribly and lead to atrocities, like the One-Child and Zero-COVID policies. In contrast, the US is a nation being led by lawyers, and while checks and balances are outstanding in theory, lawyers tend to obstruct the good and the bad. It's clear that the US needs physical infrastructure badly, but gridlocked politics make it resemble a society in infrastructural decline. Dan's conclusion is that instead of focusing on their rivalry, both superpowers can learn from each other. China can build more checks and balances and give people a bigger voice in how things are done. The US can afford to remove red tape and ramp up its construction powers.
I can understand why Singapore has done well so far.
We've balanced the lawyer and the engineer well. We were ruled by a lawyer during the LKY years, but he worked well with engineering types, and we were very much of an engineered society in the 60s to the 80s. Amazingly, Lee Hsien Loong, a mathematician, actually created a more consensus-driven society along with the support of lawyers like K Shanmugam.
But what kind of a function is required to emphasise the lawyer or the engineer as and when needed? Singapore is driven mainly by economists. Utilitarian calculus and cost-benefit analysis are necessary to understand how to reform the rules for continuous innovation and improvement. This is how nation-states evolve beyond the engineer-lawyer tradeoff.
If a society can transcend lawyer-engineer duality with strong economics, then we will need to understand societies that do not excel in either field, nor are they sound engineers or lawyers.
It's not too hard to find societies that suck at building or creating order. But I want to talk about the case of Europe, which is in severe decline. Just look at the French and how their government is collapsing in front of our eyes.
While politically incorrect, these are Philosopher societies. So much navel gazing and theorising that society is crippled from building and unable to stop things like strikes and crimes. A historian might get a brain aneurysm reading this. Still, my theory on why the Roman Empire fell is that when the Romans conquered Greece, they fell in love with Hellenism, adopted Greek Gods, and, as a result, became enamoured with ethical questions about virtue, happiness, all the humanistic shit that can't put food on a table or jail a tyrant.
The Roman Empire fell because it got woke.
For folks who are curious about China and frustrated with the unbalanced reporting in The Economist or various propaganda organs coming from the mainland, I would say Dan Wang is the best read so far.
