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 just came back from a 3-day holiday in Bintan and wanted to talk about it, because reading this might help someone else avoid the same mistake I made.
Earlier this year, my mum got hospitalised, and the hospital debited $12,000 from my Medisave account. As I wanted to lower my tax liability, I took dividend payouts to reimburse my Medisave, since all 5 members relied on it, as I have no ISP.
So that was my first mistake: the maximum claimable tax deductible is capped at $8,000, at least based on what Havend's CPF guide said. The excess $4,000 does not do squat for my taxes.
I realised my second mistake two weeks ago when the CPF board wrote to me to say that I still need to make about $4k+ contributions to my CPF-MA from my freelance work in 2024.
That was my second mistake because I thought my $12k contribution would perform double duty and offset the $4k owed from income earned in 2024. I found out the hard way that it was not the case.
So I spent the day at the CPF Board to ask around if there's anything I can do to avoid the $4k contribution. The staff there cannot do anything for me, so they asked me to submit an appeal online.
But rules are rules, and I did not read the fine print. Even if the CPF Board can bend the rules because I am acting as a responsible member throughout the year, I'm not sure how many hoops I need to jump through to finally get the $4k waived.
In the end, what made me give up on pursuing this case was hearing a sad story about someone who got scammed. I imagine my funds safely tucked in my CPF-MA, and the only way I can get "scammed" is a policy change when every Singaporean gets scammed together.
I went beyond just paying what I owed to my CPF-MA; I secured my mortgage for the upcoming year and covered family expenses. The damage to the liquid funds was profound, and I still need to have enough funds through January 2026 and the Chinese New Year, which is a dry dividends period.
Then I had an idea.
I have a toy leverage account with IBKR that I use to teach leveraged investing to my students. It's been collecting my training fees for a while, and I've not touched the dividends for aeons, as it was just there to offset the amounts owed to the broker.
Looking at the interest rate, I realised that it has fallen so low that it is around 3.3-3.4%, lower than CPF-MA, and I am not counting the meagre tax benefits I get from my contribution.
So I withdrew a small amount of SGD to cover my cash needs through January and February.
Right now, my leverage ratio is conservative at x1.6, invested in a dividend account that offsets margin account fees.
But it's funny that I'm borrowing money to contribute to my Medisave.
So am I a guru or a goondu?
Anyway, the moral of the story is, if you want to top up your Medisave, cap it at $8,000; there's always next year.
It's
been a great honour and privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop
for you.
We
begin Batch 40 with substantial changes to the way we conduct this course – 40%
of the course has been overhauled.
The
most significant change is the introduction of the Starter Portfolio, a simple
3-stock portfolio designed for beginners and stable. It can provide a
reasonable 5% dividend right off the bat while being more robust to interest
rate changes. This makes investing a whole lot easier and less intimidating
than portfolios built for previous batches.
We
also stopped segregating our blue-chip equities exercises from the REIT
exercises, combining the STI and SG Next 50 stocks into one category for three
levels of factor back-testing. In this exercise, we saw the importance of free
cash flow yields and dividend growth in assessing how good a stock counter is.
Also,
we experimented with ditching analyst reports in favour of a series of LLM
prompts to deep-dive into a particular stock counter. We first have the LLM
assess the stock price purely from financial statements, then compare it with
analyst reports available online. We concluded that analysts' reports are overly
optimistic compared to analyses based solely on reported business results.
Our
outcome is a 16-stock portfolio designed to yield about 6.2%, which I am proud
to put my money where my mouth is.
As AI developments further disrupt investment training, expect changes to how we conduct our course.
Lastly, Batch 40 will participate actively in the FB group.
I've been hearing a lot of stories about rage-quitting in my loose gamer networks. Folks, my generation just rage-quits a game halfway through, which is actually really disrespectful to the other players on the board. But at a broader level, Gen X is really starting to get into the habit of quitting, whether it's relationships, underperforming investments, jobs, or just hobbies.
Quitting something is a two-sided affair. People get cranky when they get old. Sometimes the other party is indeed an asshole, but other times, it's the quitter who no longer has the emotional reserves to tolerate shit in their life. For folks in my generation, quitting can only increase, as sometimes we just want more peace and don't want to deal with others' eccentricities.
We can build a logical framework to determine if it is tied to quitting something.
The first question to ask is straightforward: Does life get better when we subtract something from our lives? Test this hypothesis, take the matter out or cut the person off and see if life really gets better; if so, it passes the first test.
The second question is whether other people have quit for the same reasons, or if we can find a way to describe the mischief. This is something I learned from Gen Z: while it is convenient to quit something, there should also be room to exercise mercy, because you can work on yourself to cope better.
The book Red Flag/Green Flag by Dr Ali Fenwick is instrumental because Gen X lacks the vocabulary to label toxic behaviour.
What kind of relationship is a situationship? Why is such and such a behaviour intolerable? Is it because someone is trying to undermine you by amplifying your insecurities? Some behaviours look like innocent green flags to Gen X but are red flags to Gen Z, and we stupidly tolerate them while the younger person will run away!
If the toxic behaviour can be categorised and labelled, then there is at least a precedent for other people deciding to end a relationship. So it passes the second step.
The two-step test is a firmer guide than just flagrantly rage-quitting, but to be fair, some folks really have been tolerating substandard behaviour for too long, and I know some of them, and I quietly wish them all the best.
So lately, I've been asking myself this question:
Should I quit my D&D that I have been playing for 40+ years?
Amazingly, quitting D&D passes the first test!
I would save on the amount I spend on D&D books, and I already have a plethora of hobbies to take their place, as I'm now a content creator, trainer, and actually in singing classes. I can move into wargames, or even play CCGs again, as my kids are into trading cards. My courses are like a game run as a DM anyway. From a utility perspective, D&D no longer offers me a lot other than my obsession with running through combat mechanics in my head and dreaming up doing tons of damage to imaginary monsters, which I can apply to programming trading algorithms anyway and make lots of real money.
It's the second test that I am ambivalent about.
Yes, there is precedent for D&D going woke, and people are quitting because of the change in art direction. It's also not returning to normality, unlike the game and movie industries, where wokeness is now exacting a heavy financial penalty on the companies involved. D&D has, in fact, doubled down, and the demographic has become more diverse. But the wokeness does not affect or offend me, as I can tolerate the player base I play with if I pick older gamers or even fellow financial influencers.
So the second test fails, but writing this article took a lot of effort, as D&D has been a part of my personal identity for almost my entire life. I suspect my kids will be a significant factor - if they are not interested in my hobby, I will have to eventually let go so they don't have to dispose of it themselves.
Hopefully, before the year ends, I either get to play or DM the 2024 ruleset a few times with some pals.
I've been away from the game for a while now, but I'm enjoying the reads and keeping some networking ties with the gaming community.
As we reach December, I will be slowing down to conduct my course next week and to do some reading this holiday month.
December is now becoming a nice break because my reading hobby is intense for the rest of the year, focusing on serious finance topics. Giving myself a month to catch up on fiction is more utilitarian than practical.
I'm currently two-thirds of the way to Eisenhorn Omnibus. The gateway novel to the Warhammer 40,000 universe. You can access the link here.
Immediately after this, I will start Han Bo Reum's Every Day I Read. I buy some fiction from bookstores every now and then, since someone needs to sustain these cultural spaces in Singapore, right?
As for videos, I only created one video before the holiday began.
I've recently learnt of this term "financial nihilism". In societies like the UK, young people who are locked out of the housing market have given up on financially responsible behaviour and taken on ridiculous risks, like buying altcoins. In Singapore, we don't have a real estate problem because HDB keeps housing affordable. Still, the financial nihilists are usually folks who didn't get the right paper qualifications to do well here, so they get into things like altcoins, NFTs, drop-shipping and even day trading for a living.
The video that discusses this phenomenon will be out tomorrow afternoon:
With no new videos out for the next two weeks, I will be updating this blog more often. In a week, I will be sharing some pretty dramatic changes to my work in investment training if the STI continues to rise.
This week, my wife and kids are touring China with the in-laws, so I'm living with my mum while fulfilling my usual training obligations.
Initially, I was busy this week attending talks on AI and fireside chats with the CEOs of three Capitaland REITs/Business Trusts. Still, by the end of the week, I found myself lagging behind on content creation, so I spent most of the weekend creating next week's videos today.
My usual pals are also out of the country, so whatever I wanted to do, I had to do it alone, at least for just this weekend.
Starting tomorrow, I will launch my video on A Little Red Hen, a gem of a tale that can be told to kids as young as 3 years old about the importance of effort in reaping rewards.
Thereafter, on Wednesday, I will post a video on the concept of Core vs. Satellite portfolios.
Finally, my video on the Next 50 Capitaland REITs will be published next Friday.
Last week, I started singing lessons with Yuan Meng Asia. I hope this will herald a new beginning, as I will be able to gain some momentum on some initiatives that are different from the various financially related pursuits I have been obsessed with all my life.
But as it turns out, singing is a practical skill for an investment trainer, and I was practising diaphragmatic breathing techniques to reduce stress on my neck muscles during my lessons.
It is also very different to focus on non-cognitive skills for a change. I was pleasantly surprised to find that minor modifications in exhaling can improve singing quality, though I had to endure the discomfort of knowing that my singing is nowhere near the level to compete in a TV competition. Following instructions to the letter is also very challenging, as it depends more on "feel" than on thought, and I'm a long way from developing muscle memory.
For my first lesson, I might have over-stretched myself by selecting Fei Yu Qings Yi1 Jian3 Mei2 as my go-to practice song. In hindsight, I might have chosen something easier, like Radiohead's Creep or Ed Sheeran's Photograph.
Anyway, I have 9 more lessons to go. For those interested in singing lessons, I'm helping my ACLP classmate promote her business.
You can find my school website here: https://www.yuanmeng.asia/
Back to my YouTube Channel, I have one new video up on dividend fund strategies that I dislike :
On Thursday, my video that summarises the final touches to MAS's Equity Markets Review will be out:
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.
Recently, the word "unretire" has been gaining some traction in the mainstream press. So I'd like to talk further about my own personal struggles to unretire. For the past 12 years, I have protected my weekday 9-5 hours, but I've always felt that if I found something meaningful, I would gladly trade them off for good money and some valuable experiences in my life.
However, I was never successful in doing it.
My first attempt was to start my legal practice as an associate, but it was quickly upended when my Graves' disease came back after 14 years, and I lost so much weight I thought I had cancer. The following April, I ceased renewing the license. Even today, I have another law firm willing to offer me a seat if I paid for my insurance, but I prefer to hold back until I can find a meaningful file to work on.
My second attempt was some kind of Technology training attachment with financial institutions. I took multiple technical and aptitude exams, and DBS found my results interesting enough to ask me to apply to their teams. However, I was bummed out after the personality test rounds. So technically, I failed the personality tests.
My most recent attempt was the AIAP, where I submitted an entire machine learning solution to qualify for the final rounds. However, the finals were tough, and I had to compete against professional developers, so I did not manage to be eligible in the end.
The AIAP will serve as the template for companies to determine how to hire new candidates in the future. Technical assignments are challenging; you have to present and defend your solution, and finally, work in a team under high pressure. Even the rejection from the program felt really good because it explained what went wrong with my solution and how it could have been improved. Over the short term, my ready-made code base can be used to crunch any data. Still, in the long term, my lack of proper software development skills, such as basic Git use, and my incessant use of ChatGPT to debug code probably lost me the traineeship, as there are younger professional developers who want deep-skilling in AI.
At this juncture, I want to compare my positive experience of being rejected by the AIAP with the negative experience of scraping through my ACLP training. ACLP training is highly contrived. I always have to be forced to teach something in a particular way, then I would parrot a few moves to ensure that I meet the bare minimum non-negotiable objectives to pass. Even a pass feels very inauthentic because I know none of my paying customers would pay me to behave this way in a real course.
( Does passing the CMFAS papers feel the same way? )
Anyway, I look forward to seeing what will happen to all the Ah Beng ACTA and ACLP trainers next year after the reforms. SkillsFuture can only pay for a narrow range of courses that are mapped to employment outcomes. This means I no longer need to obtain an ACLP as a defensive manoeuvre in case another investment trainer finds a way to secure government support for teaching an investment course. My preferred scenario is that all investment training receives no government funding, allowing us to compete in a fair arena.
Where trainers need to prepare individuals to qualify for government support, many trainers will become jobless after the changes next year.
Anyway, I can't dwell on all my failed attempts to unretire, because my gigs pipeline is healthy with a new semester in Poly coming up. Also, unlike most folks trying to unretire, personal finances are not my key motivation. I am sad that I cannot try for the AIAP again in the next round because the tech scene is changing faster than we can learn about it. The old Machine Learning algorithms are great, but the world has moved on to LLMs and Agentic AI. I really need to find a way to break down my investment lab sessions into an interaction between different AI agents. If you know of a good course for that, please let me know.
There are no new videos as I've completely lost my voice after a nasty bout of flu. But at least one set of slides for my next video is already done.
My channel will release one YouTube short a day until I can make videos again.
Today, on 5th October 2025, this blog celebrates its 20th birthday!
And what a ride this has been.
When I started out on this blog in 2005, I had just published my first book, and I needed a platform to promote the sales of my first-ever product. Along the way, I turned the blog into a diary where I share my thoughts on personal finance and some musings on living in a modern, fast-paced society in Singapore.
Along the way, I achieved financial independence, made my first million, attended law school, and inadvertently became an investment trainer, despite initially thinking it was just a side gig. Now, in my latest incarnation, this blog has morphed into a small personal finance YouTube channel.
The financial markets have also experienced significant growth over the past 20 years. On 5th October 2015, the STI stood at 2091.91, and as of today, it is 4,411.95.
At this point, the evolution of my media presence continues. It does not take a genius to figure out that blogging is no longer as cool as it once was, and many of the bloggers who began this journey with me twenty years ago are no longer in operation today. A new generation of content creators has now taken over on platforms like TikTok.
To celebrate this blog's birthday, I have finally agreed to pay for my CapCuts Pro subscription using the blog revenue I have just collected, and I have launched my second mini-course on the Journey to becoming a Millionaire. Hopefully, the video quality will be better as I have added noise reduction and audio normalisation to my videos.
As for this upcoming week, I have no previews of the videos I will post, but the following 2-3 videos will be related to the SGX Next 50 mid-cap stock counters.
Are there any valuable insights or narratives from this twenty-year-old journey?
As we get older, we can only connect the dots in hindsight.
My interest in personal finance was built up the old-fashioned way, through rigorous examinations and taking a leap of faith into buying stocks after stubbornly thinking that unit trusts provided better diversification.
My book was published to prove to some people that publishing a book can be easy if a person puts their mind to it - it is not some kind of dramatic hero's journey that animates others.
Musically, Growing Your Tree of Prosperity was written as a "diss track". It was self-published for shits and giggles. But little did I know that it would only reach the non-fiction bestsellers list at 10th position for just one week, which is a ridiculously terrific win for a rookie author.
The blog was born because there is power in putting thoughts into words.
Along the blog's evolution, I was swept up in BigFatPurse's grand attempt to "unionise" financial bloggers and get us together for drinks and parties.
We even incorporated a small, but very profitable company together called BigScribe. In its early days, BigScribe organised paid financial seminars which sold out at every event, which led me to seriously consider the possibility of becoming an investment trainer after I was admitted to the bar.
I've been an investment trainer for nearly 7 years, graduating over 700 students across 39 training batches. This is longer than any IT job I have previously held.
So moving forward, where am I headed next?
For one thing, many attempts to unretire have failed. When I tried to become an associate with a small firm, my Graves' disease returned, and I was only able to get off the medication yesterday. This year, both attempts to secure a training internship in AI were unsuccessful. I will share details when the report arrives later next week.
But we live in a brave new world, and so long as there are SkillsFutures credits and we can get paid to attend full-time courses, we can become anything we want to be.
However, at this moment, I feel old and tired, having not travelled for two years, as I also play a minor caregiving role for my mum. I will aim to complete all my courses and part-time obligations.
Thereafter, I will attend some singing voice and vocal projection courses.
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to participate in the selection round for the Artificial Intelligence Apprenticeship Program. This is one of the most challenging try-outs I have ever attempted, because to qualify for this round, I must successfully write a program that employs three machine learning models to process a dataset.
For this dataset, I need to predict the activity levels of seniors living in a habitat equipped with various sensors, including those measuring carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and humidity levels. I completed the programme within the deadline, but my accuracy was about 59%, which is not particularly good. Nevertheless, my submission made it to the final round.
In this final round, I had to first present my solution and then undergo a technical interview. After that, I would be grouped with other candidates to solve an extension of the earlier problem set that I had already solved. The final exercise was really exhilarating, as two hours is too short to run a new dataset through even one machine learning code; making matters worse, we still needed to shape the output in a form that is acceptable to the invigilator in the form of a Python program. This really reminds me of a concept known as the "Kobayashi Maru" from Star Trek.
Furthermore, I suspect that I was grouped with the "uncles" team, basically the oldest folks in this batch, but ultimately this was a good thing, because everyone was calm and mellow. I was tasked with cracking the data cleaning part. At the same time, a buddy prepared his Python program to accept my output, and we barely squeezed out a solution at 88% accuracy, 15 minutes before time was up.
During debriefing, the investigators had to ask more probing questions about what we understood about the problem and how we thought the ideal approach should be taken to crack it. The rumour was that 50% will be culled in this round, so the final batch that qualifies for deep skilling in AI will be small.
In an ideal world, this is what skills training should be. The starting point is an asynchronously delivered lesson, and to qualify for deep skilling, you need to produce a functional product to advance to the next level after attending a short course. After which, you still need to get together with others to see whether you can coordinate with a team to get real results. If you want to prioritise skills over qualifications, then to qualify for skills training, there must be a high rejection rate.
My results, which will be announced by the end of October, are ultimately in the hands of the judgment panel, and I've done my best. If my best is not good enough, so be it, as it's been a challenging and rewarding contest.
For this upcoming week, I will be extending my discussion on covered call strategies. The last video on covered calls did not receive a decent amount of views, but it had great interaction, so I conducted further backtesting to address some questions from my viewers.
On Thursday, I take my biggest risk ever as I deviate from my ordinary discussions to talk about Incel life and the Manosphere. I discuss how to raise boys without them turning into incels and the possibility of financial education that can direct men's energies into more positive pursuits.
As I discuss thought leadership in the Manosphere, such as Andre Tate, YouTube has flagged some issues with my content and reduced monetisation opportunities, but I have appealed that decision. Therefore, I may not be able to discuss this in the future.
Whenever I feel insecure during my career, I pay a visit to the annual FL Asia exhibition to look at what kind of businesses are seeking franchisees. And it was never a waste of time. How else can you find an exhibition that has free admission, thin crowds, free food/drinks, and folks eager to dish out freebies?
With my first visit over two decades ago, I must say that nothing serious ever happened. The only time I signed up for more information was when I was on the verge of being outsourced to HP many years ago; I wanted to explore the idea of owning my own Cheers outlet. In every single case, the profit margins are razor-thin, and it felt more like buying myself employment than really becoming a boss of my own firm.
This year, I did not go because I was feeling insecure. If I even wanted to move my wealth to the next level, I had to either find myself a franchise or buy up some kind of business from a retiring founder. So I convinced some friends to attend the session with me. Friends are helpful as a sounding board when looking at potential companies.
I found an academy that trains kids in public speaking, which is up my alley, but it has a hefty six-digit price tag to get one outlet out in Woodlands. My pals seemed fixated on an F&B concept involving a shawarma done in a Taiwanese style that tasted quite good. But nothing really inspired me enough to liquidate some of my investments to get a business running.
As for the upcoming week, I have just one video on geo-arbitrage ready to launch tomorrow :
But over the week, I will be coming up with more content as we go along.
After running two courses within two weeks of each other, I'm onto my next challenge, which is to qualify for a one-year training stint with the Artificial Intelligence Apprenticeship Programme. Apparently, the software solution I built to predict the activity levels of seniors based on data from several different sensors is good enough to warrant a complex round of interviews this weekend, including a presentation of my solution, a 50-minute defence, and a Q&A on why I decided to build it in this manner. After that, my odds of qualifying for the training are slim, as I will be thrown into the pit with 3-4 fellow interviewees to solve a new problem together, and we have mere hours to engineer something in the afternoon.
The question I've been asking myself lately is whether I'm actually playing a Gen Z simulator.
I have multiple gigs where I barely make enough to get by and settle my personal expenses. To secure a training programme (or, not necessarily a real job thereafter), I must demonstrate actual skill in building a workable solution, but that's not enough; I also need to be work-ready. Hence, people have to observe how I work with others before I qualify for the next round.
If what I go through is what the latest graduates need to land a job, then most Singaporeans are in serious trouble.
Fortunately, armed with investment income, I can just enjoy the ride and deal with whatever challenges come along.
The first video this week is already out. I really dived deep into the "Safe Rate of Withdrawal" after devouring William Bengen's latest book on how to retire richer. The book is very numbers-driven and quite hard to follow, but I think the attempt to build a video around it has made me wiser to all the issues surrounding the calculation of how much you can withdraw from your funds in retirement.
On Thursday, I will discuss a highly effective strategy of betting on stock market spin-offs. Link is here: https://youtu.be/xuz-HxIaAZY
It's been a great honour and privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.
A lot of peculiar things have happened to the ERM program before this batch. One student wrote to me a while ago that he had tendered his resignation from his job at a multinational. He is in his early fifties, like me, and this is about five years after he attended the program. Another wrote to tell me that his passive income has breached the $1,000 mark.
However, the marketing arm of Dr.Wealth ended up going away empty-handed, as they preferred to maintain their privacy so that they couldn’t reveal their names for the testimonial.
The nature of the dividend investor does not have the same flash and bang as other investment methods, where some fantastic gains are one-off. This is a slow burn involving years of steady wealth accumulation. When you win the dividends arena, the wins are likely persistent and life-changing. Your life changes as you now have the freedom to design a life in any form as you wish. It can also attract negative attention, so I respect the desire for confidentiality.
As for the financial market, we are entering a period where the STI has reached above 4,300 points, so the question from retail investors is whether we are reaching the peak of the stock market. The answer from our course materials is a clear no, as our price-earnings ratio has barely cracked 14. Even so, tailwinds like EQDP and local market reforms will provide enough fuel to reach a PE of 16.
So don’t let the knowledge go to waste. This batch built a portfolio that can generate an average of $100 per month with a capital injection of slightly more than $18,000. Once you gain some momentum, start scaling up your dividend operations, and I hope that in due time, the success stories of financial independence will come from you.
Lastly, I hope Batch 39 will participate actively in the FB group.
This has been an exciting week for me as I've managed to be featured in The Financial Coconuts. You can watch that video here.
As a small YouTube content creator who barely knows how to create content, I'm lucky to be monetised in 4 months. However, to reach a larger audience, I need to leverage the influence of more successful channels. And TFC delivered in spades, giving me about 200+ new subscribers within a matter of days.
Over the next few days, I will carefully review the numbers for my videos on TFC to determine whether I can effectively document my reach and pitch an appearance on other platforms. My videos with Budget Babe were record-breaking numbers, and my Money Mind episode performed respectably with 191k views over more than a year.
The bottom line is that cooperation with other channels can be a win-win initiative, with that channel getting high viewership and my smaller channel getting more subscribers.
So if you have a YouTube channel with a decent audience and want to work with me to produce some content, do let me know!
Ok, now onto the programming for next week. As I will be conducting a class next week, I don't have the mood to make long videos, so the videos are slightly shorter.
