More hunger is not the answer

 

A legal recruiter went viral this week after saying that companies are firing Singaporeans to hire other workers from SE Asia who are hungrier. Because the chosen words were somewhat inappropriate, angry Singaporeans made the message go viral. Even I benefited from this: I forwarded someone's comment on this, and my message got over 12k views on LinkedIn. 

I congratulate Lee Shulin for successfully becoming famous overnight, because there is no such thing as bad publicity, and I do not agree with the personal attacks on her. However, 

I think there is adequate space to critique her argument.

First of all, I think it's hard to label Singaporeans as not being hungry enough. We are a successful city-state, and we solved the problems of hunger decades ago. Expecting Singaporeans to hunker down and be exploited by SMEs (many law firms are just SMEs) is not realistic. 

Having hungry Singaporeans is also regressive.

Ultimately, SME bosses who want to hire in a modern, wealthy city-state need to ask themselves what conditions they must create to attract Singaporean workers. There are valid reasons to site their HQs here, like great location and stable government, and for that, they need to hire a quota of local workers to conduct their business.

Hunger is a very bad state to be in here. But Singaporeans have alternatives.

a) Singaporeans can be greedy

First off, while we can't starve our kids, we can teach them to be greedy - work for themselves and sell their time for more money and a better life. This can be a powerful motivator. Some SMEs may not pay well, but they can offer a wide range of work to build a resume, and our kids get higher pay elsewhere down the line.

I'm going to share a story about a towkay who spouted the same line about Singaporeans lacking hunger; instead, he's full of effusive praise for some workers he hired from Shanghai. He said that even before you ask for something, they would have already done the work and submitted a report to you. But within a year or two, these excellent Shanghai workers had taken his SOP and built a larger business in China, even taking some of his clients with them.

I actually want my kids to think like these Shanghainese, but maybe in a less unscrupulous fashion - maybe launch a business with the old boss taking a 10% equity stake to supply his company. Or buy up his company so he can retire one day and take a page from Codie Sanchez's playbook.

To be greedy does not mean being ruthless.

b) Singaporeans will choose to be angry over being hungry

The fact is that there is a political dimension to local employment. If we open the floodgates to foreigners, many Singaporeans will indeed go hungry, and we won't stand for it. Instead, we will become angry.

Angry Singaporeans can go to the ballot box to ensure that SMEs or even some MNCs reserve some employment for locals. 

I think this is the most unfortunate side-effect of Lee Shulin's post: many SME bosses want to hire more foreigners and argue that Singaporeans are not hungry enough to work for them. But the government needs to monitor this discussion because an attempt to "starve" local workers resulted in the biggest thrashing for the PAP in recent memory in 2011 at Aljunied.

And Singaporeans will go to the ballot box - at least to make Tanjong Rhu Singaporean again.

c) Some will just choose to be Horny

I think there is a third option: Singaporeans can be horny.

Marry well, and a lot of these problems with employment disappear. 

Lee Shulin herself embodies this principle because I think she's really one of the luckiest women of her generation. I say this because her husband is happy to be a house-husband and support her by minding the house and the kids, so that she can build up her business. A guy like this is hard to find, especially in a patriarchal society that might label house husbands as not being hungry enough to find work.

So I've included three possible alternatives to being hungry. 

You can be greedy, angry, or horny. I think it's much better than being hungry.

But maybe there is a unifying principle behind all this.

Motivating people after they have resolved their physical needs is hard, and one thing I tell the teens I teach in a Polytechnic is that they need to find a reason to have a high level of agency. Some guys might gravitate to this because guys need high status to function in a society where finding a mate is hard. 

When you have high agency, you exude what Gen Z called Main Character Energy. If you just exist in s a state of hunger, only to be exploited by a toxic company, you are an NPC zombie.

There are many younger influencers who are trying to decode and explain what high agency is. I shall leave it to you to find these gurus. I'm in the process of understanding what this means.

More Claude Coding adventures - Shaping a Portfolio Tracker to track my investments and teach folks Data Analytics

 

It does not take very long after attending multiple courses on Claude Code for me to have the courage to start building some seriously useful apps. But I had to deal with some issues, like the ridiculously high rate at which I'm burning AI tokens, so I turned on OpenAI's ChatGPT to advise on how I can reduce the tokens I'm burning on Claude, and it recommended installing a few skills to lower my usage. In the process, I somehow learnt what a linter is, and I was marvelling at how I could be so far behind in software engineering yet still churning out new Windows programmes at such a rate.

So, armed with a somewhat lower burn rate, I proceeded to create a portfolio tracker that consolidates all my investments in one place (sans the portfolio picks my students make, which I track more religiously) and provides a helicopter view of my investments. So I wrote something that lets me import a CSV file from Yahoo Finance and display all my portfolio positions on one page. 

Immediately, I have to confront the fact that, thanks to the semiconductor rebound, I have too much UMS across all my portfolios. (Believe me, it's a happy problem if you know how UMS has been doing lately)

Then I realised that I'm actually teaching a data analytics class at the Poly, and the same metrics I track are the ones I use, so I started adding a simple dashboard to the programme.

I can't really describe my class's excitement in words when I showed them my programme and explained that they could create it in 2-3 days. I have never taught a subject like this before.

People want to understand the consequences of what they learn in school and why a simple grounding in numbers can make a big difference in their lives.

Even more interesting is the potential for me to now react to my own Poly training materials to create richer and richer interfaces for my programme, so that students can understand how the analytical frameworks work in real life and relate them to making real money.

This weekend, I'm going to stop working on my Portfolio Tracker and start thinking very deeply about a program that can perform an X-ray on any business contract that arrives in my hands or create notes for a new legal judgment. 

If you can dream it, it can happen.

Discover the meaning of your life before you press the "early retirement" button

 

One of the big questions that I'm dealing with is post-retirement issues after FIRE, because no one really has a proper grip on the early retirement beyond financial figures, as successfully completing the FIRE journey is quite rare, and if only a few MBTI archetypes complete it  ( INTJ, ENTJ, ISTJ) even getting advice from folks who completed the journey might not create a complete picture on how to retire early systemically. 

I have always harboured doubts that the answer can be found in books on personal finance, and I think I might even be better off looking at religious or philosophical texts. 

Problems with early retirement are existential issues - they need a deep level of philosophical understanding to decode them. FIRE can barely solve 60% of your issues, as it can probably give you a level of personal satisfaction. But the remaining 30% comes from living a meaningful existence that FIRE cannot bestow. The final 10% is even more elusive, as it relates to psychological richness.

So The Meaning of Your Life by Arthur Brooks is an important read for folks contemplating the completion of their FIRE journey. It contains actionable steps and mental models to help you figure out the meaning of your life.

Very briefly, it comes in three steps.

a) The first step is to connect the dots and figure out how you got here. 

This can be a deeply therapeutic step. For a certain attraction to the FIRE movement comes from my parents' background in retail, when I witnessed them fighting over insufficient sales to pay the rent on the pet shop. I wanted to have passive income even when I was in primary school, constantly asking my dad what the AUD fixed deposit rate was if I had $1M AUD. 

The other issue is that in secondary school, I was a troll, and the crappy humanities and language teachers marked me down because, well, they could, and marks can be awarded on a subjective basis. An English Literature teacher hated my guts so much that I won a Best Actor award and the overall best performance for my class, and he never even delivered a trophy because the top drama class for my cohort year did not study English Lit. ( Felt great delivering that dick slap to him after so many years. )

And I hated my language and humanities teachers, and found solace in mathematics and the sciences. Eventually, passive income became a way to reinforce my inner troll: if I have passive income, I can't be stopped because I have "fuck you" money, and no one can pick on me simply because they have authority over me. My passive income (and legal training, because dividends are not enough without serious legal firepower) makes it very hard to bully me into doing anything.

b) The second step is to figure out where you are going. What is your vector? 

This is hard for me to confront because my career post-FIRE is less well-coordinated or planned than my career pre-FIRE. Financially, I know that I still want more CPF money. But that excuse is wearing thin as I'm about 3xBRS and my SRS is 1xBRS. Why do I need 4xBRS with a five-figure dividend paycheck? I have no idea.

I enjoy teaching, and the subject combinations I have this year are "category-busting," with lessons on law, data analytics, and dividends investing. But do I enjoy teaching, or do I simply enjoy defying expectations?

It's hard to unpack this.

c) Which leads us to the third step: how would I like to impact the world?

The third step is what I think ultimately defines me.

While I play roles in my family, somehow, I do want to leave my students better off than when I started teaching them, so maybe at my funeral, some students will appear during my wake.

That's basically it. To teach, I have to do a baseline level of administrative work that I truly detest; some adult students are just downright mean and entitled, but I see suffering as the price I pay to positively impact students. 

I suspect the most positive impact of Arthur Brooks' book on me is to highlight the centrality of suffering across all religious movements. 

And it's dawned on me that if suffering disappears, as it often does when you complete your FIRE journey, so does the last shred of meaning in your life.

You can pick up a copy of this book here : 

https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Your-Life-Finding-Emptiness/dp/0593545427/ref=sr_1_1?crid=10FXR15I0G33P&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XCzDKMjRsC8n4CrdvJkWRWnCYQtGhi7GkRW6oham6FwJwnrmJRfViPEZXtXhNzVkEhjCF0_HJu31XXonbsVYuRO2cQLjbnAvHb-0gzh5fLUdKZ6RM0anUsSeyMbM8_JItx2f0Td5rz3tG-GGQjoY9uwtx5NecutVpKiBxy-reztTlwQwXD-J9XYPHkmO4mqhA7AYhqRJRSJcQTM1rA6pT3_LfPJ78Er883qmarQUKk0.pmC_uz3Xu4xVn1FQshBGxmpYto-uOHLtZS3Y6gRHl2I&dib_tag=se&keywords=arthur+brooks&qid=1777127200&sprefix=arthur+brooks%2Caps%2C360&sr=8-1

I have too much time, so I built a productivity app with the help of AI

 

As I begin to clock in certifications from Anthropic on the Claude system, it dawned upon me that the value of knowledge is next to worthless these days, so to stay relevant, or at least to be able to relate to my Gen Z students, I have to go through what they will eventually go through when they hit the work force, which I think is 10x worse than looking for a job during my time. In the early 2000s, most engineers secured a job by their final year of schooling and could enjoy working on their final-year project, with a secure job waiting for them after graduation.

For this current batch of graduates, they need to contend with the uselessness of knowledge and possibly the deteriorating power of signalling conveyed by degree certificates. To remain relevant, they need skills, but to prove that these skills matter, they will need a portfolio of products that need to display to a potential employer. 

So I've decided to join in the fun.

My first practical product using Claude Code in VS Code is a simple To Do List, just to get some initial momentum and make me more efficient on a daily basis, but I want it to be more powerful than the usual To Do lists out there, so I decided to make the application a Bullet Journal. 

But there are three complications :

• I no longer know how to code Windows applications in Python. The last time I did that seriously was in C++ using Microsoft Foundation Classes.
• I don't even understand the Bullet Journaling approach, as the book is quite thick and I've not read it yet. I know it's popular, and some hipster executives love it. But I prefer to pick up new AI programming skills.
• I don't even have the technical skills to write software specifications because I was more of an IT Governance professional.

So here's my strategy: 

I explained the context to Claude and got Claude to create a first draft of a specification, mentioning bullet journal, Python as the only language I know, and the final product as a Windows executable.

It was able to generate a specification which I can read and amend slightly to my taste.

I got Claude Code to generate my program before I took my son to school, and when I came back, my application was ready to be compiled and run.

And it ran, so I suddenly have a private electronic bullet journaling app that tracks daily tasks and lets me strike them off as they get done. My application is actually chock-full of functionality, and I have no idea what it can do in totality, given how little I know about Bullet Journaling.

I've been using the application for a couple of days, and it has really supercharged my productivity. I can list my priorities early in the morning and slowly strike off each task as I go through the day, freeing up my evenings to contemplate how to improve the application. 

On day 2,  I suddenly felt that the program was kinda boring and monotonous, and I wanted every completed task to provide a dopamine rush, so I incorporated nice sounds and confetti into the app, and it made me even more productive as completing a task gave a satisfying "ping". Making this modification was a painless task.

Then I had a crazy idea. 

Why not make the application comply with the "Getting Things Done" philosophy as well, a kind of productivity system that is over 20 years old, which I tried to understand but never had the willpower to turn into a habit?

Fortunately, AI was able to summarise the GTD philosophy, allowing me to consciously get Claude to modify my software to delegate tasks or KIV them. 

And so my Frankenstein application now combines two systems: a Bullet Journal and the GTD philosophy.

You should now be able to see where I am going here. 

For every productivity philosophy or system I learn, I can use it to add features to my program. Over time, the more I use my program, the more bugs I encounter, and the more bugs I can get Claude to fix. 

I think this might be an entirely new way of consuming software. We just dream of what kind of software we want, and an AI builds it for us on the spot. They won't get it right 100% of the time, but you can recode and recompile the software. Over time, the application becomes seasoned and customised for the individual user.

Because I'm focused on personal efficiency, every new system can inspire slight improvements in my application.

My next objective is to incorporate an Eisenhower matrix into each task, labelling it as urgent or important. 

Trade like a Gen-Z ?

 

A powerful read for me in recent months is Generation Desperation by Alexander Hurt, who writes in detail about how he traded his way to over a million dollars and then lost it all within a few weeks. This is a very important book that gives us a glimpse of what Gen Z and younger millennials go through in the era of crypto, r/wallstreetbets and Gamestop.

To be fair, I'm not very sympathetic to the author. He did start out badly, given that his parents are extreme left-wing Americans who are vehemently against paying taxes, so he probably did not get the right kind of relationship with money right from the start. Secondly, he's still quite privileged, having graduated from a top liberal arts college in the US and working as a freelance journalist in France. 

If you have also read I deliver parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, you can clearly see that some people have first-world problems.

The books have a fairly useful way to look at Desperation Capitalism, which I will try to summarise on this blog.

Rule #1 - Make people hungry for more

In Singapore, many financial influencers do this. Flexing successful trades that are multi-baggers while keeping mum about trades that fail. The problem with Gen Z and younger millennials is that the moment they open social media, they are inundated with nothing but financial porn, which raises their risk appetite.  

Rule #2 - Open the gates and remove the guardrails

There are many ways to take on extraordinary amounts of risk in the financial markets. I actually teach one of them - financial leverage. But I teach my students how to moderate their leverage using mathematical skills. The actual amount of leverage allowed is many times the maximum I teach my students. Above and beyond leverage, there are financial options, which can multiply the amounts paid to take up a position if the stock moves in your favour.

Brokers like Robinhood are the gateway to this form of risk-taking. 

Rule #3 - Draw them in with dopamine hits

Apparently, brokers like Robinhood are designed to be more like Facebook and Instagram, which throw out encouraging emojis when a trade is made. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for my constituents, IBKR is intimidating, throwing all sorts of warning messages before a trade can be made. Even worse, it's not easy to generate reminders when dividends are incoming, so thankfully, I have Stocks Cafe to generate the dopamine hits instead.

The rest of the book is unputdownable. The author describes his feelings and inner thoughts as his account reached $1,000,000, and then turned negative once his capital gains taxes were accounted for.

Is the book a cautionary tale about trading for a new generation of investors? 

Should I start a campaign to promote dividends-maxxing, given that younger folks are starting to show up at the DBS AGM?

Here's what effect the book had on me. 

I actually got myself started on options trading after reading this.

With a steady stream of dividends and my homebrew Python code that easily identifies the strongest trends among S&P 500 stocks, I decided to enable options trading on my account to buy 3 out-of-the-money call options expiring in May on the most ferociously trending S&P 500 stocks. My capital was about $1,000.

Within days, I was losing money, currently down about $250 USD.

When learning a new technique, there's always a price to pay for tuition. 

This is definitely not an investment strategy to try first for young people.

Ok, short KL holiday has ended. Back to work!

 

After conducting my last course, I took a spontaneous trip to KL by hitching a ride with my cousin. We spent some time at a slow suburban town of Seremban, where I had wonderful seafood, and then I spent just two days eating like a king and shopping for stuff for my family.

It's been a long while since I was able to travel alone, so I made this a shopping trip for books, stationery, and art supplies. What was surprising was that I was able to spend a decent amount of money, which was kinda rare, so much so that I had to buy a suitcase to get everything back home.

Travelling alone can be a humbling experience. There were moments when I realised that we can't take Singapore for granted. In a thunderstorm two days ago, I had to take the monorail for a short distance between Bukit Bintan and Imbi stations, and the crowds and slow trains made it take me nearly 45 minutes to reach my destination. The top shopping district of Bukit Bintang was not adequately sheltered, and there's a small cottage industry of umbrella vendors selling $10 MYR umbrellas when it rained. 

But what is amazing is the humanity of the crowds. When people are stressed, and public services are down, it's interesting to observe the crowds. And Malaysians are unfazed by delays in their services. Many smiled and retained their sense of humour. I was telling my relatives that if this happened here, a Minister might be hanged by an angry mob. 

Another aspect of this trip was that my cousin had some mobility, and I was able to visit the PJ area, where I chilled at a place that was eerily reminiscent of some Swimming Club in SG, minus the exclusivity and snottiness. I was in a pub eating steak, and they were playing 80s-90s music.

Of course, any trip would not just involve fun and games. I was looking for a partner to take on some small gigs in KL, so that in the future I might be able to work a bit and conduct training, but revenue would be quite low, so this would have to be a hobby for me. 

Anyway, once I get back, work will start to ramp up. 

I have some media work with the TFC gang tomorrow, and I also have a FIRE seminar under SIAS in about 3 weeks. My AI work continues as I need to see whether I can get Claude's code to move my code to the cloud.  

With high gasoline prices, most of my trips will look more like this quick escape into KL. 

Letter to Batch 41 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 41,

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

Batch 41 took place in a chaotic age, with the War in Iran heralding a period of flux that can see inflation rise in Singapore, where banks will once again do well, and REITs take a breather, enabling a period of bargain hunting for patient investors who want to build a REIT portfolio for dividend payouts in future years. By now, ERM has stabilised a starter portfolio that accounts for inflexion points in interest rates, balancing banks against REITs to create an oasis of calm for investors.

You can see a starter portfolio of four stocks, which can be optionally expanded to eight in the final portfolio list.  (ERM community members can make a guess as to which stocks belong to this new set.)

The other issue facing the programme is AI disruption. Over the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed major changes in the AI space with Claude and Openclaw potentially demonstrating the ability to massively improve the productivity of a white-collar knowledge worker, and we’ve responded with our own bespoke MD file that encapsulates the skills required to analyse and value a local stock. This file will become part of the community, and students are encouraged to tinker with it and improve it over time to sharpen the analysis of the ERM community as a whole.

An MD file is only the beginning. Over the next 3 months, expect more changes to the program as we invent new tools to make stock picks easier. I’ve already managed to have AI recode our in-house web app, and we should comfortably see it in production before June 2026.

Lastly, I hope Batch 41 will participate actively in the FB group.

Hope to see you then!

Christopher Ng Wai Chung