Are we overproducing elites in Singapore ?

Some folks have protested that I am duplicitous when it comes to degrees. 

Diploma holders of my generation do fairly well and many end up in senior management. However, for Millenials and Gen Z, I take a dim view of folks who proudly proclaim to drop out from an academic program. Life choices aside, they have no idea how much they damage their personal brands because only the most privileged folks can survive not having a degree.

Population census 2020 explains this in greater detail. I was able to calculate the percentage of degree holders based on different generations of Singaporeans.

If you examine my cohort ages 45-49, only 41% had degrees. Mathematically, you can live your life without a degree and yet signal above-median level intelligence and conscientiousness. 

If you examine the batch 10 years younger now aged 35-39, 54% have degrees. The reverse is now true concerning non-degree holders, if you drop out, you are signaling possibly below-median intelligence and conscientiousness. Of course, don't get upset with what I say because signaling does not mean that it is fact, but employers and HR departments will begin to tighten restrictions and you'll find many jobs that do not require degrees actually listing a degree as a requirement. 

But that's not the most disturbing thing about these statistics. 

Richard Turchin studies cliodynamics and he concludes that the overproduction of elites was responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire and the American Civil War. When we overproduce degree holders, especially lawyers, not every degree holder will be able to get a decent job upon graduation. You can find the ramifications of that in the article here.

The US is in a much more serious condition than Singapore, not every lawyer who passes the bar exam in the US gets to practice. Singapore is also dealing with a flood coming not from local universities but overseas. We're also seeing a lot of younger local graduates fighting cultural wars imported from overseas. About a week ago, a friend showed me how his contemporaries from the humanities have accused him of not doing enough for the woke agenda, even resorting to personal attacks to make their point. This is an early sign of a bifurcation of elites, where the elites who cannot get a decent position in society starts to fight against the status quo and society polarises and can't gain consensus moving forward.

By looking at these numbers, it is quite convenient to simply tell the government to reduce university intake. But that is a problem because the wealthy will buy their degrees from Australia or the UK anyway. Furthermore, it is not politically viable to tell Singaporeans to accept joining the workforce with a diploma when you allow the floodgates to open to foreigners and not audit the quality of their degrees. 

Fortunately for me, it's not my paygrade to propose a solution. 

I hope Minister Chan will think of something that can work for everyone.

If I have free rein, I will first get our Polytechnics certified by foreign bodies to get diplomas the same recognition as a degree overseas rather than build Tier 2 universities. It's just a waste of the student's time to keep them in school any longer than necessary.

I will also have a white list of universities in emerging economies that will consider these degrees equivalent to local degrees with minimum grades.  For the whitelist to have any meaningful effect, the inflow of foreign talent must be controlled and cannot go back to the levels of the Goh Chok Tong administration. 

Moving forward, citizens may have to live with a licensing regime for everything. A lot more forms of blue-collar work can only be performed by licensed individuals in Singapore so as to allow non-degree holders a decent quality of life. 

For a start, as much as it hurts our competitiveness,  maybe HR Managers should be the exclusive domain of Singapore citizens. 

More DeFI shenanigans...

 

From the past two days, I lost another $100 USD from the drop in ETH's value which means that this is the time to get deeper into the rabbit hole. 

Losing money this way is not really new to me because I used to get bashed up (metaphorically)  in gaming arcades. Playing Street-Fighter II was hard when you have to go toe to toe with Ah Beng's twice your age, but I found that I  tend to do better with aggressive fighters that have simpler and more basic moves so I settled with Blanka, the green beast from Brazil. Blanka's basic moves are already quite fast and lethal. Furthermore, if he gets cornered, he can launch electrical attacks. Many Ah Bengs were defeated when I randomly jumped around and zapped their more handsome fighters with electrical attacks. Half of the time I don't even know what I was doing, but I really did enjoy zapping a more handsome fighter like Ryu, Ken or Guile.  

So I made more rookie mistakes today. 

As I tried to extricate my coins from Compound, I ran out of gas and has to buy $100 of ETH to fill up my wallet. This took me a while to solve. My first rookie lesson is to always leave about $15 of ETH in my wallet. 

To dig myself deeper into the rabbit-hole, the first thing I tried to do was to get into TokenSet to get my ETH into some kind of robo-fund. I felt that algorithms that employ RSI to trade between ETC and BTC should be fairly interesting and can grow my coins over time. Sadly, the fund is no longer open to new investments. In fact, How to Defi is already obsolete as I can't find any fund that they used in the example from the book.

Disappointed, I dug into the book further to see whether I could get into the derivatives markets and found a website called Synthetix. To start playing with derivatives, the process was extremely convoluted.

First I converted my ETH into a shitcoin called SYX. Then I had to go to mintr.sythetix.io to mint some sUSD which sounds suspiciously like a stable coin. My $177.75 value only allowed me to get $39.50 of sUSD. My only consolation is that the system claims that I am earning almost 40% yields on my staked value which does not make me feel very good because it feels like buying a subscription stream of hell banknotes with real money from the nearest heartland shop that sells items for worship. 

Still, I was quite elated as I managed to get my sUSD, I was hoping to get some iDEFI which allows me to bet against assorted shitcoins in the crypto world.

Sadly, as of today, all of the inverse derivatives have been frozen so I can't take up a short position at all. 

So this is the state I am currently in. 

Right now, I can't seem to unstake my sUSD nor claim my SYX.

I really have no idea how crypto bros can claim their stake as part of their personal balance sheet but what I hell do I know right, I only know how to randomly jump across the screen like Blanka.  

Hopefully, something interesting will happen in the next epoch wchich will be in about 4 days time. So maybe I will be able to unlock some features after that. 

What I do know though, is that if your crypto adventures are paid by REIT dividends, it's a fun way to keep your current with developments. 

 

My Rookie DeFi moves.

 

I promised myself that once the crypto market crashes, I will get into playing some DeFi. Previously, I had $50 of ETH in my wallet. It eventually reached $2,000 as I bought XRP, BNB, BTC and RUNE but now all of it has crashed to about $1,200 so it is time to do something new.

So I read CoinGecko's fairly short book How to Defi and I started making some Defi moves about 30 minutes ago. 

Here's what I did:

a) On Binance.com, I consolidated all my shitcoins to ETH. 

b) I created a new Metamask wallet and it's quite cool as it embeds on Chrome. So once the wallet was built, I transferred all my ETH to the wallet.

c) I immediately connected my new wallet to Compound which allowed me to get some investment income from my ETH.

So in less than 30 minutes, I am getting a 0.43% interest rate on my ETH deposit.

Ok, this probably will not impress the Crypto bros who claim to get yields of 30+% a year but I'm a slowpoke and prefer to spend more time reading more books. How to Defi is good but I hope that more publications will follow.

Some things do bother me about this brave new world. I can probably get better yields if I convert my ETH to DAI but wouldn't that be the same as converting SGD to MYR to get better interest rates? Also while the mining of BTC is limited, entire new blockchains can be created by programmers so scarcity is questionable. 

The next time I get bored, I will be parking my crypto into a fund management house such as TokenSets. My preferred approach is to find a trend trading strategy and dump all my crypto into it and see what happens next.

Right now I probably have better odds losing all my crypto than making $10,000, but I think folks my generation should develop a more open mind about DeFi. The genie is already out of the bottle and you can't kill crypto anymore. 

Some use cases make a lot of sense because I can't imagine not dumping all my Argentinian cash into Crypto if I genuinely want to preserve my wealth. The speed at which money can move from wallet to wallet was also ridiculously efficient compared to banking a cheque with DBS. 

We'll see how this goes!

Better qualitative investing with Anthropology

 

Before I talk about investing, let's talk about racism in Singapore. 

My personal opinion is that we have been too hasty trying to cancel racist polytechnic lecturer Tan Boon Lee. There are thousands of Tan Boon Lee's in Singapore, some who can conceal their tracks better than others. Authorities should go with a lighter hand but work with cultural anthropologists to understand the institutions that enable this to happen in the first place. I was tactically ignored on social media when I inquired about Tan's secondary school even though I know that I may have struck a nerve as I did some googling of the schools that celebrity racists like Sharon Au and Dennis Chew have come from. To me, it was not accidental that Tan Boon Lee eventually made a living teaching object-oriented programming in a Polytechnic. A lot of Chinese-speaking Singaporeans turned to study engineering in the 80s to earn a middle-class lifestyle because it was the only professional path that can tolerate poor English proficiency.  Tan Boon Lee's labelling of a minority dating a Chinese girl as racists seems to come up from some subconscious "object-oriented code" that inherited itself from some racist firmware that was installed in him but subtly overloaded with his own ideas when he was much younger. 

But I will not digress further, Anthropology is the qualitative study of human beings. 

A Singaporean tribe that does not mix with minorities even after 50 years of independence should be an interesting sub-culture to understand. Anthropologists can interview them, live among them to understand their media influences, favourite institutions and personal narratives. Then using data analytics developed by Cambridge Analytica, we can figure out their OCEAN personality profiles and develop a means to target racists even before a single external expression of racism can manifest. I like to christen this a Majority Report. There are plenty of community centres where we can set up "re-education camps" where we can ply them with Thosai and Mee Rebus to blunt the racism.

I think my solution can deal with racism much better than coming up with a rap video to threaten fellow Singaporeans. 

Anthro-Vision by Gillian Tett felt more like a reaction towards the rejection of humanities ( thanks to big data and data science ) than promoting what anthropology can do for businesses, but it is a wonderful addition to an investor's arsenal. As someone who employs a lot of quantitative models, I see them fail fairly often but wonder what needs to be captured if we are interested in qualitative considerations. Anthropology shows us why this is a very broad problem that cannot be cracked easily.

I have only one example to share on this blog.

Office REIT investors are worried about work from home and they are sure whether Office REITs have come down in price to justify an investment. Accounting numbers don't really help because we don't have an idea whether folks will be forced back to the office.

Amazingly anthropology provides some hints. Offices promote two things to workers that no amount of accounting knowledge would provide.

The first is sense-making. What does it mean to be a worker for a company? You can only derive meaning from your work by observing your managers, speaking some lingo, and dressing up like them. Doing so puts you in a physical or social environment called a habitus. As such, landlords are not simply giving you some square foot of space for rent. Enabled by MNC tenants, landlords provide habitus for a fee. If everyone works from home, you have to confront the fact that it is harder to transmit corporate culture to workers. 

The second is informal information exchange. If you manage a tribe of programmers who do better when left alone, then WFH may become a better default. But if you have a proprietary trading team, a lot of informal information exchanges occur that can positively improve trading returns. So in such a case, programming teams can decamp to their homes but traders should rush back to the office as soon as possible. 

For these two points raised, I can begin to be more bullish on office REITs as investors are more likely to overestimate the impact of WFH on office REITs. 

The higher dividends may not last.   

One thing I really like about work is that the author was very eager to shine the anthropological lens on themselves. Folks who study anthropology are the hippies of the academic world and would not want to work with corporations or even the government. I observe similar levels of antiestablishment in Singapore. 

So good luck getting anthropologists to work with financial analysts to cherry-pick Office REITs.

I can imagine these woke Gen Z anthropologists throwing up when I propose building a racist detection algorithm that can take a FB profile and calculate the probability of their racism. So far, they'd rather eat an avocado sandwich and watch a Preetipls video than actually solving the racism problem with Big Data. 

   

 

  

Think twice before paying for a business degree

The Department of Statistics has recently published the latest census on the Singapore population and it is a treasure trove of data that can be used to inform us what is the best move for folks seeking a basic or advanced qualification. 

Inspired by an article in the Business Times a few days ago, I tried to tabulate the number of degree holders corresponding to the field of study and track changes from 2010 to 2020.

Here are my results :

I'm going to share my personal insights from the data, feel free to disagree and comment below:

a) It is better not to pay for a business degree

There is clearly an increase in business degree holders over the past 10 years, so it's better to avoid getting into a Red Ocean situation by also getting another one. Unless you can get into the Honours program in NUS Bizad or at least a Cum Laude from SMU which still leads to fairly high paying MNC jobs, it will be really hard to distinguish yourself from masses of business graduates. 

I think this is even more so if you are a private degree graduate. You will be discriminated against twice - once for having a private degree and once more for studying a business qualification.

Also, you should take care before signing up for an MBA. They will be a dime a dozen. Still, I consider INSEAD MBA the Rolls Royce of MBAs because not only must you speak three languages, now they require proficiency in Python Programming. 

b) Demand for humanities qualifications seems immune to practical considerations. This is enough reason to avoid going for one unless you are extremely talented.

Over 10 years, we've seen such advances in technology and we've even beaten reduced the number of foreign competition in Tech, yet humanities and arts education has not experienced reduced demand. While I can't recall the research paper in the US, an academic said that interest in the humanities is in fact very "human" and demand to study this field comes from natural interest that cannot be dampened by practical considerations. 

In reality, a humanities education has become more expensive relative to the employment and salary outcomes over the past ten years but you continue to see plenty of demand to become a humanities scholar. 

If you want to thrive in such a field, passion is not enough. You need to combine passion and proficiency. If you become the kind of Arts grad that is non-Honours and can't find a place in academia, better start prepping for the CMFAS or CEA exams.

c) If you are moderately good in Maths, why not go for a STEM degree?

I can sort of understand the dip in Engineering degrees in Singapore. Younger Singaporeans don't trust that the government will not flood the country with foreign technical talent. But the era has changed and technology salaries are at an all-time high. Worse, now we evidence that Singaporeans are so spoilt no one wants to pick free money from the ground. 

The only barrier is a mathematical ability which might require some genetics. I think folks, in general, avoid heavy maths courses. If you push yourself through after biting the bullet, there is much less competition moving forward. 

Furthermore, nothing stops someone with a STEM degree from competing in the business field. If you end up becoming one of those useless engineers that might build a collapsing bridge, you can still fake it by becoming a project manager. If you suck at tracking projects and speaking to people, you can still take CMFAS and CEA later. 

Before I end, I'd like to address the copious amounts of literature that celebrate the importance of generalist skills as compared to specialist knowledge. I read almost every book on generalist skills like Range by David Epstein but I would not put so much weight on this message as they seem to be perpetrated by academics who know that their value in the industry is waning in the face of data analytics and AI. The fact in Singapore from Census 2020 is that the number of generalists is rising for the past 10 years compared to specialists and consequently. at the personal level, you may want to develop a narrow niche of tech skills to juice more money for your investments. 

But their message that specialists would need more generalist skills is not wrong. You'll still need to be politically savvy and present your ideas cogently. 

But these humanities academics are better off encouraging their students to pick up more marketable tech skills rather than harping on Critical Race Theory and why they don't have a sinecure because of capitalism.   

  

"Lying Flat" as a continuum of responses to the stresses of modern living

This blog has commented on China's Cultural Involution in the past. ( link )

The hottest idea arising out of Chinese society is the concept of "Lying Flat" which has gained so much traction the Community Party is now viewing this philosophy as something that can destabilise their society and has begun washing off groups that allow adherents to this philosophy to fester in Chinese social media. 

This idea arose from young Chinese's frustrations with an unreasonable job market and the lack of social mobility. It's not fun qualifying for a top university in China only to see the best jobs reserved by peers who come from richer families. So the collective response is to simply lie flat and do the bare minimum to get by. 

There are three components to this "Lying Flat" lifestyle :

• Don't advance in life, do not buy a car or house, do not get married and do not have kids.
• Maintain a minimum standard of living
• Refuse to be exploited as a slave or be part of someone's money-making machine.

If you look at this from the perspective of the Chinese, this idea can really gain traction given that the gender ratio is so pronounced in this country, most men really have no choice but to stop trying to start families. Once a guy makes that decision, the second and third leg of the lifestyle is easily attained with plenty of online entertainment and gig economy jobs.

I daresay that this can be really liberating.

In Singapore, we sort of know that our variant of "Lying Flat" is embedded in our BBFA ( Bui Bui Forever Alone )  lifestyle. Once they convince themselves they are Forever Alone, adopting a minimum standard of living, watching Netflix, and playing games is a cinch. 

Still, I think that Singapore's situation is not as bad as China as Singapore guys can find foreign spouses if they get rejected by local women and there are career paths that can lead to great wealth without the need for advanced degrees like becoming a commissioned FA or selling real estate. 

What's interesting about Lying Flat is that you can arrange these lifestyle philosophies in a continuum :

At the highest octane level is the "Tiger Mum's Dream Life" where someone collects the best qualifications to decorate their resumes, launch ambitious careers or businesses and end up in the pinnacle of Singapore society. This is otherwise called the Singapore Dream and can live on so long as there is social mobility.

FIRE's (Financial Independence and Retire Early) different levels are next, where you adopt the minimalist doctrine but do not mind being exploited so that you can become financially independent later. The FAT FIRE acolytes are not too far from those wanting to live the Singapore Dream, but the Coast FIRE guys are really very different - they just want some form of escape like the BBFA. 

Below Coast FIRE is the massive population of indifferent Singaporeans who think that England has a chance at this year's Euro Cup and would want to know the best place to queue for a BTS MacDonald meal. If life happens, it happens. Meanwhile, let's watch K-Drama.

Below that is the BBFA. BBFA living is not as defeatist as Lying Flat because BBFA dudes are still very active in finance forums and EDMW flexing crypto trades and behaving as disagreeable as their anonymity allows them to. BBFAs will advance up the spectrum if they luck out via a crypto trade or an inheritance. I expect these bros to be very in your face when they succeed. 

This puts Lying Flat is at the bottom of the spectrum where adherents actually develop a philosophy to counter what they perceive as a social and economic injustice. It is just to live the bare minimum and put up a middle finger against all of life's injustices. 

As we move down the continuum, we move from Siao Onz to Indifference to Anti-Establishment. 

Readers should make an informed decision as to where there are in this continuum. 

There is no right answer.

( Except the part on England winning the Euro Cup. England will never win the Euro cup in our lifetime. I don't watch football, and even I know that. )

Letter to Batch 21 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

 

Dear Students of Batch 21,

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

We had a class within a month of the last programme because we knew that demand for investment classes typically spike when a lockdown occurs. Having a lesson a month after the last one can be pretty instructive to the programme as we can see how dynamic ERM portfolios are even when conducted after a short period.

For one thing, I deliberately made Batch 21 is a lot more aggressive than Batch 20, and I very much prefer to add some growth stocks into the mix for your voting pleasure as vaccinations rates go up in Singapore. Unlinked cases have also stayed low at single-digit levels.

The class was a lot more freeform this time round as a fintech stock mentioned by a student was included last minute in the selection process and was even voted democratically into the portfolio. I would expect this counter to bring a certain level of excitement (or tragedy) into what Batch 21 has created.

Also, this is the first time we’ve deviated from our portfolio construction rules where we introduced a non-REIT into the REIT portfolio. So I’m glad the class accepted the controversial decision and justification as to why this developer might behave like a REIT for the next decade.

Students can examine the portfolio in its glory and note that increasing trend for the agglomerated stocks. If this were a technical analysis class, the chart itself should be screaming a solid buy as the regime chart is coloured green. Past five years, backtest of this portfolio generated 19% returns with a merely semi-deviation of 14%.

Lastly, I hope that Batch 21 would participate actively in the FB group. I should see all of you in the flesh in mid-July, and we will have another round of revisions then.

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

[Video] Singapore vs Overseas Investing

Dr. Wealth staff took a long time to edit and launch this video because initially, we thought that the material was too abstract for retail investors. Nevertheless the material is out and I hope that you guys enjoyed it.

If I met Alvin Chow in a Woodlands kopitiam to discuss the business and latest portfolio moves, the discussion would be similar in nature anyway and nothing here has been scripted.

I will be doing another video next week with another Dr Wealth trainer. Hope that you guys will continue to support me.

On Business Cycles

 

I'm in the middle of another class this week and for the past week, I've been trying to crack one of the best books ever written on market cycles. Lars Tvede clearly hit the ball right out of the park with his bible Business Cycles and I strongly urge serious investors to read this book as it is clear and actually gives the reader a chance to quantitatively chart the business cycle if they can have access to economic data.

This book is extremely broad and covers the history of myriad attempts at defining the cycle as well as what is experienced for investors on the ground. My only regret is that it is impossible to summarise the book for my students. 

I probably need a few months to engineer a tool to create a business cycle for Singapore. 

A few useful lessons I picked up from the book :

a) It's not one cycle, but at least three cycles working in tandem

The best way to understand business cycles is that it is a combination of at least three different processes. The Kitchen's cycle is based on inventory and this has a period of about 4-5 years. The second cycle which is the Juglar cycle is based on capital expenditure that rises and falls and this can have a period of about 9 years. The longest cycle or the Kurznet's Cycle and can run as long as 18 years. 

To complicate matters even further there is a rumoured Kondratieff cycle that runs for half a century.

If you take this idea seriously, it would be very challenging to break the actual cycle into different phases. But it can be rewarding because avoiding a property crash is probably the aim of all serious investors.

b) There is no consensus over what measurement to use within a cycle

The next problem is to figure out which metrics can be used to trace a cycle. High rental rates may discourage inventory and not all inventory plays a large role. Somehow vehicle inventories play a larger role in determining this cycle. 

The same applies to capital spending cycles, there is a theory that shipbuilding rates play a big role and some ratios involving CAPEX in the local economy needs to be factored in as well. 

Property prices also involve complex metrics like building a ratio of CAP rate to bond yields. 

If I want to engineer my own business cycle, will need to gather data and build my own index. 

c) After you have engineered what seems to be a business cycle time series, it must be able to predict asset price trends based on historical data

Once you can start modelling a business cycle, it must be able to predict asset prices. It should ideally be able to lead asset price trends by a few months. 

If a business cycle trend is built, ideally it should be able to predict the downwards trend in stocks when it begins to decline from its peak. Whether this works or not can be covered by a regression exercise or any machine learning tool. 

These are all fairly tough problems, but I think the book has given confidence that coming up with a business cycle using local data is not impossible. I'm pretty sure some econometrics major would have already succeeded in this endeavour. You may wish to take inspiration from the RICI index developed by Jim Rogers.

It may be a while before I can digest enough to make an impact on future training materials. 

I will update this blog on Saturday evening when my program concludes.

Are polyamorous relationships financially inevitable in Singapore?

The Rice Media has a really good article on polyamory lately. You can visit the link here.

I was really entertained by the article but this was not my first exposure to polyamory in Singapore. 

My first exposure was with someone I met while getting my Bar exams. This girl who worked along with me on an assignment claimed to be polyamorous and it triggered an interesting conversation. She said she's dating two men, sometimes simultaneously. One man is about her age in his twenties and another guy is an uncle who is much older like me. I remember my first reaction was not to judge her. In fact, I asked her how she coped with jealousy which I thought was built into the male psyche. She said there was none and in triple dates, the uncle even pays for the young guy.

As I'm a lot more interested in the numbers, I tried to decode the relationship at that time. I thought the uncle was the guy who provided the bankroll for a young couple and, in return, maybe gets to take part in the action.  This is not the kind of 3P a guy would be able to accept conventionally.

The fact is that thanks to the pandemic, not everyone is entitled to the same economic outcomes based on the effort they put into their careers. A software developer is almost untouched by the pandemic, but an artistic performer probably has 80% of income wiped out. This means that a certain segment will thrive with an unusual amount of savings in investments and some will end up depleted.

If we focus on real estate, we can be looking at low-interest rates and delayed buildup of BTO homes, all recipes for a spike in real estate prices. Landlords will take this opportunity to increase rents.

As such polyamory can supplant a traditional marriage from the finance space. 

a) Polyamory solves the problem of expensive real estate prices.

Polyamorous folks can buy larger flat and participate in the upside but as tenants in common as opposed to joint owners. This preserves their rights and lets them benefit from higher real estate prices. If six people buy a jumbo flat, the mortgages may be manageable using CPF-OA for each person. 

b) Polyamory reduces daily expenses

Polyamorous folks gain massive benefits from economies of scale. They can easily participate in the group buy arrangements and buy in bulk from warehouses. I studied some statistics and household expenses per head go down by quite a bit as the numbers of members of the household increase.

c) Polyamory reduces housework

Polyamorous folks get benefits in childcare. As these groups are large, not everyone can contribute to the household financially so some can volunteer their time to raise the kids. This is not a new thing. Before the Church dismantled polygamous families, some women want to join a clan because their share of the housework and child-rearing is shared with other women. For a similar reason, the men may find it easier to hunt in a pack. 

Polyamory is the disruptive technology that can upend traditional families as it is really tiring to manage multi-generational households from a financial perspective in a city. I predict that early adopters may slant towards those with contract jobs and creative artistic pursuits. 

I also realise that the question in my title is not answered. 

My expectation is that Gen Z will surprise everyone with how open-minded they are. If they can normalise something like cryptocurrency, incorporating polyamory would be a cinch.

 

I made some videos on the Dr Wealth Youtube Channel

 

I'm still busy as heck doing previews and prepping for another class next week. 

Last week was a major milestone as Dr Wealth is trying to get more trainers featured on their Youtube Channel. You can subscribe by following this link here.

Here's the first one I've done for them. I've also produced about two more which I hope, will be out very soon. 

There should be some content here for you guys over the weekend. 

The one with the Friends: The Reunion episode

 

There's a lot of serious material coming out from me on the Dr Wealth blog so I prefer to do something more frivolous for the weekend. Incidentally,  this week is also the launch of the Friends: The Reunion episode. I just want to share my thoughts about how the series shaped Generation X today. 

In case you are Gen Z and have no idea what Friends is all about. Friends is the most successful sitcom of all time having sustained itself for 10 years across 10 seasons. It revolves around the lives of six good-looking Gen-Xer as they navigate through that period of time just before they start their families. Sadly there is no real equivalent for Gen Z, because, in their mid-20s, Gen Z is still living in their parent's basement subscribing to OnlyFans and trading shitcoins to make their first million. Also, any show about six good-looking heterosexual whites adults would induce too much woke rage in society today.

I only have one point to make today about my philosophy of reunions - Reunions are about seeing how old our contemporaries are these days.

I love reunions because I hardly enough of them. 

I don't come from the elite schools that find ways to get alumni back for donation drives so I have to wait for someone charismatic to organise one for the cohort by tuning into my secondary school  Whatsapp group. I know that I'm not the only person who enjoys this - some of my forever alone friends love stalking the beautiful classmates of their secondary school days and derive a lot of joy at seeing how old and "chui" they are. 

Like the cast of Friends, Gen X is longer young and hip. If anyone is successful it would already be obvious when there is a reunion. 

So the central theme of every reunion to me is Schadenfreude. 

Questions like these abound:

• Did the class scholar end up being forever alone? 
• Did the school flower become an auntie? 
• What power relationships form between males in a reunion, is the guy with the loudest mouth the wealthiest in the batch?
• Do soccer hooligans stay soccer hooligans? (That would be a yes in my book. )

Because I was largely misunderstood as a (very cruel) jester, outcast and troll, I can take a detached perspective when I meet my classmates.

As such Friends: The Reunion allows a second-tier B-Grade Singaporean like me who cannot attend an old boys donation drive of RI, HC or ACS some measure of vicarious schadenfreude. 

Thanks to the miracle of aesthetic medicine, all the women look as young as before. I would say that I can't even see any change in Monica.  

But the true satisfaction for any Gen X pot-bellied uncle like me is to see Joey with a head full of grey hair and a middle-aged paunch. Another thing I enjoyed is that Chandler is no longer full of witty comebacks. Matthew Perry's just not that good without his script! For me, there is a certain sense of Karmic justice as Ross seems to have the most dignity when it comes to ageing. I used to get so mad because Ross gets bullied a lot despite being the smartest and well-educated guy in the clique. 

Some points I really like are the high-powered cameos and the show really exceeded my expectations in the graceful way a reference was made on Brad Pitt. 

Now all I hope is that my secondary school friends don't disinvite me to the next class reunion. 

 

Why some engineers hate lifelong learning and end up driving Grab

 

I don't really understand my motivation to read Super Courses by Ken Bain. The courses are run and conducted by universities so may have limited application to my own programs. But what the heck, if I can find one useful nugget to improve my customer experience, the time and money spent on the book would break even immediately. 

Right off the bat, I saw an old NJC, NUS engineering faculty, and Raffles Hall mate, Manu Kapur, a brilliant Maths Olympiad student, featured as a thought leader in Learning and Education and I was hooked to the contents of the volume. 

( What the fuck am I doing with my life, right? )

One useful insight I gained from the book is that when universities conduct engineering courses there is too much focus on the technical details and too little on context. Because of this, engineers can't tie their work to greater business or societal goals. Because they've mostly taught math equations,  they can't appreciate the value of their beyond training cheaper foreign engineers to take over their jobs, they graduate without much love for lifelong learning. Without knowledge upgrades, a technical career cannot be sustained so that's why a lot of engineers find alternative employment - driving Grab, giving financial advice and selling real estate. Becoming a project engineer is the beginning of the end for most technical careers.

I still use a lot of maths in my job as an investment trainer and enjoy transferring the mathematical concept to analyse legal cases and financial investments, but I have reason to believe that I did not have the same education as my peers. I spent four years doing public speaking with the Toastmasters in NUS, so I had quite a bit of experience working with folks from different faculties to meet organization objectives and sharpen communication skills. I did this so much, my engineering professors who meet me in the industry had forgotten the research awards I won but remembered me primarily as a public speaker. 

I think the central problem in modern education is the transfer problem. How do you transfer your knowledge across different domains. This has not been solved by Singapore yet. 

Here are few personal examples I cracked :

• If you understand the secretary problem in Computer Science and give yourself 10 years to find a wife. Then the optimal behaviour is to spend between 3-4 years just dating casually and shopping around. After that, marry if you find someone better than all those in your dating history.
• Legal cases are often resolved by sharing and apportioning the liability between two parties. It's easy to apportion straight assets but hidden options can be apportioned as well. In shipping cases, the underlying volatility of asset values can be so high, these options can explain contradictions in judicial decisions. The Black-Scholes equation is an important tool to analyse judicial decisions. ( eg. The Achilleas )
• Recovery of Singapore markets can be improved with an understanding of epidemiology. The question of whether we're hitting another crash will be answered if we know the R0 of B1617 in a vaccinated population. Another related useful concept is forest fires which tend to spread when trees are close to each other. Mathematical models can be used to predict at which point Singapore will become safe based on our vaccination numbers.  This may actually justify a large leveraged bet in the future.

The rest of the book really tells us what we intuitively know as educators. Real problem solving is multidisciplinary. Students who take personal ownership of their learning learn a lot more than others. Grading leads to undesirable behaviours like "grade grubbing" and erodes the willingness for life-long learning. 

 

I can imagine a Singaporean reader, especially a teacher in MOE, will wind up being exceedingly cynical after reading the book. Most of the ideas behind Super Courses cannot be executed without going through the massive MOE bureaucracy. 

• Do these interventions justify the investment by the taxpayer? 
• Will the teacher be rewarded for innovation or punished for skirting MOE guidelines?
• Do students and parents even appreciate this?

Even the book admits that societies view lecturers as arbitrators of whoever gets to be rewarded by a meritocratic society.  So teachers are not just moulders of student's lives. Teachers are judges whoe decide that the intelligent conscientious guys get into the upper-middle class of society and the loafer gets into existence of sporadic unemployment. Companies rely on universities to grade their students to decide who to employ. So I can imagine grading to remain even though it harms the intrinsic motivation of the student in question.

Lastly, as a private course provider, I am actually quite excited by some of the suggestions. There is no administrative service mandarin to stop me if I execute some of the crazier suggestions in the book. All I need to do is to justify that the course pays for itself and bring my partners more money.  

Hopefully, cynicism and unhappiness will not stop my teacher pals from reading this book. At least they know what can be imagined in their philosophy to create a better course in Singapore. 

Why you don't want to be one of the world's greatest investors

 

There's been a disturbing trend where authors interview extremely wealthy and successful people for generic self-help advice. These books sell very well because, in our modern society, it is difficult to disagree with wealthy people. 

Wealthy folks are more confident and they can back up everything they say with money. But that being said,  I'm not so willing to concede a point to someone who is wealthier than me. In fact, I would say that I derive meaning from my intensive wealth generation so that I don't have to kowtow to a wealthier guy. One approach is to become one of the 1%, then 99% of folks around you can't browbeat you because they are wealthier than you.

All this being said, Richer, Wiser, Happier by William Green is, when reading deeply, a fairly subversive piece of work. 

On the surface, it does its job deconstructing the successful traits of wealthy people by simplifying their thought processes for the layman reader. For example, Mohnish Pabrai is all about cloning other successful investors, and he does it so well that he can be construed as a fairly original guy. Charlie Munger is all about inversion and avoiding bad investments rather than looking for good ones. I guarantee that a reader of this blog will love this book.

If you read this as self-help fare, however, I think you will miss out on the real value of this book. 

Putting all the great investors together, there are very uncomfortable truths about becoming a great investor. 

Great investors are lonely. Almost all of them have troubles relating to others. To a much lesser extent, this resonated well with my own childhood experiences. I was an only child, I can't relate to others so I spend time on my books and role-playing. My secondary school classmates would create football league tables to compare school grades and they told me openly that I can't join their league unless I used only my Chinese grades. ( BTW, I'm not bitter, I was extremely flattered in those days )

Introversion allows a person to develop their thoughts in seclusion and this allows all great investors to take contrarian bets and do something different from other people. I tested a borderline extrovert, but my students in all my 20 batches have never tested extrovert in the history of my ERM program. I was forced into a world made up of my own involving a lot of mental models and D&D because I went to secondary school where I just could not make a lot of close friends. ( But it got better in NJC and NUS )

My latest Batch 20 is dominated by INTJs - a trait most conducive to FIRE.

The second thing that really jumps out is just how bad the best investors are at having families. 

Divorce is a constant theme around these investors with Warren Buffett as an exception. But Warren moved out of his house to live with his girlfriend while keeping relations friendly with his wife. I suspect you need to be really disagreeable to stick your guns in investing. This also makes you more competitive and want to win with stronger fund performance. A final hint to see how disagreeable a tribe is to count the number of law degrees in that tribe. If you self-select to study law, you definitely fall into the top quartile on disagreeableness. 

Therefore, it's not unreasonable to conclude that the greatest investors have extremely low EQ. There are really credible urban legends of Charlie Munger, the Abominable No Man, dissing his fans when he's in a bad mood in the book which is really fun to read. 

My final point is that ultimately this book is a great read not because of the surly investors featured, but by the author himself who is a very skilful writer. The author is a journalist who takes liberties peppering the book with ideas from philosophy to make the book accessible to the layman reader. 

You can review this blog article again after reading the book to see whether you agree with me.

Letter to Batch 20 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

 

Dear Students of Batch 20,

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

This class may have been the most challenging class to teach, thanks to the pandemic restrictions which came into existence just a week ago. Initially, there are no restrictions to conduct a face to face class. Still, regulations disallow the serving of bento boxes in classrooms, so I had to scramble to create a half-day course focused on portfolio creation for Batch 20. On top of these restrictions,  I was trying to juggle software demos and updating spreadsheets over Zoom, which is not something I look forward to doing again.

Nevertheless, we could have a better program with more class participation thanks to allowing alumni to participate in a Refresher class for a token fee. This improvement will not be felt until we meet face to face in July or August, where seniors can guide juniors in stock discussions and assist me in answering questions.

The portfolio for Batch 20 is exceptional because analysts reports have yet to factor in heightened restrictions due to the pandemic. The write-ups would be more optimistic than usual. However, we also employed a different approach to select our stocks, allowing voting to take place and picking only half of the stocks shortlisted by the financial model. The result is a very conservative mix of defensive investments that can tide us through a bad patch if we end up with another Circuit Breaker.

Our relationship is not over, and we will meet face to face when the restrictions are lifted. Meeting face to face will ensure that you can thoroughly revise the concepts taught in class and build a portfolio from scratch again the next time we meet.

Lastly, I hope that Batch 20 would participate actively in the FB group. Until we meet, the community and I would be happy to assist you in any queries.

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

Medical Misadventures

I was not fazed so much by the market crash last Friday nor the lockdown regulations that forced me to push this weekend's lesson online. I've had a spate of bad luck lately with my health.

It started a week ago when I had pain on the lower right side of my abdomen. My first visit to the GP was unable to detect any problems and I was given some painkillers. That cost me about $50.

Then after doing some googling of my own, I thought that I may be developing appendicitis. It was logical to me then because it was on the same side as my appendix. The pain was quite sharp at night so it was similar to what websites say. I became worried that a GP would not detect anything again so I went to a private hospital to eliminate the possibility that my appendix is about to explode. This was expensive. A consultation was $100 but the lower pelvic scan cost me $1,000 but Medisave will reimburse part of it. Strangely, the scan said I was just fine.

My pain persisted, and blisters started to appear on the right side of my belly so I went to the GP again to get a cream. At that time I thought they were insect bites.

Sadly for me, they were not insect bites. I developed shingles, something that normally happened to older men. My immune system became so weak, my chickenpox came back. Shingles treatment was not expensive. It was $80.

It's been 6 days since I was on antivirals so I've more or less recovered. 

An interesting point to note is that I'm in my 40s and my shingles came two weeks after my second vaccination jab. Medical reports say there is not causation but about six women in Israel developed shingles as well after their vaccinations. 

I don't see any moral in this. 

I regret my paranoia, I paid for a $1,000 test which came back negative. 

But do I really want the test to come back positive? 

Getting my appendix removed would cost me $18k and the loss of my revenues for this week's class. This was unthinkable given the number of man-hours of support my partners have put up to make the class a reality.

Maybe this is a taste of what is to come in my 50s where I have to juggle more medical mishaps as I get older. I would never forget the story that was told to me about finance guru Dennis Ng who died while conducting a class preview. That can happen to me as well.

It's a busy week ahead and my shingles have been so painful, I need some cheering up. 

This blog will resume next week after my class. 

( Pic was taken from the Internet, my case was very mild given that I threw so much money after it. )

Sorry Singapore ! Harsh Dalal is not the saviour you're looking for.

 

One of the lessons I learned in Dune ( thanks to my now amped up English Literature skills ) is that saviours can be a bad idea. In the Dune series, the Fremen, a desert faring race of nomads, longed for the appearance of the Mahdi, a messianic saviour from outer space, who will save them and then launch a Crusade to take revenge for all the Fremen's perceived grievances on the rest of the Universe. The supposed saviour Paul Atreides eventually took a massive U-Turn and then tried to erase the faith which grew around his persona.

If you think about, Harsh Dalal, until recently "30 under 30 in Asia" lister of Forbes magazine, was the kind of saviour Singapore desperately needed. 

Almost everything about this guy ticks all the right boxes :

• A student of Singapore Polytechnic, not the usual elitist scum from an elite JC.
• Business Administration diploma - Non-tech running a tech company! 
• Moved to Singapore at age six from India, but now a Singapore Permanent Resident about to serve NS, so local xenophobes can't keep going "CECA CECA CECA" over his success. He will serve NS.
• $25M startup with 70,000 users in the Xenon platform.
• Even has someone from MIT working for him
• $9.8M series A funding from Grand Canyon Capital

When I first read about this guy, even I wanted to believe that this guy is the saviour that Singapore needs to bolster the tech startup sector and the non-degree route to success. 

But sadly, thanks to the recent CSI from Tech In Asia, a lot of Dalal's claims are not true and have been retracted. The juicy details can be found here on Reddit.

Fortunately for us, we still have Sim Wong Hoo, the real Saviour from over 30+ years ago. Sadly these days, I won't even admit Creative Technologies into the screen for tech stocks and it seems to do better in litigation. 

As Mr Sim becomes older, I think the search for the next big startup founder has become more desperate. I imagine journalists will leap into the fray whenever a Singaporean with a diploma starts to gain traction over a business preferable before age 25. For this story to work, the rising star should come from an HDB background and cannot have the safety net of successful professional parents. 

The Startup Hero's Journey must remain intact. 

So Singapore needs to keep searching...

Interestingly, Tech In Asia just found the Philosopher's Stone to produce compelling journalism that I hope the mainstream media should adopt under a new business model. 

Instead of selling us propaganda, why not use your investigative skills to unmask all the so-called saviours we have today?

The public wants to be entertained and ever since the Harsh Dalal exposes came out, I was tempted to pay for a subscription because I want more!

There are a few guys in a crypto space (whom I shall not name) that may be deserving of such CSI. 

 

Direct your umbrage at the system, not the person

As I am somewhat anti-woke and pro-PAP, I find other PAP loyalists jumping to the defence of SPH CEO Ng Yat Chung. This is puzzling because Ng Yat Chung is not a politician. 

In fact, Min Shan has spoken somewhat against him. 

I will not describe the immense and consequential damage that was just inflicted on SPH shareholders as this is well documented by many bloggers. In fact, I will try to figure out why so much damage control was done over a few words of someone who is a non-politician. All I can say is that my ERM students were burned by SPH's foray in Orange Valley in the past and buying SPH counts as one of the poorest investment decisions we have ever made during the life of the entire program, second only to the disastrous position in Eagle Hospitality Trust for one batch of students.

From the point of view of someone who actually worked under a statutory board, the words uttered by the SPH CEO were mild. I had supervisors in the public sector who asked my Indian IT vendors whether took part in the Little India riots during a team meeting and loudly voiced concerns over female employees about the possibility that they will get pregnant and go on maternity leave ( the supervisor being a mother herself )

For me, if I want to direct my umbrage at something, it would be the amakudari system that parachutes top Admin officers into private sector roles that may ultimately damage the capital that belongs to us hapless shareholders. This is really something that we investors do not deserve. As brilliant as a top civil servant is, I liken their experience to twenty years as a goalkeeper for a soccer team. When their time runs out, they are forcefully put in a position of a striker. There is no way you can hone the kind of adaptive entrepreneurial thinking from a formal rules-driven bureaucratic mindset of the civil service sector. Some may succeed due to luck, but many will fail.

This is the kind of arrogance hinted at by many old-timer government officials. Just because someone has high general intelligence, they can thrive in any environment, even a highly competitive one like the business sector. 

I think the true damage done by SPH has nothing to do with losses shareholders suffered on Friday but the consequences it will have on amakudari moving forward. Voters should not be shy to pressure the PAP to revise this system. ( I will happily troll my new MP Mr. Edward Chia on this issue the next time I see him hanging around in Segar Road. )

I want to offer a cautionary note on our religious fetish for government scholars. This comes from an unlikely source. 

Two issues ago The Economist published an obituary of Bernard Madoff, the man who built the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of mankind.

If you peer into the mind of Bernard Madoff, you will find some fundamental truths belonging to all Humanity. Bernard Madoff had no need to enrich himself at the expense of his peers - he was financially independent before setting up his fund. Things began to fall apart when his fund underperformed slightly and I suspect Bernard has so many strings of personal successes, he was unable to cope with his first failure in life, so he doubled up using fraud to cover up his mistakes. 

Introduce failure to a person who has been successful all his life will induce cognitive dissonance and it takes a very strong mind to resist doing something underhanded to keep his self-esteem intact. 

I struggle with this on a daily basis as well - I have three degrees in Engineering, Finance and Law. I have passed almost all the major investment exams. But every day, I see a 20-something year old become a multi-millionaire by buying Dogecoins or staking their coins in a Liquidity pool. Fortunately, I have done much worse and faced my own demons on this blog on March 2020. 

Today failure is my best friend and I often have a drink with it. 

I suspect many Admin service officers, being the Apex Predators of Academic Hunger Games may also never experienced a major failure in their lives. This can lead to disastrous consequences as they try to rationalise or even scold their way to avoid personal accountability. 

To assist them in coping with failure, perhaps a Gen Z crypto bro should flash a Lambo at their scholar pal every now and then to teach them a bit of humility. 

Singaporeans should actively promote someone who has a humiliating failure in his resume. 

Therefore,  it comes as no surprise that my favourite PM candidate is Ong Ye Kung. I think the Aljunied elections in 2011 has shaped his character for the better. 

Direct your umbrage at amakudari and the CEP system. 

This can be something that unites both PAP and Anti-PAP supporters. 

   

Eternal trends and how to spot them

 

I always enjoyed reading books about the future. Future studies are the discipline about how to predict future trends and I'm gradually training my brain about how to think about prediction. Naturally, this can be a really inaccurate exercise and a lot of predictions turns out to be wrong, but imagine how much can be earned if somehow someone gets it right.

I'm still in the process of building a library of books on future studies, but this highly accessible book by Magus Lindkvist talks about a number of trends that are eternal for Mankind.

a) Wellness, health and convenience

We've always been trying to make ourselves live longer and easier lives. Many of the trends that affect us, such as eating in a healthier way, have been obsessed by even our ancestors. Someone will always be thinking about some form of exercise, diet or medication that can claim to result in better longevity. 

b) Self-expression

Everyone wants to be noticed and leave a mark one day.  Another parallel trend is the desire to belong to something.  Our ancestors have been using cave paintings to communicate their ideas, today they use social media. This is another trend that will not end, as an investor someone will produce the next Clubhouse or anything that allows folks to interact with each other and be heard by the larger community.

c) Sensory stimulation

People crave sensory stimulation so they will always be trying to experience new things. Ancient carnivals and theatre have evolved into the Disney Plus and Netflix channels of today. A parallel development is that new ways of grabbing someone's attention will always be in development. 

d) Technology

Enabling all the above eternal trends is mankind's ability to tame new materials and processes for his personal benefit. We're now right in the middle of the Information Age, the question is what kind of age will arise out of all the new internet technologies. 

Unfortunately, we might be quite far from Future studies becoming a serious discipline with its own methodologies. The book is also quite chaotic and disorganised. One wish list is that the author would look at these eternal trends and dedicate a chapter to the evolution of each trend and make a series of wild guesses on what to expect on the horizon.  

I'm personally betting that a Quantum Age is upon us soon enough that will make most information technologists obsolete. 

 

Why policy makers may not plug the CPF Shielding Lifehack Abomination

Ok, this will be my last article on this issue as I've managed to get other bloggers chiming in on this issue and hopefully, the matter will take on greater prominence over time.

One interesting point to note is that matters will not have gone viral if I had not used the word "abomination". The inspiration behind this word was from the third book of the Dune series (Children of Dune) is this character called Alia who is a child savant witch-like character. Alia was imbued with the power of ancestors who lived before her. In the story, her conscious thoughts were like a battlefield where her good and evil ancestors fought to gain control over her mind. When the spirit of her evil grandfather Baron Vladimir Harkonnen took over her eventually, Alia became The Abomination and was the major villain of the third book of the Dune series.

In my opinion, the CPF Shielding issue belongs to the same class of problems known as "The Problem of Evil" that theologians and philosophers have to confront. 

• If God was good, why does evil exist?
• If government regulators were that good, why do commissioned FAs exist?
• If the CPF was so good, why do Singaporeans need to resort to CPF Shielding?

CPF Shielding has been known for a number of years and nothing much has been done about it, I can speculate that authorities have not acted for the following reasons :

a) The impact of this hack was too small to warrant action

This seems to be the best reason for inaction. 

Very few Singaporeans have enough money in their CPF to need this hack urgently because their CPF-OA is normally exhausted by housing needs during their financial lives, so it easy to just shut off one eye and keep things status quo. In this sense, it's useful for us bloggers to keep driving awareness towards this issue so that more people may actively manage their CPF to be able to exploit this shield.

b) The government simply does not want you to get an extra 1.5%, so you need to work for it

Some folks argued that the government just wants to limit the number of folks who can max out their 4% so there was no incentive to make getting that 4% easier for citizens. 

This is less persuasive to me because they can cover up this hack entirely having all accounts flow to CPF-OA at age 55 before CPF-RA is constructed. But I think this will cost another GRC in the next elections for the PAP if carried out. 

c) The technical and operational change may be extensive

Changing the system to allow citizens to elect to top up of CPF-RA via CPF-OA first may require system changes. We really cannot tell whether the systems allow the priority to change. 

If someone hard-coded and compiled it years ago, the expense may not be justified. But it would be really dumb to hard-code the order money pours into CPF-RA from a software engineering perspective. 

d) The CPF Shield is a part of a complex system of compromises with the Finance Industry

This is a most interesting idea. 

If you think about it, allowing citizens to use up CPF-SA to buy select investment products is already quite a dangerous idea given that 4% riskless returns is rather high. CPF currently allows CPF-SA to be invested in balanced funds. From a risk-adjusted perspective, it's giving folks the option to trade off a product with a Sharpe ratio of infinity to maybe something with a Sharpe ratio of 0.4 - 0.6 in the best case. 

I'm totally fine if it's an option folks can refuse. But CPF also does not want to drive out the finance industry or trigger massive unemployment for FAs as well, many count on financial advice as a rare route to millionaire status without a degree. 

So maybe this hack is a series of compromises to keep some career paths open to Singaporeans. 

I like to think about compromise when I put myself in the shoes of a policymaker. There are a lot of things about financial advice that can be improved instantly for the good of most citizens, primarily ensuring that FAs have, at least, a relevant degree since financial planning is not a joke.

But this has not happened, so you've got a bunch of advisors claiming to be doing work as important as medical doctors as taught by their handlers but having no need to meet such standards.  

Sometimes I wonder if financial advice is really based on intelligence and knowledge, then how many Singaporeans will be out of a job if we reform the law to align with this reality?

In summary, I'm not trying to remove the freedom for Singaporeans to invest their monies. I just want the freedom to earn my 4% without resorting to third-party funds, hence I think giving Singaporeans a choice to populate CPF-RA from CPF-OA should be provided by the CPF Board itself. 

If a savvy FA can convince someone to invest their CPF-SA somewhere else, good for them. 

I see our role as financial educators to make sure that folks understand the price they pay when this happens.

CPF Shielding is merely the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of reforms to the Financial Advisors Act that will benefit the people of Singapore and I hope one day I can convince an Opposition party to take up these issues one day.