Happy Chinese New Year ! The time of the Fire Horse is here !

 

The year of the Horse has finally arrived with all its fiery glory, and already I've been experiencing the forces of tumultuous change occurring in my life.

The first change is that I've already completed 10 music lessons, and my singing has improved a little bit. But there have been many new initiatives and changes to my course materials, so I have to stop singing lessons for a while and instead hunt for a voice-confidence course that's more applicable to a trainer. My goal of competing at Golden Age Talentime is still there, but I want to explore this field more randomly and don't really want to pursue it the same way as my other initiatives. I think I've earned the right to be a little frivolous with this.

The second change is that financial markets have already exceeded my expectations for the entire year of 2026. One of the things I've promised myself during the pandemic crash of 2020 is that I will begin treating a market melt-up like a market melt-down, and I will make seriously drastic changes to the portfolios I have with the same urgency as during a market crash. Expect these moves to occur when STI hits PE x16 or 5,200, whichever comes first. I will likely close all my ERM portfolios and re-establish positions in extremely low-volatility large caps. I will also increase the allocation to my All-Weather Portfolio, which is designed to have an extremely low standard deviation in trying times. 

You heard it here first: At 5,200 or x16 PE, my Early Retirement Masterclass may come to an end.

I will take some profit off the table. Take an extended break, and go do some travelling. And I will return with a different kind of program for a different market regime that emphasizes bottom up investigation of local stocks and concentrated stock holdings. I assure my community that the FB group will undergo slight changes, a new course will be born, and the current alumni privileges will not be affected.

The third change is simply that AI is happening too fast for me or anyone to catch on, so further changes are already transforming my program into something that is different even from previous runs. I'm already studying how to compile all my investing wisdom into a Markdown file so my student can analyse stocks with just one prompt instead of many. In a matter of months, I might even have to build a Clawbot to do fundamental backtesting for me on Quants Cafe. If the authorities can build an AI proficiency ladder, I might have to stop everything to climb it later this year. 

Maybe there is a silver lining to all this Chaos in the Year of the Fire Horse.

The silver lining is that as changes accelerate, no one can claim to be an AI expert; there is no competitive advantage. The video I have put up using Grok is already yesterday's news, as folks become enamoured with Seedance 2.0. 

If FIRE is a trap, then why am I so happy with my life?

This weekend, the Business Times launched a new column entitled Switching Lanes. This column is after the hearts of many folks who read this blog because it focuses on the realities of life after a full-time career. I encourage blog readers to support this column, as I expect my own blog to issue rebuttals and support for such articles in the future.

And this is why I enjoyed Kenneth Goh's article, titled "The best investment in your 20s isn't your portfolio." This article, in my opinion, is rife with logical fallacies, and even though the author has disclaimed that his opinions are his own, I can't help but feel that the views expressed also coincidentally align with those of financial institutions.

First of all, the article proposes that the best investment in your 20s isn't your portfolio. That's hard to disagree with even for the stanchest FIRE advocate. Health is probably a much better investment of your time. Even some relationships are worth investing in. 

But the author does not mention health and relationships at all.

Instead, the authors begin by discussing the FIRE movement, and credit goes to him for referring to Jacob Lund Fisker, whom I consider a real father of the FIRE movement, rather than to Vicki Robins, who is very much a free spirit and an inheritor of wealth.

At this point in the article, the logical flaws begin to surface as the author constructs a strawman of the FIRE movement. A strawman is an exaggerated illustration that can be easily toppled by a simple argument. This strawman is a troglodyte, a caricature that saves so much money that he forgets to network with other people and build up his human capital, which the author deftly channels by invoking Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker. 

I've been into FIRE for 25+ years, and if you follow my blog and observe my LinkedIn, I suspect I've been building my human capital way longer than the author. I've also had personal correspondence with Jacob Lund Fisker, who is a very friendly guy and a brilliant Renaissance man, a Physics PhD and a handyman. In our private conversation, I remember admiring Jacob for his handyman skills, but told him that in Singapore, these skills can be outsourced for a low fee, and I can afford to build other competencies. 

Therefore, I don't think you can position people in the FIRE movement as antisocial troglodytes who sacrifice career networking for their investment portfolios.

This is a false dichotomy. There is no tradeoff. 

I can be frugal and also have coffee sessions with businessmen I admire (many as frugal as me!) . 

However, this article does have the benefit of prompting us to reflect on why people think financial capital comes at the expense of human capital.

A majority of the FIRE movement are INTJs; they are naturally introverted. So I can argue that even if they do not engage in portfolio building, INTJs can do many other things to keep themselves intellectually satisfied, like watch anime endlessly and argue with people on Reddit, learn Klingon, build AI bots, play Dungeons and Dragons, or anything but build their human capital through relentless networking.

Finally, the author and the financial institutions need to really do some soul searching on the people in their 50s today who CAN NOT RETIRE.

There are plenty of Singaporeans who spend their 20s building networks, playing office politics, and getting ahead. Not all of them succeed; some gain minor advantages and become addicted to a high-status lifestyle, but all of us eventually get older, and at 45, many Singaporeans see their salaries plateau. Soon enough, how can the author explain the many pre-sales consultant types retrenched in their 50s and forced to draw down on their assets?

At this stage, someone who read Gary Becker can argue that a significant amount of human capital has already been transformed into financial capital. 

So does it make sense to continue the endless circle jerk of professional networking and looking for a Patron in the office?

Beyond a particular point, you need real skills to manage your financial capital. 

It starts with a small VWRA or IWDA position with a custodian broker limiting your expense ratio to less than 0.5% a year. Then it evolves into a full-fledged portfolio spanning real estate, dividend stocks, and, yes, algorithmic advisors in Python to get sky-high Sharpe ratios. The human capital required to code, invest and reap your rewards is, in fact, quite immense.

But we need to ask ourselves this: Why do financial institutions genuinely hate the FIRE movement?

It is because we are so good that we prefer to invest our money ourselves. Wrap fees and expensive commissions are something for other people. 

So, why park my funds with you when I can buy shares in your bank? 

 ( Apologies, I gave a nice title to this article, but actually did not answer the question. LOL ! )

Levelling up before the Year of the Fire Horse

 

While the YouTube channel has not seen much new content, I've been quietly levelling up some of my skills. The most obvious is that I'm learning how to chain together Nano Banana, Grok, and the Capcuts to create video sequences so that future videos on my channel are not just PowerPoint presentations with financial content. You can click on the link above to see what I have in store for you in the future.

But of course, using AI tools and shaping better prompts hardly counts as levelling out in this modern context. 

In fact, for the first time in my life, I managed to write some Python code to trade directly from my IBKR account. I've been postponing this for a long time, as I've always preferred to use my programming skills to build advisors and keep an execution manual, but given that I've picked up some modern books on investing for programmers, I've managed to get access to some rudimentary ( and very buggy) code to get started on some advanced trading algorithms. 

For those who are interested, for now, all I can say is that you need Trader Workstation (TWS) for IBKR, a Jupyter notebook on your local machine, and a way to enable the required APIs in TWS. My first program purchased double the number of stocks I wanted because the original script demoed a market and a limit order, so I had the happy problem of buying double the number of shares, which has since gone up. The opposite tragedy could have happened to someone else. 

Sadly, as the setup is unauthorised for Singapore users and requires some technical proficiency, it will be some time before I can create a course out of this. I might work with Dr Wealth to have personalised 1-1 coaching on such complex technical setups, but this probably cannot come cheap.

There are some things I really like to get better at. I can build Python scripts that send prompts to ChatGPT and use responses to analyse local companies. I'm still struggling to use RAG to process downloaded analyst reports. There's also a desperate need to catch up on agentic AI, which remains a dynamic field, and to independently research and make investment recommendations on it, so there will definitely be a few Udemy courses I will need to start before CNY.

Hopefully, my YouTube channel will be back with new content as early as next week. 

Malaysia will not be cheap forever, you know...

 

I just returned from a short trip to JB with my mum to clear some paperwork with Tenaga National. This was a 2-day, 1-night trip to accommodate my mum, who might not be able to handle the heavy traffic across the Causeway. And this trip is a little special because I made some financial mistakes that I can share with the readers.

The first major mistake was booking the hotel directly. KSL charged me $120 SGD for one night for a superior room with two beds. It included breakfast, albeit a really bad one, valued at about $40 SGD for two pax. The experience at Tower 1 KSL was very negative as the wifi did not work well, a power socket could not charge my phone, and there was barely any hot water, even at the hottest setting. But it's only one night, so I can soldier through it.

The second mistake was eating the usual at Meng Meng Duck. We ordered a meat platter, some hot-and-sour vegetables, and even shared a plate of rice. The total bill was $104 MYR, which is quite high for an essential meal for just one person.

The third mistake was ordering a stingray in the area outside KSL. There's been a change in management, and a boisterous Chinese lady has been calling the shots. The food is no longer undercooked and quite tasty, but one medium stingray, some kangkong, and two bottles of mineral water cost is $110 MYR. And the entire place is so absurd that a family was playing firerackers in the midst of the open-air eatery! I would be fine, but it really annoyed the hell out of the stray cats in the area, and no one stopped them. 

So basically, if you don't manage your spending well in JB, even with the mighty SGD, JB can be expensive sometimes. The damage from one night's stay is equivalent to almost a week's rent I collect from my property there.

Is the experience still cheaper than SG? Sure, but in SG, I stay in a house I own and know where to get $2.80 chicken rice.

When Singaporeans think about investing in JB, there are definitely places heating up near Bukit Chagar, and some FIRE enthusiasts consider Malaysia a retirement destination. Heck, in my lessons, my students almost always do the sums to work out how much it costs to survive in KL each month.

But we need to think about second-order effects as well. With better transport links, more Malaysians will want to work in SG, and to prevent them from doing so, salaries need to go up across the board for service staff, which will impact how much Singaporeans enjoy their weekend trips.

In time, the JB discount will shrink, and Singaporeans will question whether the hilarious bad service staff who can't even count change is worth the trouble, why the jacuzzi's water is lukewarm, or why someone is throwing firecrackers within 2 metres of me while I'm eating an overpriced sting ray.

All these problems will come home to roost. And don't get me started on the oversupply of property coming to JB soon.

Ok, now let's turn to my content creation this week. I don't have a new video, but I have a collaboration with the Financial Coconuts on The Assembly Place IPO. Enjoy!

In which I present a useful framework to understand one's personality?

 

I've always believed that, in career and financial planning, a person needs a deeper understanding of their personality to succeed, but many frameworks exist, and adherents to one often pour scorn on others. For example, folks who subscribe to the Big5 OCEAN personality models pooh-pooh the folks who follow the MBTI framework. Of late, having exposed myself to the idea that personality can be determined by neurotransmitters, as in my last article, I am beginning to see the usefulness of treating all personality frameworks as a stack, like the OSI model in networking engineering.

If we can arrange theories of personality as a stack, we can start at low levels, examining biochemistry, and move up to models based on actual brain structure, like the OCEAN model. Above OCEAN are the more HR-oriented models, like MBTI. We can then go even further and incorporate ancient techniques, such as the Enneagram, above the MBTI. Above the more prosaic models are astrological and metaphysical models. In this way, we respect the models validated by science, but we also do not discard models that facilitate communication in pop culture or company culture (like MBTI) or models derived from our own cultures and ancestry (like Bazi).

As we build our personality stack, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves so as to effect consequential change in our lives. That's the application layer, where I tend to use personality models to explain why some people achieve FIRE earlier than others, and HR professionals explain why some people are suited to particular jobs. Couples can also spend countless hours examining their significant others' personalities.

So, with this insight, I reveal parts of my own personality stack.

a) Neurotransmitter - The Molecule of More by Lieberman and Long

Reading the book explained a lot about my behaviours in recent times, when I constantly feel I can never enjoy the present moment like other people do. These days, I stare into a blank space to think about the future of not just financial markets, my impending doom and whether my kids can make it as adults. And I'm always acting to remove future obstacles in my life. I have a dopaminergic personality, and I respond weakly to the "here and now" neurotransmitters such as serotonin and oxytocin.

b) OCEAN - Just Google a personality test online

The OCEAN model is best in class because each factor, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Openness to New Experience and Neuroticism, can be traced to a physical structure of the brain.

I'm quite familiar with my own personality here. I'm highly disagreeable and justly more conscientious than my peers. I should do ok with money matters, as I enjoyed being rude to financial advisors. They are not as well-trained as I am, and when I buy term and invest the rest, I really invest the rest.

c) MBTI - Also available in many places online

The MBTI does not need to be strongly validated by psychologists. The power of MBTI is that it maps to an easily identifiable stereotype that HR professionals can use. It is also quite dynamic and contextual. 

I tested ESTJ when I was 18, and I continue to be very data-driven and empirical, but I was raised by N, so I am quite intuitive and trust my gut before I make a trade so over the years, I shifted to ENTJ, and now as I get older I become more antisocial and AI rates me an INTJ when it reads my blog. So I pay more attention to ENTJ weaknesses, like being blunt, when I read notes on social media.

Today, I still identify more with ENTJ, but I'm less reckless with age and still enjoy hanging out more than my friends, who are getting more and more reclusive over the years.

In this layer, you will find many alternative models that generate significant revenue for consultants like DISC, Gallup StrengthsFinder, and Emergenetics. I have done them all and conclude that it's profitable to do this.

d) Enneagram

If you can accept MBTI and its lack of a variable to include neuroticism and how it shifts from context to context, then you will have no problem using a simple 9 personality archetype system like the Enneagram.

For me, I'm a type 3 Performer that is gradually shifting to a type 5 Sage because I'm an investment trainer. I don't find Enneagram particularly useful, but it's good for cocktail conversations.

You will also find other fun diversions like Kingdomality in this layer. Also, for folks who are into philosophy, some questions, like whether you tend to be a Stoic or an Epicurean, can reside in this layer too.

e) Bazi - Chinese Metaphysics

As we reach levels where models can hardly be validated by science or even conventional logic, why would someone like me enjoy analysing my Bazi?

If you follow Bazi experts like Joey Yap, you will notice that Chinese Metaphysics have evolved from fortune telling into life coaching, so Joey Yap videos are as fun to watch as TED talks or presentations from McKinsey Consultants. Also, I think it's very hypocritical to challenge Chinese metaphysics and believe that stock prices will bounce off a resistance level or any projection from an economist.

But I have a deeper rationale that might astound even Joey Yap - I use LLMs to analyse my Bazi, and I suspect that AI has somehow trapped my writings and content in its training models, giving the readings with an eerie accuracy that a human astrologer couldn't possibly predict. I will provide more content on this on the Chinese New Year, but here's just a small snippet.

According to Bazi, my favourable element is Earth, my unfavourable element is Fire. And throughout my decade of life, investments with an Earth theme have always done well for me, despite years of underperformance. I held AIMS APAC REIT until I have my full capital returned to me in the form of dividends. And yet, even when I identified Palantir as early as during my time in IDA, when it first came to town, invested in it early, and participated in its IPO, fate intervened to prevent me from making real money from it.

I would not use Bazi to make specific investments, but my Earth element ensures I will always hunt for a margin of safety, steady dividends, and a low beta in my portfolio. Even when I invest based on trend-following algorithms, which is a Fire endeavour, my algorithm has led me to commodities like Lithium (Metal or Earth investment), which has made me the most money.

Even if you discount the predictive power of metaphysics, there are two practical applications of metaphysics. You can identify a stance in the way you live your life. Earth is defensive, patient, long-term and trundles along slowly. Also, as you identify your elements, you begin to arrange events in your life into a more coherent framework to understand the meaning of your existence.

I'm still not at the point of paying for expensive consultations, but I strongly urge you guys to just try it out for fun with LLMs. I intend to do a more specific article on how to do this with a paid version of ChatGPT.

Depending on your culture, you would also find Western Astrology in this layer, which I intend to play with soon enough.

Conclusion - Build your stack

In summary, I am proposing a much more open-minded approach to understanding your personality so that you can make better decisions in life and derive more meaning from the events that happen to you. 

You can use some hints on where to find these personality tests, and do share with me how things go.

Dividends and Dopamine, that other D&D I play

 

I made the right choice to read The Molecule of More by Lieberman and Long last month, and the core idea is that almost all of our motivation comes from the neurotransmitter Dopamine. The book's idea is also useful, as I take some time to understand myself slightly better.

After 5 decades, I've been noticing some of my own personality traits that are very different from those of others and from almost all my friends. I plan so far ahead and create so many contingencies that I don't really have the capability to enjoy the present. Otherwise, I can enjoy anticipating a nice soak at the Onsen at Kallang Wave, but often get impatient once I'm actually there, taking the dip in the hot pools. I can't seem to find an MBTI or Big5 explanation for this until I read this volume. The closest character I can find is a Warhammer 40,000 entity known as Kairos the Fateweaver, a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch (shown above).

According to the book, I have a dopaminergic personality, which makes me more susceptible to a dopamine rush and less affected by other neurotransmitters like serotonin and endorphins that help me enjoy the moment.

Of course, the next thing I had to do was to understand my obsession with building a dividend portfolio that would allow me to live on my dividends, way before more people would even consider retirement planning a bad idea, so here is a powerful table of neurotransmitters that activate when a dividend hits your bank account.

As it turns out, dividends trigger different neurotransmitters, so psychological benefits accrue to people beyond the dopaminergic personality, but it is the anticipatory dopamine that drives the behaviour: self-denial, delayed gratification, and the obsessive frugality that enables FIRE to succeed.

Of course, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Do dividends produce different neurotransmitters than capital gains? ChatGPT has the following answer :

Capital gains may create a different chemical cocktail in the brain, which may explain the stubbornness of dividend investors and why it's not as simple as telling them to sell parts of an ETF to generate synthetic income.

I will leave some disturbing ideas for readers.

Once we know which neurotransmitter needs to be active to generate a financial behaviour, some crazy technocrat can find a way to stimulate a population into consuming recklessly. Technically, the approved technique is via a marketing campaign, but cocaine can throw a person's dopamine into overdrive. 

What if we're becoming unsure as to whether someone is really pulling the strings on our financial behaviour? 

I survived a nightmare scenario for CDP investors

 

Today's article is relevant to old-school investors who hold their stocks in CDP. I'm sharing my personal story for two reasons: first, to help CDP investors who haven't encountered this issue before; and second, to seek comments from other investors who have found better ways to deal with the situation.

So let's start with the investment that led to the fracas. I have an ETF called IS Asia HYG (Ticker: QL3). This is a good investment for me because it yields decently and is not correlated with banks and REITs on SGX, as it invests in high-yield Asian Bonds. It pays every 3 months at the end of March, June, September and December. Because payment is in USD, it is often delayed by a day or over the weekend, so it pays in the dividend dry months of January, April, July, and October in SGD directly into the bank account.

I was tracking the dividend, and on the 2nd of January 2026, not only did the dividend not arrive, but the Direct Credit Scheme, some sort of dividends pipeline that connects to a joint-account CDP of mine with a DBS joint account, was found to be suspended.

There was obviously some cause for panic, since this had never happened to me before, so I did the worst thing an investor can do: I consulted ChatGPT to find out why.

ChatGPT took me on a wild goose chase. It informed me that joint account connections are no longer valid and that banks will, based on events affecting the account, suspend these links in the future without grounds for appeal. 

As you can imagine, I panicked even further. 

I went online and tried to re-establish the link. On Monday, I went to the CDP office itself.

As it turns out, CDP no longer has counters. If you are physically present, there is a phone to dial in, and you wait like everyone else who calls a call centre. Eventually, I managed to get someone to explain to me that re-establishing the link was the right thing to do, and that the joint-account status just means the banks will take longer to activate the link. The call-centre staff explained that the breakage was a processing error caused on their side.

It took about 4 business days from link activation to re-establish the link, and the dividend came a day after that.

So the TL;DR of the story is: if a dividend is late, check the Direct Credit Scheme for the account; if it is suspended, just re-activate it using the bank account it was previously tied to.

 But the story is not over.

Before I even received my dividend, CDP decided to conduct a KYC check on me. Initially, I wrote back in anger, asking whether KYC was a prerequisite to re-establish my DCS, as it felt like a punishment when the processing mistake was theirs. 

At the moment, I submitted all my KYC documents as I did not want to delay subsequent payments, but that took at least 2 man-hours to generate my pay slips and bank statements.

So all-in-all, 2026 has been an administratively tough year because my dividend pipeline broke. 

I have no idea what would happen if the investor is an old boomer who suddenly finds his cash flow cut off and would need to go online to re-establish the link.

It's 2026 ! Happy New Year everyone !

 

2026 should be an exciting year ahead for Singapore investors, but I shall wait for Dr Wealth to publish my articles, so just hang on while Dr Wealth collates the input from all their trainers.

At the moment, I have yet to come up with a coherent plan for 2026. I would still have law lessons to teach, and I'm still forming my ERM class for March 2026. So there are no concrete plans to launch a new initiative as yet.

What is new in my life is formal singing classes, and I intend to do this until I can participate in a concert in April 2026. This is surprisingly uncomfortable and hard, as I've been singing wrong all this time at karaoke, and I'm going through the bottom of the J-Curve at the moment, as I can't hit my head voice yet. Still, I am patient and will see whether I can sustain this after April's milestone.

The rest of my plans will be finalised at the Chinese New Year. In the past, I have always been able to find something positive in every new year, as I follow both the horoscopes of the Tiger and Rat. (I was born in the year of the Tiger but the day and month of the Rat.) But according to some readings for 2026, both Rats and Tigers will have a challenging year ahead.

So right now I'm waiting for Joey Yap to release details on his projections. Joey Yap is my favourite astrologer because he sounds more like a management consultant than a Bazi expert. His advice is also good, even if you do not believe in astrology - it's probably the same thing that a business mentor will say.

The preview for me is that Rats need to experience some kind of change and pivot in 2026, while Tigers have strong academic luck. So I expect to find more creative ways to spend my SkillsFutures in 2026. I should also be attending a talk on PhD programmes in SMU. 

Anyway, here's to a fantastic 2026, and I will catch up with you for more updates over the weekend.

End of one month of not reading tech or business titles

As I spent the greater part of the year immersed in technology and finance books, I would now go through December intensely, reading things I would not usually read for my work. And the experience is actually more negative than I expected, even though I would enjoy a few fantasy novels. Still, then I would veer into the unknown, and last year I found this book, The Singapore Grip, by J. G. Farrell, really dull.

So this year, I will detail three books I did not enjoy, but I suspect some readers of my blog might find them worth reading.

1) I'm not lazy, I'm in energy-saving mode by Dancing Snail

This book's success is probably based on a single idea. Introverts read, but introverts are not as valued in the real world as extroverts. So let's make introverts feel good about themselves.

I finished this book in one day because it's mostly pictures and someone sharing inane thoughts. South Koreans are so stressed that a particular genre of cosy self-help is emerging to save some stressed workers from the toxic cultures they are stuck in. 

Authors in Korea can make a lot of money by simply telling everyone it's okay to be like that.

Maybe the working title of my next book should be My PSLE grades are shit, but I also want to eat  Chwee Kueh.

2) To the Moon by Jang Ryu Jin

Reading this book actually angered me. 

When I read a fictional story about cryptocurrency, I expect it to have a pretty shitty ending, with the crypto crashing and dreams and friendships getting dashed. It would be a moral lesson for the reader.

So imagine my shock that the book actually has a good ending with a plausible reason to exit ETH at its peak, and everyone lives happily ever after that.

I was initially afraid this would be used as marketing collateral for the next wave of shitcoin crypto schemes, but I realise that crypto bros and incels might be too dumb to read a work of fiction to understand its value.

Still, if you happen to be a deluded crypto bro who loves talking up shitcoins in your Tinder dates, this book is for you. 

3) The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa

I bought this book because I judged a book by its cover - and I paid the price for my folly. 

The edition with autumn leaves on its cover looks good on the shelf, except that nothing of note actually happens in the story on the Hankyu Line. 

Some unpleasant people met some less unpleasant people on a train, then conversations happened, some wisdom was shared, and some relationships shifted as a result. 

(You do realise that I enjoyed Warhammer 40k fiction, and Inquisitor Eisenhorn can lose an arm in the prologue of a novel and would eventually bind a daemon to his loyal friend's corpse, why the f**k do I care about annoying tai-tais reserving seats on a train?)

But I can imagine Western audiences lapping this up as its chapters are named after the stations on the line, with some flavourful local references, so it doubles up as a travel guide as well.

A local English Literature major can replicate the success of the book. Just take an MRT from Jurong East to Marina Bay, and at every station, something random but funny happens, like an uncle starts gooning an OL between City Hall and Raffles City and gets blanket-partied by a section of NS men.

4) So what's a good read?

Ok, some readers might get upset with me that I'm only sharing my worst reads this holiday, so what book of fiction should I recommend to a Singaporean reader?

It's not wise to judge a book by its cover. 

But I can judge a book by the hefty advance, and the author gets to write a work of fiction.

My favourite local book this year is The Original Daughter by Jemima Wei.

Just buy and read this for 2026. If you are very giam then wait for the Culture Pass to be enabled for local books.

See you tomorrow night for my article on 2026!

Personal update as I hit my 51st birthday

 

I get three chances to plan for any upcoming year. First round on Christmas Day, which is my birthday. Second round in the New Year, a week later. And a final round, which is quite far away in 2026, on Feb 17 for the Chinese New Year.

But as of late, whatever I have planned for 2026 is already in progress. I'm definitely winding down all my initiatives as I'm already around the 2/3rd mark of my life. I currently see three medical specialists - one for my diabetes, which I forcefully transitioned into insulin jabs to reduce my dependence on my drug cocktail, one for thyroid eye disease and now I have physio sessions to deal with my frozen shoulder.

a) Financial Markets

This is a rare year where folks who invested locally won big. I could not see it coming at all. Even though MAS had that EQDP planned, no one foresaw that Liberation Day would eventually push funds out of US bond markets to the rest of the world, with Singapore a favoured haven for its stability and strong currency. Valuations are still reasonable, and next year would not be as solid as 2025, so there's some more upside to go, especially for REITs. 

I'm one of the few folks who actually agree with DBS's forecast that the STI will reach 10,000 by 2040. I've been a believer even during the years when dividend investing on the Super Terrible Index was considered a "dangerous" thing to do. Now my family has reached a million per capita, thanks to this stubbornness, without a single person holding a "real job". 

I tell people that dividend investing in Singapore is a broken clock, but a broken clock can still be right twice a day, and you only need to be right once to get rich.

At around 5,160, I will take some steps to consolidate my assets. 

b) Work initiatives

Other than lucking out in financial markets, work has not been great, with lecturing gigs being sporadic and unreliable. Business is also bad in the training field. I expect 2026 to be the worst year ever. Still, I see myself updating course materials to sharpen my proficiency as an investor, incorporating LLMs into them and refining prompts to improve investment results.

In this area, I'm glad I actually did what I wanted to last Christmas: get the ACLP with my Skillsfutures credits.

The big deal in 2025 is that, as my gigs start to dwindle, I was able to create a fully monetised YouTube channel, opening another career possibility as a YouTuber. I'm cautious about advancing this area as I want to work on a more measured pace and build helpful videos once a week, but I can capture 1,000 views in a week. I doubt the investment of time would pay off without sponsors, but I am not willing to work with financial institutions that can give me a unique voice in this space.

c) Learning Goals

I'm not going to make big moves until I get the metaphysical readings right for the Year of the Fire Horse, which augurs a fairly terrible year for me. Right now, I'm enjoying singing lessons and taking them quite seriously. My school is fun, and students will be performing in April 2026, so I want to participate in my first-ever singing concert.

If gigs dry up in 2026, I may pursue a serious course and see whether I can get mid-career support from the government, but this is limited to 2 years for all Singaporeans, and I might want to save it for a rainy day.

d) Hobbies 

With singing and content creation, readers of the blog will notice that I've been contemplating quitting D&D for a while. You need to empty the cup before you can fill it with something else. But I don't think that it's time to make such a decision yet - it would be made if my kids have no interest in my hobbies. 

In fact, I spent $400 getting the deluxe versions of all three rulebooks and planned to game this holiday season. If the year of the Fire Horse is going to be that bad for me, I need more avenues to destress.

I would talk more about the year ahead next week. 

Useful instagram channels for you to enjoy this holiday season

As we head towards Christmas, I wanted to share a few Instagram channels I follow that can sharpen our investment savvy over time. I do not zoom into financial channels because I prefer to read to further develop my expertise. 

Hence, the channels I love focus on geographical regions I'm interested in. 

a) Tim Tiah for insights on Malaysia

Timtiah gives a more accurate view of the Malaysian economy than reading newspapers like The Star or The New Straits Times, which spend too much time on politics. Tim's reporting is very even-handed and paints a relatively optimistic picture of Malaysia. Over time, I suspect Tim's strength lies in his focus on the economy rather than on politics, so Singaporean fans won't be frightened off by UMNO's racial politics.

You can follow Tim here.

https://www.instagram.com/timtiah/ 

b) Yuan Pu Huang for insights on China

This space is actually getting crowded. Yuan is an interesting channel as he is a scholar who has made it his personal mission to help the Western world understand China a little more. China is too big to analyse as a whole, with Chengdu being a chill place and Shenzhen being way faster than cities like New York, so Yuan is a valuable guide to help us better understand China.

Like all media from Greater China, we have to absorb both the negative press from the West, such as The Economist magazine, and, while I found Yuan quite balanced six months ago, he has recently become more critical of the West and more defensive about China. 

Nevertheless, it's not easy to find balanced reporting, and we need to read books by Dan Wang and Hu Anyan to better understand China. This is a lifelong educational process.

Whether you like it or not, China will become more critical to the next generation. 

https://www.instagram.com/yuanunpackschina/

c) Nicholas Wu for insights on Indonesia

This channel is a guilty pleasure for me because Nicholas Wu is a seasoned businessman who has experienced a lot in Indonesia, and it's where he voices his frustrations about what it's like to be a Singaporean there. 

Singaporeans who want to build their credentials but prefer to do it in Hard or Inferno mode may want to try Indonesia instead of the unusual places like China or the US. It's videos like this that make me grateful for being Singaporean. 

https://www.instagram.com/paknicaman/

Why do I like channels like this?

I suspect it's probably a realisation that I've spent most of my career in Singapore and feel like a frog in the well. In hindsight, the most successful Gen X careers involve a long stint overseas.

Would I have been able to generate the same amount of wealth and cruise after age 39 if I had built an engineering career elsewhere? I can speculate. Fortunately for me, I no longer have a need to explore that.

But I want this option for my kids in the future. 

Made a rookie mistake contributing into Medisave this year.

 

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. 

Letter to Batch 40 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 40,

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.

Hope to see you then!

 

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

On rage quitting and understanding when to let go.

 

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.

Financial Nihilism is the evil we have to name

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.

What have I been up to lately?

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.

I hope next week is more interesting for me. 

 

Developing a Beginner's Mind

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:

Catch you guys over the weekend.

Videos for the upcoming week

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.

Personal Update

It's time for another personal update. 

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 :

This is what privilege looks like

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.