Letter to Batch 38 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 38,

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

We might be riding into a storm, as macroeconomic figures might see Singapore enter a technical recession after a quarter of negative GDP growth. Conflict between Iran and Israel may also escalate over the next few days. As such, you have chosen to estimate that Singapore’s economy is entering a contraction phase, which favours stocks, bonds and possibly REITs over the next few months.

The impact of AI is also felt in class, as I’ve pioneered the process of using ChatGPT to fill out entries in the ERM Data Entry Tool to assist in decision-making. The result is better write-ups in our PDFs, but projected yields may not be as accurate as extracting them from analyst reports. We also completed the portfolio generation in record time, creating a 19-stock portfolio that yields 7.13% before lunch break.

However, AI also leaves much to be desired compared to human analysis. When AI assessed the advantages of investing in LHN Limited, it made a fatal mistake by not considering that the key driver of the business is the co-working space Coliwoo. In many other cases, AI gave very templated answers with terms like “Stable growth” and “above-market dividends”, which ERM strives to shortlist anyway.

But what is the conclusion from this test run? We can do better with AI.

Prompts can be refined and improved. The future of the ERM program is for every student to use a paid LLM model and generate investment insights by just analysing financial statements that the AI pulls from official sources. I believe that we can get there in six months.

Lastly, I hope Batch 38 will participate actively in the FB group.

Hope to see you then!

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

FIRE Webinar with Tiger Trade

 

[ Apologies, the webinar is actually on June 24 2025. I guess both Tiger Brokers and I are stumped.  ]

I will conduct a webinar on FIRE with the folks of Tiger Trade on 24 June 2025 at 7:30 p.m. 

This webinar will review the basics of the FIRE movement, why it is so vital in our current context, and how to invest in FIRE. To make it more interesting, I'm inviting readers of this blog to suggest topics for the webinar so that I can make them more relevant to the audience. 

You can comment on the YouTube video comments section.

The link to the webinar is as follows : 

https://ttm.financial/RN?name=RNLive&rndata=%7B%22liveId%22:%221834980576866345%22,%22type%22:2%7D

A painful month of reading Singapore fiction in June

 

I'm in the process of trying to read fiction for two months a year, so I've chosen the June holidays to read my fiction backlog, and I could not have chosen a worse read. The writing is dense, and the author goes into long prose that describes the thought processes of the characters in the novel. I endured all the way to the end only to encounter a very unsatisfying ending where the nasty characters seem to get away with it and the earnest heroes get rewarded with years of internment. 

That being said, The Singapore Grip may be one of the best historical fiction novels ever written with Singapore as a backdrop. Readers are treated to references to the companies and geographical locations in WWII, which is why my copy has an old stamp that says Singapore Tourism Board on it. It makes an excellent reading text for secondary school social studies, covering history, English Literature, and some geography. 

I'm done punishing myself long enough. I've moved on to something more contemporary. 

This is a much better read and a more intimate book about living in Singapore, right down to details about cheap, discounted shops that always claim to be closing down.

Within the first few chapters, the protagonist's mum decided to bring her to McDonald's to give her a treat. The emotions are so raw, I got hungry and brought my son to buy 9 pieces of Chicken McNuggets for both of us just now.  

Will we see international audiences warming up to Singapore Literature?

I like The Original Daughter so far, but we need to warm up to our own writings first.

IYKYK

Remember this: Financial Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of responsible financial management are happening constantly throughout the country. Some PMETS, tribes and subcultures do not know they have enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the FIRE movement is everywhere. Even the smallest act of saving for passive income pushes our lines forward.

And remember this: your company HR's need for control is desperate because it is unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Your golden handcuffs are brittle. Oppression from your bosses and the toxic work are the masks of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these attempts to skimp and save, these moments of getting investment income, will have flooded the banks of your employer’s authority, and then there will be one too many. One single cent getting into your bank account outside your employment will break the siege.

Go watch A Gilded Game starring Andy Lau

 

[[ The attached video is my latest video on my YouTube channel and not related to the content of this article ]]

One of the things I did this weekend was to watch movies with my mum, as the rest of my family is on holiday in Malaysia.

Review-wise, A Gilded Game starring Andy Lau did not deliver the goods, but as a movie of folks who love investing, it deserves 5 stars along with the greats like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street. 

Here are some of the points of why I liked the movie:

• It's rare to even consider a senior equities analyst as the good guy in this tale. Probably won't fly in Hollywood.
• Some of the questions check out; there was one fairly accurate use of Weighted Average Cost of Capital, and the protagonist even interacted with it, telling the senior manager to adjust the tax term due to regulatory changes. When asked how he knew this was a tech firm, he replied that PE is high at 148, which is quite brilliant to me and showed that the script-writer knows something about investing. 
• There was a scene where a cleaner asked Andy Lau's character whether a stock was a good buy due to its recent performance. His reply was spot on; the cleaner would take on too much risk if he bought it. 
• There were many opportunities to discuss high finance. A great scene involved a dividend cheque and a co-located server rack used for High-Frequency Trading. Andy Lau even walked through a stock chart and showed a pump-and-dump operation.  

The movie must be engaging to maintain dramatic tension, so there might be a suspension of disbelief. It's hard to believe that a seasoned business would get into a bet to give up its shares if its price drops to a certain level. Everyone in the movie suffered too much because they did not diversify their holdings and made leveraged bets on their margin accounts.

Finally, there is something admirable in Andy Lau's fictional character, Todd Zhang, who makes a good point. If companies rush to list IPOs and bid prices to please their clients, where is the profit to be made for the shareholder?

I won't share my favourite scene on this blog because it involves dog food, so watch it yourself!

The dark side of FIRE

 

There have been interesting learnings this week. My channel gets the most subscribers on Sunday nights, so I have to queue the most interesting video to show over the weekends. This means the meaningful stuff for beginners on CPF, FIRE, and investing lessons must be prepared before Friday.

In other news, I have successfully run an AI class for two primary school kids, which means that we have succeeded in getting our foot in the door for enrichment events. In hindsight, my marketing channels are weak, so my priorities are to refine the product and organise through the larger tuition centres in the future to get a bigger primary school class. Like in any new business venture, I will spend most of the time learning new things, but most importantly, I have not spent any money.

Finally, I started on insulin injections. My regimen is quite harsh with one jab of slow-acting insulin in the morning and then a jab before breakfast and dinner. The pain of the injections is negligible as pinching my flab is worse, but I'm struggling with hunger pangs the whole day, and it'll be a miracle not to gain weight over the next few months. I'm introducing a fibre biscuits and apricots diet to staff to remove hunger, but it feels like eating cardboard the whole day. 

My only consolation is that it might lengthen my life so that I can witness a CPF-LIFE payout before I leave this world.  

Enjoy this video on the Dark side of FIRE. I think I published the most concrete and real critique of early retirement so far because I lived through it. 

 

In SIngapore, its monetise or be monetised.

With my latest video on how to invest to attain FIRE, my subscriber base hit 850. No small feat considering that the primary approach is for personal branding, and I've avoided overly incendiary content and focused primarily on how useful it will be for the viewers.

Today I'm going to talk about monetisation. 

After reading this article entitled All Hail the Landlord by a left-winged troll called Zat Astha on The Peak magazine, which hit a nerve some time ago, which demonised landlords to a certain extent. My reaction was to clear one of my rooms in double time and get my real estate friend to find me a tenant. If you are looking for a one-room in the North, you can respond to this ad: 

https://www.propertyguru.com.sg/listing/hdb-for-rent-350-woodlands-avenue-3-25641833

If I read about something left-wing academic types complain about, my personal rule is to embody the problem because it has always done me good from Thomas Piketty's (r>g) doctrine, David Graeber's concept of bullshit jobs and Marxist dialectic materialism - I think my version of FIRE I embody beenefitted largely from sociologists, political scientists and economist who actually hate capitalism.

As an owner of multiple REITs, I don't think landlords are evil. The only way to get higher rentals is to find a tenant willing to pay for them, and we've just emerged from a time when mortgage interest rates were sky high. Accusing landlords of trying to keep their shops empty is irrational, as landlords lose money every month to keep their property unoccupied. Businessmen must become more competitive or move into a zone with lower rents and footfall.

But what do we do at the personal level? 

In this current economic environment, even when I am in a state of comfort, I should always find something to monetise, whether a personal brand or a spare room. For many years, my kids were not ready for us to get rid of their toys, and we had a spare room full of clutter. Now, it's actually advantageous to have a tenant to keep a lookout for my mum and maybe flip the master switch during a power trip. Having some rent is just icing on the cake - it's not always about greed.  

If a person fails to monetise, they will be monetised—they will have to take up employment for most of their waking hours. I think readers are better off giving up the concept of loyalty and just treating work as selling time for money - this will eliminate many sources of stress in their lives. 

Anyway, at the personal level, I'm not having a good time right now as I've just started on insulin injections daily. I was initially glad about lower medical expenses, but then I learnt that now I have to buy a box of needles every month with alcohol swabs. I hope the elimination of my drug regimen and its side effects will make this change worthwhile. The last thing I want is to switch to insulin from the hospital bed. 

 

Why institutions do not want you to pursue FIRE.

 

Ok, back to the regular YouTube videos. 

I will slow down the more technical investing videos in favour of videos that hopefully trigger more discussion. I will also follow some of the suggestions from the YouTube Inspiration pages. 

The algorithm should have a better idea of what people want to see in future videos.