Why men will always be a slave to their ambitions.

 

Someone on social media was promoting some event that is all about finding some safe space for men to express their emotions. The idea is that we live in a very destructive competitive environment and the current definition of what masculinity is is very narrow. 

While I will not openly oppose any attempt to rewrite what masculinity should be, I am old-school and believe that boys will be boys. 

I am also aware that it is very difficult to disengage from ambition. I struggle with it personally, and when I finally made the decision to suit up and go to a law firm, a lot of what I do had to do with my son who's watching my every move. If he gets winds of the idea that it's possible for a guy to basically do nothing at home and still earn a nice 5-digit passive income, one possible reaction is to just stop striving. 

I think that loss of motivation takes away a greater part of the meaning of life.

Another perspective I have on masculinity is that it’s not ultimately up to men (or worse, single men who actually have the time to think about moderating their masculinity) to determine what’s masculine. The main determining factor is women. We should ask ourself what kind of guy actually attracts women in Singapore, gets to settle down, and have kids. Women ultimately gate-keep because they decide what kind of men gets to propagate their gene pool.

For example, in Shanghai China, women don’t really care how good looking a guy is, he just needs to be able own an apartment. In such societies, savings rates amongst men are one of the highest in the world. When there is a real estate boom, so much attention goes into real estate ownership, workers become more disengaged at work.

So if we adopt this approach to determine the evolution of masculinity, we should start with a survey conducted by Lunch Actually recently on what Singaporean women want in a guy. In a nutshell,  a guy should be highly educated, have a high income, and have a compatible religion with the woman. In other surveys, it was also found that guys actually don’t really mind higher earning girlfriends, but a large swath of the female population would not be able to accept guys who earn below them.

So if I want my son to be successful in starting a family, he needs to study really hard, gun for the best paying jobs, and be a free-thinker (as opposed to being an atheist like me) so he gets to be as flexible as possible when it comes to religion at a later time. Another words, I don’t think it is wise for my son to focus on developing traits like kindness and empathy. These traits can be a bonus, but I’d put a bigger premium on traditional masculine traits like being decisive, ambitious, or even a little confrontational.  Case in point, not having a degree in Singapore means halving your income. So if we already know that women prefer high earning men, missing out on a local degree is like getting castrated.

Of course, this analysis should also consider whether there is an equivalence of dividend income and earned income. There are no surveys on this yet, but I suspect when women talk about high earning men, they are more interested in traits of conscientiousness and disagreeableness when looking for mates. This would actually put a higher weight on earned income compared to dividend income. So I would conclude that even if you have a nice $5,000 passive income every month, you may want to hold a job that gives you amount of status in society. 

The singlehood status of many guys in the FIRE movement may attest to this possibility. 

So this is why men will always be a slave to their ambitions, because women like ambitious men and ambitious men continue to propagate the gene pool for humanity’s next iteration.

More details on why I ditched my carefree life to practice law

 

When I wrote my last article, I thought it was a casual personal update. People who study law and get admitted to the bar eventually become lawyers. I've also had plenty of time to plan for my career transition. 

Interestingly, the last article attracted a lot of attention.

Investment Moats Kyith was the first to contact me through Whatsapp. He was wondering why I was urgently making a career switch. It should be noted that no one is as obsessed with the "safe rate of withdrawal" as Kyith in the financial blogosphere, so I suspected that he thinks my finances have become wobbly.

15-Hour Workweek went even further with a hilarious but scarily accurate breakdown of my financial situation.  You can read it here. 15WW is mostly correct, but he "see me too up" and overestimated my wealth. Rising interest rates do affect dividend portfolios negatively, and I took my fair share of poor performance, although it's nowhere near the folks who dabbled in tech, China and crypto. 

I just want to add some perspectives on why I transitioned into law 7 years after leaving my IT career.

a) I mentally divide my assets into "earned" and "inherited" wealth

I'm very public about inheriting money, but spending it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I segregate my assets. Even dividends from the inherited bucket go back to it. As a consequence of that, Imagine my "earned" bucket as being barely enough to sustain my family expenses. I can't objectively live on 4% of that, and I can barely live on 6% of it, but it motivates me to start an investment course and engage with the world, so I refused to break these silos down. 

The consequence is that I feel hungry and deprived all the time, but if we account for the inherited bucket, I would not need to get up in the morning, and my family can go to Japan three or four times a year.

Still, the inherited bucket is useful. It is helpful for medical emergencies, and I will be generous regarding children's tertiary education. My dad kept emphasizing giving me an education in his will, so I will carry out his wishes in spirit for his grandkids. 

Do note that my SRS, Mortgage and CPF voluntary contributions, which I have been so aggressively pursuing lately, come from my "earned" bucket, so you can imagine how deprived my life really is given how poor my business revenues are. 

I'm very transparent about this approach, but I don't recommend that readers do this. My mum thinks I go hungry when I go to work and shoves me a few bucks when we eat together. 

b) I learned that FI can induce boredom, and you become jaded after a while

As I've stated before, Financial independence is a networked good. If there get there early, congratulations, but your friends may take another 20 years to reach your stage. Not all of them can travel with you then. 

I'm fine being the only person who is financially free, but recently, as a result of growing old, I've lost interest in everything I used to like. When I was younger, I could anticipate a new RPG or game and could hang out at Comics Mart to talk about my hobbies. Now by the time anything arrives in a Singapore store, I reviewed it in PDF format and can even sell it to noobs at the game shop.  I've also closed my mind to newer games, they always seem sort of derivative of an older Euro game, and there are textbooks on game mechanics that deconstruct everything. 

And these days, all I do is deconstruct everything.

Lately, I've begun to feel the same way about books. The assertion of management books is rarely backed by empirical data, so I've grown to disdain it. Some authors just back their ideas with long-winded stories which are entertaining but ultimately one data point. Philosophy repeats the ideas of dead white men and feels like subjecting the reader to a painful cultural vasectomy. Investment books are still ok if they are self-serving, but I can't just subsist on investment books.

I need variety too. 

Legal practice, on top of my investment training program, is one way I can take theoretical ideas and solve practical problems with them and see the real consequences. If I can pick my pace of work, there's a chance I might even enjoy it.

c) Timing issues with my CFA qualification

I passed level 3 of my CFA in 2003, and then I just carried on as an IT professional. Years later, after I determined that I should start an investment training business, I figured that running my training program full-time could allow me to earn this qualification that has eluded me for nearly two decades. After getting a sizeable portfolio, I realised that to have an investment career, I was often prevented from investing on my own account by company policy.

So the clock started ticking for me to get my CFA in 2017, and I just got it about two months ago. So I'm really only free to pursue my legal career recently. 

d) I don't want to corrupt my kids

In my entire life, I've only been retired for six months. That was in 2014 when I awaited my acceptance into law school. Beyond that, I've been studying, doing a training contract, and running an investment course.

I don't want my kids to imprint on the idea that a dad is just a retiree. In fact, my kids need to understand why they will end up side-hustling and having multi-hyphenated careers.

Seeing a dad chillax every day might corrupt them. Even if I can make them FI on their first day at work, imagine how much I would have robbed them if they lacked the motivation to earn accomplishments in their lives. 

e) People have lost their Financial Independence in this downturn

Times are bad; we went from a pandemic to a war in Ukraine, a breakdown in supply chains, and multiple crypto meltdowns to a hawkish Fed. I know folks who have lost their FI of late, and it's unpleasant to get back to the workforce without bargaining power. 

Imagine updating your resume, and there is nothing to write about. 

I've experienced discomfort this week. I returned to fighting the morning crowd and fought off sleep after taking too many carbs on lunch break. 

It's uncomfortable, and you don't ever want to do this because you need the cash, so better do this while you don't need the money.

Lastly, students and readers are inquiring about my new vocation. I've spent the week getting to speed and may refrain from business development activities for now. I still need to process the rules on touting for lawyers, so if you have an issue you need help with, write to me at my normal email waichung.ng@gmail.com. 

Will share more when I get my name card.

Personal Update : A New Dawn

 

Last week was the last ERM session for 2022; as the training business faces one of the biggest challenges ever in 2023, I've begun making some moves in my career, at least to stave off irrelevance, if not to pay the bills. 

Starting 1 December 2022, I should have restored my practising certificate to resume legal work in a firm as an Associate. My area of work is community law, and for a start, I will take on any case my supervisor will be working on. Over time, I expect to find an area I'm comfortable with.

That's not all; starting tomorrow, I will be tagging along to attend the trial in the State Courts as an intern to get back into the swing of things. For folks who are my long-term customers and friends who do look forward to working with me in my new role, please be patient as I will only share details of my workplace on Thursday after I clear my communication with my firm; lawyers have a strict no touting policy. For future updates on my new venture as a rookie lawyer, I expect to use LinkedIn as my major form of communication. 

( Facebook is where I go Goblin mode, and my career will be very short if I talk about the law there. )

For folks who have been following me on this blog because of investment training, don't worry. I negotiated to be a lawyer and an investment trainer at the same time. If anything, I may even become more useful to my clients and friends. The next ERM course will be in February 2023. I will need to see what kind of time pressure my new role entails, and I might get back to the deeper articles on Dr Wealth if I do not have the bandwidth to make new videos. 

Some changes in my life may include :

• This blog may reduce its update frequency; we'll likely see maybe two weekly articles. 
• I probably can't read as fast as before since I still have to process my Business Times, The Edge and Economist weekly. 
• Probably limit my Netflix and Disney+ watching to a minimum.
• My volunteer work in schools will have to be scaled down to almost zero, but I do suspect that I will spend more time with disadvantaged citizens once I get into the swing of pro-bono legal work under CLAS. Given my lack of revenue pressure, I will likely ramp up on this to sharpen my career skills. 
• My gaming life has been dead for over a year. It's part of growing old and seeing D&D turn more woke than I can handle. I still hope to visit conventions and look forward to Comic-Con this year.

Some readers might want to know how my finances work at the back end. 

So even though I now have a hyphenated career as a lawyer-investment trainer, to maintain my flexibility, I do not draw a monthly income (how else can a middle-aged Singaporean man get employed ? . Everything is based on effort/results, so if no payment is made by clients, I get nothing. To sustain this for at least a year, I've already set aside a full year of household expenses and mortgage payments in my savings account. 

The only risk to me is my mortgage payments which are still floating rates loans. My dividends in 2023 can likely take care of that. As I am still developing my basic skills in my new role, I am likely to continue to rely on passive dividend income to make this career transition successful. 

Of late, I have been feeling quite conflicted about this career decision. Even though I was cleared of all my medical issues two days ago, a younger and fitter good friend had a mild stroke, and I can't help but feel that all this is just vanity and a desire to maintain my relevance in middle age. My only solace is through giving legal representation to those who cannot afford it to build up my reputation and skills in the meantime.   

The biggest question at the end of the day is whether there will be an interesting story to tell my students next year. I'm likely the busiest man who has completed the FI of FIRE. But the idea of dividends powering a hyphenated career is an interesting one,  and maybe I can author a series of new articles in mainstream media about this. I won't just talk about retirement; I'll talk about transcending it. 

Now the question is whether I can teach, code, draft and counsel out of this period of rising interest rates?

I'll blog again in the middle of the week. 

  

Letter to Batch 28 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 28,

It’s been a great honour and privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.

On 26^th September 2022, I anticipated a nasty market downturn when the Fed started to turn hawkish, so while leveraged student portfolios still had a tiny profit, I told the community to exit all leveraged positions. I liquidated everything in all my margin accounts, hoping to return at a better time. The ERM portfolios will continue after conducting its 28th class of students.  

Batch 28 has its unique challenges.

As interest rates have only risen on March 2022, I’ve made a judgment call to only backtest year to date performance of both STI blue chips and REITs. Furthermore, I also took the liberty to decide that it was high time we took on some more risks and limited our REITs universe to twenty REITs that gave the highest dividend yields. This decision was made even whilst high-yielding REITs underperformed compared to the baseline performance.

The first reason is that as REITs are cheap, thanks to rising interest rates, higher dividends can cushion losses moving forward. The second reason is that if interest rates rise longer, REITs, where landlords struggle with increasing rent, will start behaving like bonds, and REITs with the highest dividend yields will have the lowest “duration”. They will preserve their value better as the overall REITs sector fall further out of favour.

Also, as the class size is small, each team had to review many counters before lunch.

The final result is possibly the highest-yielding portfolio we’ve ever built as a programme, with an average yield of 6.88%. I look forward to investing in this portfolio with my SRS funds. Folks anticipating a return to a leveraged portfolio will have to wait a while longer as margin rates remain relatively high.

Lastly, I hope that Batch 28 will participate actively in the FB group. Sometime in Q4 2022, we should meet for an online community webinar.

 

Hope to see you then!

 

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

Market Deployment #4 : The future of Ang Moh is being more Kiasu

 

Being a parent in Singapore is like being tossed between the philosophies of two different civilizations. I just met my son's kindergarten teachers and can see this clash of ideologies in full swing. My son's English teacher is very cheerful, and encouraging and seems to want to make learning more fun, emphasising creative thinking and life skills. His Chinese teacher, an immigrant from PRC, reminded me that if a child can eat three times a day, doing three pages of exercise should be easy peasy and laments the reduction of Chinese Spelling in primary schools next year. 

Over time I can imagine this effect on kids. They will evolve like me, and even though they willingly invest heavy amounts of time in CL2 and work hard to get great results, they will likely align themselves with the Anglophonic world as it allows them to express their individualism more. 

This game is played throughout the world stage.

Investors should try to read books that attempt to predict the future. One periodical that does so is a special issue of The Economist that will talk about the world in 2023. For the extremely long helicopter view, Hamish Mcrae talks about The World in 2050. These predictions, while not fully accurate, are based on long-term trends.

I don't want to spill all the beans on this excellent book, but I just want to talk about one point I find extremely interesting. 

It is the idea that the future of Ang Moh is more Kiasu.

The book's main premise is that the US will retain its dominance even after losing the no.1 spot in economic size to China sometime after 2030. The main reason is that the US remains a very fertile country that supplements its population growth with many enterprising immigrants from other parts of the world. China, on the other hand, will become an ageing population like Japan and will lose its economic vigour as we head towards 2050. 

One possible side-effect of these long-term trends is that, over time, Asians in America will dominate higher education, politics and even pop culture because Asians just work harder and have a strong preference for STEM subjects. As the US Supreme court was to take out some forms of affirmative action that privileges blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asian Americans, the work ethic and rigour of Asians would influence the West, so we may see Westerners become less individualistic and adopt more kiasu practices towards their studies. 

Let's face it, if I were a white guy, would I let Asians just walk over me in maths class and tech startups? I don't think so; I can adopt some of the work ethic of my Asian classmates. Similarly, as an Asian in the US, I would also like to be seen as cool. 

Cool might mean being more like Simu Liu than CZ, for example.

There are long-term implications for this. 

Singaporeans who cannot make it in the local system may think they can fly off to a place like Australia or UK where they can academically walk over Caucasians and get GPAs they will never attain in NUS had better be ready for a big fight when they get there. This is because second-generation Singaporeans might already be trying to spoil the market for everyone. 

As for my work deploying my funds in the markets, I've already started to regret moving some DBS to high-yielding REITs as DBS has increased even further. But mistakes are part and parcel of investing life; I've made money even as I thought a red tsunami would sweep Democrats out of the Senate. 

I expect to deploy some funds into the portfolio built by my students this week, but I do not expect any big moves for now. Expect REIT DPUs to be on a downtrend for the next 3 quarters, but prices have already adjusted to account for this fact. 

 

Market Deployment #3 : Will banks conquer the book retailing business?

 

As I run my 28th batch of ERM class tomorrow, I decided to take a short break to visit the latest BookXcess outlet at Wisma Atria that seems like more like a partnership with OCBC bank. This was such an amusing experience that it deserves a blog article on its own.

I've always been a fan and customer of BookXcess and look forward to visiting the branches whenever I was in KL and sometimes in JB. It's not a bookstore like Kinokuniya that stocks the latest an greatest books that support my ambition towards thought leadership. BookXcess has an innovative way of procuring books at rock bottom prices that they get to sell at prices way below e-book prices on Kindle, but you can't be too fussy with titles. You have to take whatever's available on discount.

That being said, I was able to find a few good finance titles and the newage FIRE bible Quit Like a Millionaire can be found there.  It's also selling cookbooks and comics for the cheap.

What I really like is how innovative the arrangement was made with OCBC. If you come for the banking services, the seating is arranged as part of the bookstore, so you can browse while waiting to be served. 

The most amusing part of this bookstore is that banking staff will there to serve you and even help guide you to the books that you want. I've been buying books since I was 7 years old, and I've never seen such an overeager sales team trying so hard to serve me when I'm browsing for books. Of course, along the way, they would remind me that paying for with an OCBC card entitles me to a further 10% discount on books. 

But you know how defensive I get when I meet financial salespeople, so I pointedly asked them whether they sell banking services or books. When they told me that are bankers, I said I'm not interested in banking with them, but I complimented them on the performance of their OCBC stock, and thanked them for the 4+% which beats endowment plans and some structured notes.  

So if you think about OCBC has done something truly brilliant and innovative for readers in Singapore. 

As much as I liked BookXcess, I never believed that they can survive the rents in Singapore. Their KL branches is easily staffed by the stupidest people I know. One counter staff in the Cyber Jaya outlet shoved all the hardbound books I bought into one flimsy plastic bag and pretended not to notice after the bag broke (lucky I brought a haversack). 

With this collaboration, all these problems are solved because the bookstore will be supported by highly motivated finance professionals. Rents can even be shared. Even if you don't like books, this sophisticated "man-trap" has a fairly good hipster cafe and some kind of craft gallery. 

At the moment, I have my doubts about whether this arrangement is sustainable. Here's how I think things can be better:

a) The discounted titles of Bookxcess are not the best partners for a bank. I prefer a more tactical selection of the latest business and self-improvement books to "trap" folks who can be more easily convertible to bank customers. Book title selections should be determined by data scientists.

b) Where money meets books, talks by finance and self-improvement professionals will create more traffic. This is where trainers, speakers and bloggers can work with OCBC to liven up the area.

c) I heard good things about the cafe, but it's located right next to Toastbox where the kopi is probably half the price. 

Within the grander scheme of things, I'm delighted that in a high rental area like Orchard road, we can actually accommodate one Kinokuniya, a Zall bookstore and and a BookXcess store. This is only possible because a banker thought it might be a way to drive more sales of banking services. 

The alternative is having no bookstore on Wisma Atria. 

I guess you can just ignore the bankers when you are browsing books.

The latest inflation numbers are good because they came in lower than expected. The following day, I liquidated 25% of my DBS holdings and placed them into high-yielding US office REITs and business trusts. I still like DBS a lot, but it also went up after going XD, so it's time to spread out my investments quite a bit. 

The next Fed decision to raise inflation rates will occur only after another inflation report in December, so a lot of investors are confirming a real rally on after that event. I think a calculated gamble that inflation will head lower is a good idea as we should only be seeing the lagged effects of the first 75bps raise dome months ago. 

That being said, shifting to high yielding REITs and business trusts is not a really ballsy move.

I leave the ballsy moves to the younger bros. 

Market Deployment #2 : The second crypto Cataclysm.

I consider the First Crypto Cataclysm as the fall of the Terra Blockchain. I lost about $15,000 in that disaster and considered myself fairly lucky, but my crypto course that is focused on passive income folded as stablecoins were found to not to be as stable as presumed. The loss of the course really hurt due to all the man-hours put into coming up with the lab notes.

Thereafter, I thought that the safest strategy would be to buy coins that have already crashed and got some LUNA  and some UST at a fraction of a cent. For the rest of the time, I treated my tokens as amusement park tokens and farmed it on Mirror and Apollo DAO at ridiculous yields of between 200% to 300%. Even today I make about $8 to $10 USD every day from liquidity pools, especially the VIXY-UST pool in Mirror. Every 2-3 days, I put 1000 USTC into a new liquidity pool I find on Apollo / Mirror / Astroport. 

Mirror protocol had its own disaster as of late as the entire developer team stopped supporting the project, Amazingly, someone else compiled the open sourced code found on GitHub and the website was brought back form the dead in multiple addresses. I tried to continue farming some MIAU-UST and, thankfully, avoided getting fleeced so far. 

Instead I continue to make stupid mistakes which cost me $20+ when I tried to use SimpleSwap to convert my LUNA to LUNC but omitted the text in the memo field. 

Even after retreating from a leveraged account for my equities portfolio, I decided to pour in more collateral for my leveraged ETH on Compound, the idea was initially to take advantage of the Merge, but even the merge turned out underwhelming for ETH investors. 

Today ETH is my last leveraged position.

Two days ago, my now tiny position in crypto dropped a further $3,000 USD and I found out quite late that FTX is in trouble. 

To me, this crash is more unexpected than the one that occured on the Terra blockchain. FTX’s SBF is a nice guy and there was nothing to suggest that FTX can become insolvent. It’s easy to talk about hindsight, but even the really smart guys in Temasek did not see this coming. 

I think just like the collapse of LUNA, the collapse of FTX will create ripple effects that will hit other parts of crypto ecosystem, so folks should at least try to move your coins to a decentralised wallet in case your exchange starts to halt withdrawals. 

The question is whether in the grander scheme of things, should investors ditch crypto completely as an asset class?

I don’t think so.

Investors who are sitting on a property and already have a nice equity portfolio, you should continue to put up 1% of their net worth into crypto. If you are risk averse, just put it in BTC and ETH. As volatility is really high, the time difference between An All time Low and All Time High would not be too far apart and we could be talking about a totally different market in 2025. 

Lastly, I think we can learn to enjoy this moment. I’ve always despised the crypto and tech stock pumpsters who were at the top of the world last year telling everybody else to “Have fun staying poor”. If they win, no one would respect prudent risk management anymore. Now that they are silent, I hope they would stay that way. 

Update on my DBS position. I should be expecting some decent dividends from DBS this month end and regardless of the outcome, i have a nice counter-weight to the rest of my REIT position. I’m sceptical of the recent recovery in local stocks as I expect inflation to remain high and herald a more sustained effort to raise interest rates by the Fed. This means more pain for REITs but also a longer time to get some bargain hunting done. 

In fact my DBS position is a bet that folks will underestimate the conviction of the Fed and we will see a battery of 50 basis point raises all the way until June 2023.  

Week after next, I expect to invest funds into student portfolios without leverage, so money has been earmarked beforehand. 

Market Deployment #1 : What society are we trying to build?

 

Two weeks ago, I could finally volunteer at my own secondary school. Blog readers will note that, for one reason or another, I tend to be invited by RI or ACS to speak about the importance of personal finance, but somehow, I never was given a chance to speak at my alma mater.

You cannot call Swiss Cottage Secondary School a bad school, regardless of how negative my personal experience was when I was there from 1987-1990. Swiss Cottage is ranked no. 1 amongst the non-autonomous secondary schools, and entry is extremely competitive with a PSLE cut-off of an AL score of 11 or below. 

My volunteering work was fun and drama-free, but I thought I had one issue to raise, not so much about my secondary school, but what kind of society Singapore is building. 

According to upper management of the school, Swiss Cottage was a leader in educational desegregation. For several years, Swiss Cottage mixed express (AL < 11 ), normal(academic) (AL around 21)  and normal(technical) (AL around 25 ) students within a class. To ensure that nobody gets stigmatised, only the form teacher knows which category a student belongs to. Subject-based banding was imposed so students study with others at their own pace for specific subjects, so a kid can find themselves in a fast-moving Maths class but a slow-moving CL2 class.  

I was fortunate to be able to hobnob with the teachers of my school, and taught me things like always using "positive words". I admitted that to help special needs kids, I told the strongest kids to help the "weak", but professional educators are discouraged from using words the way employed.  I did feel kinda bad after day 1, but when I started on day 2, I was able to just get the fastest kids to help the slowest ones ( to earn a longer recess ) without being too judgmental about them. 

All things considered, I'm proud of my secondary school for trying hard to create the semblance of what Singapore society should look like in the future. Less discrimination and more inclusiveness.

But there are issues with this policy.

Parents are now stigmatising secondary schools for mixing Express and Normal students. In parent chat groups, my wife told me that the perceived value of autonomous schools like Bukit Panjang Government High is no longer sought after because some parents had traumatised children who cannot adapt to having boisterous normal-stream kids in the same class. This is a tad elitist, but I'm sympathetic because there were normal stream kids in my ECA group when I was a teenager, and they love annoying the "mugger-toad" kids like me. In those days, you just shrug it off because it's great training for NS anyway.

If we want to retool the education system to be inclusive, we should not adopt half-measures.

Swiss Cottage clearly has high standards for an Express stream program, but the cost is desegregation. Another school I checked online, Anglican High, has a cut-off of AL12, which is a lower standard but does not offer desegregated classes. As an SAP school, the price to pay for admission is a pass in Higher Chinese.

This is perverse and disturbing. 

Elitist parents can get a safe harbour if they volunteer their children as Chinese elites. Pump enough tuition money into your kids, and they can live in their own "gated communities" free from minorities and normal-stream students. 

I'm not raising the alarm on the really elite schools like Raffles, ACS or Chinese High because good grades are a strict criterion, and they are a small part of the population.

No matter how you improve the system, parents will not change their mindsets overnight. The incoming principal of my secondary school gave me a spiel about choosing a secondary school based on my kid's special interests and talents. I smiled and said that that was not something most parents would believe in. The old boy networks are just too powerful to miss out on in life.

If you want to reform the schools, do it across the spectrum and don't give rich, racist parents a safe harbour.

I've actually done something I might regret later with the funds I got from liquidating my margin accounts. I put most of them into just one DBS stock at the moment. The move is simple and elegant, and I hope to get about 4+% yielding instruments that can benefit from rising interest rates.  

No, I did not diversify between the banks because my objective is to collect dividends in November and slowly liquidate DBS into ultra-high-yielding REITs from December onwards. 

It's arguable whether I'm better off with SSBs or T-bills, but right now, I want a liquid instrument that can bet that markets will underestimate the conviction of the Fed to raise interest rates further beyond 5%.

Also, I can easily stomach the volatility, which is not high anyway because... it is DBS.

 

Market Assessment #5 : Old Money vs New Money

 

As we continue our discussion on status groups, for a financial blog, we should learn to distinguish between Old Money and New Money.

Old Money

Old Money has evolved to come up with a distinctive style that is quite hard to imitate. This is characterised by high levels of financial and cultural capital. The objective of Old Money is not to be noticed by ordinary people, but they want to be recognised by their own kind.

When it comes to fashion, Old Money does not try to be flashy or attract unnecessary attention. Colours are often muted. While I'm no fashion expert, some articles I researched recommend dressing up like you are attending a tennis match. Old Money brands include Ralph Lauren and Chanel - these are brands which have been around for a long time.

From a financial perspective Old Money, while undisputably rich, may have limits when it comes to conspicuous consumption because their wealth is often locked into trust funds. They have many other ways to distinguish themselves, and this can involve their high cultural capital. Old Wealth can spend a lot of time studying art, and it's not really fun for ordinary people to appreciate some complicated movements in classical music. 

Another aesthetic Old Money tends to love is patina. It's one thing to buy a luxury watch worth six digits, but Old Money can inherit a 200-year-old timepiece that has oxidation at the right kind of places. 

New Money

New Money is within reach of professionals in business, finance, law or medicine. For a while, the crypto folks we also part of this group of people.  

We should be more familiar with the conspicuous consumption of New Money. New Money has made their wealth within the same generation, so they can be quite self-conscious of their low cultural capital. 

And this chip on their shoulder is the reason why luxury companies make so much money every year. New Rich have the ability and willingness to spend on supercars, megayachts and Birkin Bags. To compete with other members of New Money, they are even happy to decorate their servants and employees in similar designer gear. 

When it comes to Art, New Money has no time to study the works of an artist like Renoir, but they are happy to plonk millions of dollars on Jeff Koons or an NFT. 

Imitation and counter-signalling

Now let us have a discussion of what this means for us ordinary mortals who are neither old money nor new money.

One way ordinary folks like us interact with Old and New Money is through imitation. 

While we can't adopt all the aspects of the wealthy, we can focus on adopting some parts of the wealthy into our lifestyle. I noticed that a lot of middle-income Singaporeans have a strong interest in luxury watches, and there are plenty of options from $5,000 - $20,000 range like Rolex and IWc. These brands cannot solely operate on the upper ends of the economic strata, so coming up with mid-range options is important for the bottom line. The problem with this is that for these luxury items, anyone with the right amount of credit can own a luxury watch, so I don't understand why there's a prestige in owning a luxury watch.  This is why my personal policy is not to wear one to most engagements, preferring to own stocks in Hour Glass instead.

Another way in which ordinary folks can deal with these status groups is to engage in counter-signalling. For some folks, it is simply impossible to be part of even Old Money or New Money, and imitation can only take you so far. So people form counter-cultures or groups that are directly opposed to Old or New Money. 

One example of counter-cuture is a rebellious group in the 1980s called Centrepoint Kids who are basically Ah Bengs/Ah Lians with a JPOP aesthetic who loved hanging around Far East Plaza and Centrepoint. They love buying cheap jewellery at this place called Lips Enterprises that still exists today. Centrepoint kids are rebelling against the mainstream good boys and girls who study hard and want to live the Singapore Dream.

I'd like to think that the FIRE movement is a counter-culture to Old and New Money. FIRE folks use money to buy their freedom from a toxic workplace and gain more control over their lives. The preferred approach is to be frugal and track their expenses. The most prominent FIRE folks have no identifiable aesthetic - our favourite brands are Decathlon and Uniqlo. We also eat at food courts and kinda proud about taking public transport. 

An understanding of the differences between Old Money, and New Money and the twin responses to them can help many of us in decoding the consumption behaviour of Singaporeans and stand our ground when pursuing our financial independence goals.

This is why when I met another trainer in my industry who told me that he spends $1,000 a month on his pet poodle, I replied with a smile that he probably spends more on his dog than how much I spend on my son. 

On the markets, I noticed that many students are buying T-Bills because they are yielding north of 4%. I made a presentation this morning to ask that some folks reconsider because even DBS is yielding more than T-Bills and can even generate higher dividends over time. Also, there is more flexibility as it is entirely possible that the market bottom can happen within the next 6 months.

Market Assessment #4 : Why we pursue status ?

 

One topic that a lot of personal finance books rarely discuss is status. Why do people seem to be obsessed with their status and why the pursuit of status can actually lead to wealth destruction. As such, a book like Status and Culture by David Marx is a useful addition to a reader's collection because developing an ability to identify status-seeking manoeuvres is the first step to curbing one's own impulses.

There are four important points regarding status :

• Status is a position within society that denotes respect and perceived importance.
• Status comes with rights and duties, but having status does accrue benefits.
• Status has to be bestowed by others.
• Status is contextual, based on how we are treated at a time and place.

Status matters to me even post-financial freedom. In Singapore, I found out the hard way that you will get abused if you fall into a lower status. I will never forget being shabbily treated when I tried to apply for my wife's Singapore citizenship with ICA, as I was queuing with the folks who are also doing the same for their Vietnamese wives, I was shouted at by boomer auntie counter staff after I said I was an unemployed student. Only after escalation to the woman's manager was I treated better because I revealed I was a law student with SMU (with the requisite non-Singlish orang atas accent).  

So the pursuit of status is really fundamental to being a human being and a higher status does lead to a better quality of life.

When people come together, they form status hierarchies and some fairly universal rules become established. One rule is that a person cannot claim more status than what they deserve. 

The four principles that run in status hierarchies are as follows :

• Status maximization - we desire high status and fear low status.
• Status achievement - we can level up and improve our status via our talents, accomplishments, possessions and virtue.
• Status integrity - we cannot claim more status than what we deserve.
• Status mobility - we can migrate to a different status hierarchy that values us more.

In my first company Procter & Gamble, employees are subject to a three-grade rating system where getting a grade A is very hard and competitive. As much as tried to get a good rating, I was not able to punch above the higher end of the B grade regardless of how much I invested in my IT skills and certifications. I'm also ranked very low socially among the "management associates" because I don't enjoy small talk during lunch about scuba diving, prefer clowning with operations staff,  and certainly don't see myself as a young and fabulous "yuppie".

So I migrated to a different status hierarchy. 

I used my savings and investments to synthetically build up my wage increments. If I saved 50% of my take-home pay and invested it at 8%, my annual increment will receive a 4% boost the following year from dividends. In a good year, my increment will be higher than someone with a Grade A. Of course, I can't really share this technique with my competition because if a Grade A employee started saving 50%, I'd be toast. 

The funny thing is that after replacing about 60-70% of my expenses with my dividends, I became much more confident about myself, got a lot more vocal and disagreeable, and I actually did get a few A grades after we got sold off to HP. There was no FIRE movement in those days, and I was really trying to build a sub-culture with just myself. But these days I can join a new FIRE movement that values frugality and low-key living instead.

I'm actually really obsessed with this topic of status right now and in the next article, I will talk about the different status markers of Old Money, New Money and FIRE money. So guys who want to hear about Patek Phillip watches and Bugattis may want to read the article I will put up next.

On my observation of the markets, I'm very happy to see a small rebound even after Hong Kong had a crash on Monday. I don't think it is time to move into the markets yet. If on November 2nd, the Fed raises by 75bps, that will be within the realm of market expectations so there should not be a big response. But if the Fed raises by 50bps, there may be a case to start buying a few local counters. 

 

Market Assessment #3 : Are real estate agents worse than FAs ?

 

Some parvenu wannabe on social media, incensed at my loathing for FAs, publicly challenged me to air my views about real estate agents, so this article is about my response to this challenge.

I don't have any beef against real estate agents. Yes, they spam my mailbox with letters addressed to "Owner", but I dump all these flyers into the rubbish bin located right in the middle of the PO Box area in my condo. Real estate agents also have to find a way to play up the real estate markets, so in any secondary school reunion, expect real estate agents to work very hard trying to convince you to transact regardless of whether it's a buy or sell transaction. The trick is to simply avoid asking the barber whether you need a haircut and read books on real estate instead. 

If anything, if I do end up doing conveyancing work, I would even end up selling to them!

To assist me in writing this article, I wound up reading Direct by Kathryn Judge which discusses the impact of middlemen in our economy and how we can find creative ways to defeat the information asymmetries that exist in our society today. Apparently in the US, real estate agents are likely to be more deplorable than FAs - whoever sells real estate actually pays 5-6% when they sell their property which incentivises wasteful activities like mass mailing.

My real estate friends are actually quite nice to me given they get front-row seats to see what I enjoy saying about financial advisors. But when I am not around, I get wind of very amusing attempts to get some business done. I think in this climate of rising interest rates, real estate agents are seeing a potential drop in sales and they have been trying to talk the markets up. I think it's fine to promote transactions when interest rates are going up, but when you do this to an old friend, you must be seriously trying to insult his intelligence or selfish as hell. 

But who am I to judge? No one has ever actually tried to do this to me.

One important point raised by someone else is useful when comparing real estate agents to FAs. Real estate markets are inefficient as every home is unique and idiosyncratic. This means that if you can find a real estate agent that really understands your needs and financial situation, and you act on their recommendations, you are more likely to profit immensely from your decision if the recommendation was made in good faith. This is opposed to financial advisors who can take a big cut of commissions when they sell a product to you, and there's very little leeway for the product to earn decent risk-adjusted returns net of fees. The best an FA can do for you is to minimise fees, but it takes a true friend to recommend you a "buy term and invest the rest" plan when other products promise much higher commissions. 

You don't have to take my word for it, just observe the folks around you :

• I have only engaged one real estate agent in my whole life when I bought an EC and I'm sitting on $600,000 in gains today.
• On the other hand, I see so many folks now in a state of panic when their over-confident FAs placed their funds in China and Technology stocks without any consideration for the underlying volatility. A professional FA is supposed to manage your risk for you, not take bold momentum or trend-following bets with your hard-earned money.  

On local markets, I really cannot imagine the carnage that will occur tomorrow after the unveiling of new leadership in China. Hong Kong stocks tumbled because this does not look like a team that will promote capitalism and business. As Singapore is highly correlated with Hong Kong, I think we should expect more capital losses but I'm hopeful that healthy bargains will be everywhere in mid-November, when I may make my first move after retreating from all leveraged accounts. 

I do hope that I will turn out to be wrong.

Market Assessment #2 : Three Singapore Hypocrisies

 

In my last article, I railed about how academics who have nice sinecures funded by tax-payers can label landlords parasites when, to me, collecting rental payouts can be seen as one attempt to replicate the same kind of financial security academics have. 

Apparently, I'm not done because there are a class of hypocrisies we see in a society where sanctimonious assholes praise or celebrate some acts and condemn other very similar manoeuvres. 

I suspect some acts are condoned because some perpetrators have more social or cultural capital. 

It's like if a poor man likes eating, he's labelled a glutton, but when a rich guy does it, he's a gourmet. 

Here are other hypocrisies I discovered :

a) You can receive advantages from early academic success, but living on investments made earlier in life makes you a rent-seeker

There's always a lot of angst over landlords who bought the property ago and now enjoying positive cash flow after paying off mortgages. If coming from academic scholars, this is highly hypocritical because many of these academics are flying high because of the stellar A-level results they had in the past. While it can be argued that scholars may have gotten high ratings in the public sector, they had a sexier project portfolio mix and a steeper CEP, but landlords also needed to maintain and hold onto their property and resist past the temptation to sell to enjoy the rents they have today. 

We pay property taxes above and beyond income tax, but we don't tax scholars for their sinecures.

b) Enrichment from buying Executive Condos is unjust, but assortative mating, which creates more inequality, is even encouraged.

There have been reports from salty people that folks like me who own executive condominiums are unjustly enriched because we see about $500,000 of capital gains since they bought their units five years ago. I'm happy to say that in this market bear, looking at the value of my EC is one of the few things that gives me joy beyond my CPF-SA account. So some policy adjustments will be made to nerf EC purchases and sales because it exacerbates inequality.

But no one has publicly admitted one of the primary causes of inequality is assortative mating, where people marry spouses who have the same educational qualifications. This gives a ridiculous advantage to their kids, who inherit higher IQs and greater social and economic status than their parents. I think there is a special hell for folks who tolerate assortative mating where doctors marry doctors and summa cum laude marry summa cum laude; some even go as far as to organise matchmaking events for folks with similar qualifications. 

I've publicly challenged policymakers to create situations where folks from Raffles marry someone from ITE. Why can't top software engineers marry ah lians? Why? 

You can code in LISP, but cannot communicate with an Ah Lian?

Next time someone ask me how much my training business contributes to income inequality, I ask them why their spouse is so educated? Why ITE cannot?

c) Inheriting wealth is bad, but inheriting a high IQ and conscientiousness is fine

Society is very upset at folks from the lucky sperm club. 

In many countries, inheritance taxes are quite large, and Singapore has done very well as a wealth hub because we don't have inheritance taxes, but there seems to be increasing rancour from leftist bastards who want to see inheritance taxes come back in Singapore.

This is unfair because we're missing out on the other half of folks from the lucky sperm club, folks who did not necessarily inherit wealth but the high IQs and conscientiousness from their assortatively mated parents. 

You can perform a thought experiment at the street level. 

It's actually accepted practice to pay thousands of dollars to tuition teachers to ramp up kid's grades, but if I save the thousands of dollars and invest it in a lump sum and transfer it to him on graduation, if he fails to enter university, the dividends would give a nice boost to his diploma starting salary in Singapore that may even be superior to graduate starting salaries. I've made public presentations on this matter, and parents always object to my alternative approach. 

At the end of the day, how do we interpret the root cause of these hypocrisies?

I think one useful approach understands that human beings form hierarchies and confer status to each other. Hierarchies themselves can be isolated from each other and are arranged in a hierarchy of their own. If the RI-High-IQ hierarchy is ascendant, they might mess with the ACS-High-Wealth hierarchy and maybe find ways to tax wealth but create privileges for the professional caste. If the opposing faction wins, taxes will be lowered, and more questions on paper generals will arise, and entrepreneurs will be celebrated. 

I don't come from an elite secondary school, I think that at the extremes, Singapore society is a compromise between the powerful RI and ACS factions embedded in elite society. 

Everybody else will have to accept being crushed for being forced into compromises. 

This is why Lawrence Wong is the Prince that was Promised. He comes from a non-elite school. 

Fortunately for us retail investors, the markets crash, affecting elites and peons alike. Had I not fled, portfolios built by my students would be seeing negative returns today.  It's clear from the data that inflation has not come under control in the US, so we should expect raises in early November. China's stubborn adherence to the zero covid policy is also bad news. 

Next month's inflation numbers will hint as to whether we will see s 50bps or 75bps rise in December. 

In the meantime, my war chest remains untouched.

 

Market Assessment #1 : Why Elites hate Landlords

 

These few days have been interesting, I'm seeing a lot of hate for landlords, with some academics calling landlord parasites etc. Some points may be well argued, so I don't really see a need to rebutt these arguments. Instead I just want to try to understand why elites hate landlords and maybe highlight the hypocrisy of these folks while we're at it.

Not everyone will agree with my worldview about living in Singapore. 

Imagine a wheel with elite schools like RI, ACS and Chinese High. 

As this wheel spins, it crushes the non-elite and neighbourhood schools beneath it as these schools go on to put alumni into positions of power. Some of these powerful folk end up in jobs that are almost sinecures in Singapore, cushy professorships, or senior civil servants on the correct side of the "scholar-farmer" divide. Some even then go on to establish powerful gangs, not unlike the Paypal mafia, to entrench their power in some professional fields. On reddit, I even read about students complaining that their job offers were rescinded because of this "mafia" action although I was not able to verify this. 

If you are nobility ensconced comfortably on the wheel, you have unparalleled access to wealth and power.

Faced with this arrangement in society, what is there left for us farmers to do? 

We desire to break the wheel, but we know this is hard. I hope PM Lawrence Wong will be the Prince that was Promised. He's someone from a neighborhood secondary school who can break this wheel forever, but I am entitled to dream and hope.

So I know a revolution will not make any sense, so I take a different route. I discover that if you buy REITs, the dividends you receive are blind to position on the wheel. 

Dividends do not check your gender, sexual orientation, university grades, the schools you attend or your current estimate potential. 

Dividends pay an equal amount to all shareholders.

Elites hate this.

Over the years, I farmed my meagre farmer paycheck to buy industrial property, land, and when I was in a really bad place in my career after leaving the private sector, I lowered my pay so much, I was able to buy one executive condominium. The capital gains from my home, now has equity nine times my annual salary when I was working for the shithole.

What is there not to love about rising home prices?

After years of studying the financial markets, getting financial certifications, I built a system to invest for dividends, it's not rocket science, but it favors folks who really know how to save money. 

If it is any injustice, I have to admit that I also did inherit money. 

My father started what is today the most successful pet shop franchise in Singapore if not South East Asia, I deployed my father's capital to give my parents comfortable twilight years using rental payouts. While I've yet to directly enjoy the money from my forefathers, I do have a measure of control over it, preferring an ascetic lifestyle so as not to corrupt my kids.

1) The question is this : Am I a parasite ?

If the answer is yes, then elites have a lot to answer for. I never had a sinecure, much less one powered by tax payer's money. I built my own sinecure with dividends payouts, and when it is time to face off a scholar centric work culture, my financial freedom allowed me to say no and enter law school for four years without pay. 

So the Elite can have there sinecure, but landlords can't synthetically build their own ?

2) Does inheriting wealth and land make me a parasite? 

If the answer is this yes, then I suggest as a society we account for items you can inherit beyond what written in your will. Intelligent people inherit a high IQ and possibly high conscientiousness. In law school, I might be able to read 8-12 cases a day, I have classmates that can do 20-30. I cannot accept that this has nothing to do with inherited genes. We are products of both nature and nurture.  

As the Strategic Retreat phase is over, we will now hunker down to observe the markets to find a good timing to get our war-chest back into the markets.

• On 13th October, US will be releasing inflation figures, I suspect while inflation is down, it would not be enough for the Fed to stop raising rates.
• On 14th October, MAS will release their actions on the $NEER. AS inflation will not be tamed sufficiently, it's not unreasonable to bet that MAS will steepen and recenter the $NEER
• This should lead to 75 bps increase in interest on 2nd November.
• Markets will see a bottom yet.

The economist has some really bad news for policy wonks. To push inflation down to close to 2%, unemployment in the US may need to reach 7%+. 

The US is still creating new jobs today.

Maybe this is the time to think about Communist revolutions and what will happen if there is peasant uprising in Singapore.

For sure, if an uprising occurs, capitalists, landlord and rent-seekers will be murdered or have their wealth confiscated. 

But history says that intellectuals will not have easy time as well. 

Can ask Xi Jinping's dad if you want the details. 

Strategic Retreat #3 : How I assess your man bun

The week has become more relaxed as I attempt to “study” for my next blood test by eating more strictly and going for more hikes. A pal wanted to do some networking with folks who understand a little bit more about Malaysian property, so I called in a few favours to get some Malaysians to show up to explain how to pick up cheap properties in JB and KL. I don’t think any opportunity can beat Singapore property, but Malaysian property can be a good lifestyle decision post-FIRE. 

The my pal asked me a question the next day.

He asked me what I think of his man bun.

I didn’t even know he has a man bun, much less act as an authority on it. For the past 30 years, I gave only one instruction to the barber which is “medium slope”, and even right up today, I have no idea what other kinds of slope instructions there are that can be given to barbers. I did try other styles like Armani, but like ILPs, Armanis are just a shit excuse for the barber to charge more and even I do look like Jacky Cheung, I can’t sing as well and it’s even rumoured that I might actually be better with money management.

I have no comment on man buns, I can only suggest that he ask the ladies what they think about it. ( Update : The aunties are not a huge fan, but lions do not care about the opinion of sheep. )

I think what’s more important is the passive income that comes with man bun. There was Chinese poem that says that as high as a mountain can be, you need the presence of an angel to bring it great esteem. Deep oceans are mediocre unless it’s graced by the presence of a Dragon. 

I think that this idea can be reapplied to man buns. My pal has a decent stream of passive income since the last time we met, which explains why the sudden desire for Malaysian women and landed property, I think that’s the clincher. 

Of course, he can’t sell his man buns for money more than I can shave my pubes to get more dividends every month.

I’ve concluded my strategic retreat. 

My objective is to secure enough cash for 2023 and maximise my tax deductibles. I have completed the following actions :

• Set aside enough family expenses inclusive of mortgage payments until December 2023 in a separate bucket.
• Place $15,300 into my SRS account, to reduce my assessable income
• Set aside enough CPF voluntary contributions to ensure that I pay zero income taxes in 2023. 

The CPF move is particularly important as a contribution for a 48 year old will yield about 3.22% as it is spread between three accounts, tax benefits will bring it up further. More importantly, it should be noted that the CPF-SA is very much superior to a SSB purchase, as you get some creditor protection and interest rates can even be increased in the future as it is tied to yields of 10-year government bonds.

Finally, none of the proceeds are invested yet. I’m adopting a wait and see stance as I expect things to still get worse with better US jobs numbers. If on 13 Oct, we still don’t see a significant drop in inflation, we’ll likely see more money flee the equity markets. 

Be careful when read news on Yahoo Finance, a lot of fund management types are harbouring fantasies of the Fed easing their monetary tightening when the Fed is just getting started. In similar vein, you need to shut off your Real Estate agent pals who still think that this is a great time to buy more property.

Strategic Retreat #2 : Details on deleveraging from margin brokers

 

I was meaning to update this blog a while ago, but I think I better wait for all my funds to arrive in my bank account before I piss off my margin brokers any further. 

But before I do this, an update on my health. I saw a specialist and it is likely that my situation is not deadly or urgent, so I tried to get blood test in two weeks just to see whether my numbers improve, if they do, I may skip the scans and go back to the public medical system. The downside is that I need to test whether lifestyle changes can actually improve my numbers. I've been hiking quite aggressively for the past few days and refrained from eating dairy products and red meat. 

Ok, deleveraging totally from my margin accounts and moving them into my bank account took a while and is not as orderly as I expected. I'm sharing my notes here in case some readers employ the same platforms as I do.

I will begin with my more pleasant experience with Interactive Brokers :

• Selling from Interactive brokers is easy, but it's safer to use the Close button rather than the Sell button because it's harder to make a mistake on selling quantity. I'm dealing with over 30+ counters per broker.
• Note that you cannot use the "Sell Everything" feature in the platform for SG stocks. 
• Transferring from platform to bank account was fast and I transferred on Monday and received my funds on Tuesday evening.
• The system will say that sometimes a rep will call me up to confirm my fund's transfer if the amounts are large. This did not happen. 
• After the transfer, I have about $1,000+ left worth of fractional lots so IB is prompting me with threats of margin calls and liquidation, which can be daunting if the money has yet to arrive in your bank account.  

My more unpleasant experience was with Maybank Kim Eng :

• I sold my stocks on the mobile app and my sale was incomplete. The reason was that the mobile app did not display the number of stocks I own correctly. The rep told me that stocks gained from corporate actions in the past are not reflected in the mobile app at all.
• This means that I need to go through two rounds of selling. My second round was sold via the mobile app and I referred to a screenshot of my desktop app that reflected all the stocks I actually owned. 
• Why such a convoluted method of selling? Simple, the desktop app is extremely slow during market operating hours and sometimes may hang. The mobile app responds quickly.
• This has the unpleasant effect of allowing my broker to earn more commissions even though it is already unhealthy compared to the alternative. 
• The money came a day later than IB, I received it yesterday evening.

All things considered, I don't want to be too harsh to Maybank Kim Eng because at least they have a responsive team and were able to use human contact to soften the edges of their drastically inferior technology so they may be better for folks desiring a human touch. I used to have a margin account with DBS Vickers and no one was there to even answer my call during the March 2020 crash, and I closed the account after my retreat. 

Also, IB margin financing rates are now over 5% for SG stocks while MBKE is 3.8%. 

Finally, I've decided to maintain both my accounts and prepare for my releverage sometime in the future. 

But which system will I employ as my primary margin broker is anyone's guess at the moment. IB's rates are high, but I think it might be determined by an algorithm so it may come down faster in the future. 

Strategic Retreat #1 : Personal Update

 

I've been receiving a lot of well-wishers over my health condition so I thought I'd share an update. My medical checkup yesterday ruled out the possibility of pancreatitis, which can be good news or bad news. Good news is that I'm less likely to be suddenly hospitalized over the next few days, the bad news is that we have no idea why my Lipase numbers shot up so much over such a short time. 

Googling my condition is a bad idea because it can be a gall bladder problem or even pancreatic cancer. 

At this stage, there's nothing much the system can do for me as even I tried my best, my next appointment is a month's time, so I pulled some strings to get a private gastroenterologist to look at me next Monday. I'm not impressed with public healthcare right now because the government hospitals just rolled out this white elephant called the Epic system and every consult now is basically waiting for the doctor to waste time with data entry. So as it stands, I need to use the private sector can help me rule out the more adverse root causes, but I'll be paying through my nose because of the bodily scans and I need to manage the conflict of interest with a private doctor. 

At this point of time, I can only say that I'm really grateful for dividend payouts over the years as I'm not on any insurance panel. 

Which brings me to the issue of our strategic retreat from the markets.

I really don't enjoy being right about deleveraging but markets have attempted several rallies unsuccessfully over the past few days and we're not even getting one solid rebound at the moment. 

Fortunately, I have the luxury of time and can carefully plan how to counter attack when the fear is at the highest peak. 

There are several ways to go about the attempt, one involves high yielding REITs which have been beaten senseless by retreating investors, another involves banks. 

A couple of strategies seem credible right now - using dollar cost averaging to go in over the next year. Another is gaming the CPF and SRS system to maximize tax deductibility. A general approach will probably be explained in a free video, but detailed steps will be incorporated into my training program in November.  

We'll see how things go next week.