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 

Stopping my YouTube channel until further notice

 

For the next few weeks, I've decided I can't sustain my YouTube channel until I satisfy my craving for AI to assist me with my business initiatives. 

Across LinkedIn, people are fairly confused about how to pick up enough AI skills to remain relevant.

This is also a problem I'm struggling with, but it's really worth the struggle. Over the past 48 hours, AI also converted all my course materials into a textbook that may be published in the future.

There are simply too many questions on my mind.

a) What would happen if my industry woke up and started using AI aggressively? 

Will investment courses become more AI-driven or human in character? I think Dr Wealth's position is that investment training will become more narrative-driven and human, but I'm inclined to bet otherwise. But we can advance both agendas in one go, make the course more powerful and intuitive at the same time, while preserving the student's human judgment. I don't really value things like emotions and empathy because they don't make me much money in the markets, but I'm open-minded and willing to change.

b) How will content creation change?

Ideally, I should be so productive that I can work on my gigs and create more content on my channel, but I need to understand how professional content creators integrate the latest AI tools into their channels and whether there's a way to increase revenue at the same time (without generating AI slop). This means I need to watch a lot more YouTube videos to level up my skills in this area. 

c) How do we even start an aggressive campaign to up our AI skills?

Anyone who can crack this can make a lot of money. At the moment, I'm just clinging to Claude Anthropic's courses and trying to get as many certificates under my belt, but what I really crave is to develop several consequential personal projects to learn about agents and level up my course materials. I want to reshape my CV into something a 25-year-old might have, a portfolio of tangible projects and proven results. 

The culmination of all these changes means that I can, at best, focus on my business and gigs in the next quarter while I invest most of my time learning about AI to see how far I can push it. 

And since I barely do any conventional work, there are very few efficiency gains from AI unless I dream up and create new products like simple mobile apps, a personal productivity tool, and at least one D&D module for 4th-level PCs. I'm cognisant that in such a situation, FIRE can lead to complacency as the flow of dividends just provides so much incentive to let the world just pass by. At this point in time, I'm glad that I still have a few gigs to run and would actually be teaching IT to poly students next semester.

If you are a reader and wish to help me out, send me details about when Gen Z are meeting to discuss things like Open Claw or Claude. 

I'd like to join to learn, by osmosis, what these young engineers or computer scientists are thinking.

Using Claude Code to upgrade my business

Last week was busy, even though it was the school holidays, with one SIAS course followed up with a preview. At the same time, I've managed to sign up for classes for Athropic's Claude, which covers a mix of high-level philosophical lessons on incorporating AI into human work and just one technical introduction to Claude Code.

And what such a small difference would have made!

Within 30 minutes of barely understanding how Claude Code worked, I began using it to improve the Early Retirement Masterclass web app.

For reference, here is a screenshot of my old web app, which is still in production for my next course run.

After using about $1 worth of tokens, this is the latest version of my website.

And I've only just begun in website design, and UX is my greatest weakness. It's an area I'm not really interested in learning, and now I have a person who can adjust font sizes and change colours for about $0.30.

But it goes deeper: AI can collaborate with me to improve my website. I initially wanted to incorporate LLMs into my tool to pre-fill the forms my students use. It was the AI that suggested making direct API calls to Yahoo Finance instead.

So no more broken English when students mangle the main business of the stocks they are investigating in our final portfolio reports.

At this stage, every investing trainer needs to ask themselves the question:

What kind of investigation into a local stock can be enhanced by AI, and what kind of judgment call had best be done by human beings? Claude places this under Delegation in their 4Ds AI framework. 

My program has a fully fleshed-out Markdown file to automate stock valuation. Here's one of many paragraphs produced for YZJ Financial Holdings.

I've designed the analysis to rely solely on downloaded financial statements and avoid referencing human analyst reports until the last step. I find that such reports are superior because they are more willing to make sell calls and price a stock as brutally and realistically as possible.

The old web app will still be used in next week's Batch 41 program. The new web app will be deployed to the cloud after the course. 

Finally, putting such powerful tools to work for any business or solopreneur has implications for the economy. I prefer to wait for these social scientists to think through the implications of this. There are just too many applications I'm dreaming of to do any navel-gazing on jobs, governance, and policy implications.

I only know that dividends can be converted into AI tokens, which can lead to larger businesses and more passive income, enabling better AI tools and more tokens, provided you are ready to retool yourself as a dreamer.

The time has come to be a maker and not a taker.

Students can refer to Dr Wealth for a refresher.

Anyway, if you are wondering why I've not been creating new content. 

The above is the reason why.

Would you bet on CS salaries over the next 10 years ?

 

I recently turned down a bet, but I felt it was an interesting one worth sharing here.

In an age of AI disruption and the over-hiring of software engineers over the past few years, my friend offered me a bet that, after 10 years, the salaries of Computer Science graduates would not keep pace with Singapore's inflation rate.

That's a very nice bet that if we have some kind of Polymarket in Singapore, I think readers of this blog can give it a try to see whether they are right.

Initially, I felt that a 10-year horizon was too long, and I actually offered the same bet with a 3-year horizon, but my friends refused to pick it up. So we ended in a stalemate.

So here's the funny thing. If we kept the 3-year horizon, my friend has a good chance of winning the bet because the NUS CS grad salary actually fell from 2024 to 2025. Tech overhiring is real. But if we tried a 10-year horizon, my odds would increase tremendously, simply because wage growth here exceeds the inflation rate. ( In small part due to the MAS approach to manage the SGD )

And I can go on. Some economists believe that the demand for software engineering would actually shoot up over the next few years because of this theory known as Jevons Paradox. With IT agents and cheaper tokens, many people will come to believe they can spin off companies and develop new SaaS solutions using an army of coding agents. One possibility is that a huge industry of software engineers is required to pick up the mess. Another is the rise of an agent maestro, a totally new career that requires domain expertise and software engineering skills. I strongly believe in this thesis because even Sheng Siong is looking to hire SWEs.

So after some examination, I think this is a good bet for me, provided we can narrow this down to NUS salaries. If we expand this to the median CS salary, there will be a serious problem because that represents a CS degree over 10 years. If the Arts faculty launches a Bachelor of Arts in Artificial Intelligence (which I consider an inevitable move to keep humanities relevant), do I need to include the income of an Arts major?

But at the end of the day, 10 years is too long. 

A good bet does not need to be financially significant, but it should exact a psychological cost or an actual ego boost.

I suspect the bet was set up because there was some animus against CS grads on my friend's part, and I can't provide an ego boost by losing because I'm basically a freelance hobo, but I also cannot gain an edge if I win. My only mischief is that I actually like CS grads because they debugged my trading algorithms and upped my Sharpe ratio from 1.2 to 2.

I think a better bet would be to consider the future of CS grads against some kind of Compliance career, which I think lies at the root of this animus. But this is not something I care to take up because I actually benefited a lot transitioning from IT support to IT governance. Harsh truth: Society does reward the box-tickers in the corporate world. 

I had more pay and less work.

The worthlessness of box-tickers in the corporate world is amply discussed in cultural anthropologist David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, and believe me, there's no way their remuneration is going down in the age of AI; they will start gaining expertise in AI governance and find some way to become consultants in some ISO-676767 AI certification - if ever to keep being a pain the ass for hapless engineer.

But the rage could be philosophical. 

In Ayn Rand's philosophy, I suspect she loves CS grads as much as I do because they seem closer to the hero in her books, like John Galt or Hank Rearden. But in her novels, compliance professionals are the hyenas and parasites; what have they produced other than getting in the way of the people who do the real work? 

While I'm not betting on this, I have secured teaching stints in both the Law and IT departments at a Polytechnic, and I'm a parent, too. So I might want to see how starting salaries for lawyers and CS grads will evolve over the next few years.

So expect some tracking on this blog moving forward.

Happy Chap Goh Meh !

 

I had to miss out on a Valentine's Day post because of the intensity of my marking workload and grappling with changes in how investment courses are conducted in the age of Agentic AI. But since today is Chap Goh Meh, which is the Chinese equivalent of Valentine's Day, I shall dispense with dating wisdom on this blog today instead.

Clearly, the context in the dating space is grim, as Singapore faces an all-time-low TFR of 0.87. I'm not sure whether it's coincidental that markets are at an all-time high. But the dating market is already quite broken.

a) Maybe it's time to ditch dating apps

As I consume a lot of social media poison on Instagram, I sometimes get hilarious video snippets that explain what happened on their dates. And Gen Z guys on dating platforms these days are losers. Insisting on splitting the bill is fine, but more importantly, not being able to articulate career goals and bragging about commercial pursuits that mark you as a loser, drop-shipping or crypto trades.

I think there are many good guys out there, but maybe a dating app isn't the best place to find a guy. I still believe that to find guys with a high IQ and high conscientiousness, you need to search in institutions of higher education, then let assortative mating take care of itself. 

b) Singlehood is the biggest hurdle a guy needs to overcome

Middle-aged wives can be brutal. When I was talking about online dating and younger Gen Z norms, they brutally reminded me that men these days no longer compete with each other; they compete against singlehood - and singlehood is winning.

So basically, a lot of women realise that singlehood is better than getting attached to a guy with the same attractiveness score, so they stay single and have a good life dodging kids and domestic stress. 

I'm not sure that this argument applies just to women. While I know a lot of guys who can't apply themselves and have no sensible way to navigate their lives, I think single men have plenty of enjoyable options, too, with AI tools and entertainment. Fembots are a few years away, if not here already.

It was Boomer male who invented the phrase "Why buy the whole cow when all you want is just a glass of milk?"

c) There are a lot of beautiful women, but only a few successful men.

If I can advise Gen Z men, this is something I would say. Actually, if you are logical about it, this is a completely objective statement that is not misogynistic at all. 

First of all, we have to accept that women are pickier, so their subjective standards of success will always lead to a smaller population of men, whereas men's flexible standards of female beauty can be quite wide, so the population of beautiful women will always be men who meet women's standards of success.

What does it mean? Everything that I've been talking about. Guys need to work on themselves and climb the ladder of success. 

Many beautiful women are waiting for them once they reach the top.

Just ask the PropertyLim people.

Happy Chap Goh Meh!