Happy National Day ! Let's talk about something that stresses you

 

This National Day, I want to talk about what I know about education systems.

When scholars from China are asked about books that shaped the country's evolution, they often point to books about Lee Kuan Yew. So this National Day, I'm going to talk about this book entitled The Highest Exam, which really taught me how to think about Singapore and the way we structure Singapore society.

For a start, the Chinese have been taking Imperial exams for thousands of years; this is a timeline that is way longer than that of the Chinese Communist Party or Singapore, for that matter, so countries with a large population of ethnic Chinese would naturally try to structure society using what the book describes as a "centralized hierarchical tournament".

The version of this tournament in China is the gaokao, one of the most gruesome exams in the world. Singapore's PSLE is also a centralized hierarchical tournament, but even some mainland influencers consider making 12-year-old kids go through our version of gaokao to be exquisitely cruel and would remind PRCs thinking of settling down in Singapore that our academic system is no cakewalk either.

From the Chinese perspective, the Gaokao is a great system because it measures everyone based on a single, transparent standard. In a corrupt society where money can buy favors, this is probably a better alternative than the US system, which prefers a multi-dimensional, holistic assessment criteria that can be gamed with money. Consequently, the proportion of urban elites in places like Beijing and Tsinghua University is smaller than in places like Harvard and Yale, which welcome legacy admissions.

Of late, the Chinese have been expressing some regret over their system. 

This is because the Chinese now feel that the latest Fields medallist, Prof Wang Hong, was only able to win the award after she left Chinese academia and settled in France. The academic environment in China may mean that she would be constantly overlooked, and some of her research might actually be stolen by her superiors, as she has stayed.

But the Western system has its own hobgoblins. Look no further than Cambridge Professor of Sociology Jason Arday, the DEI wunderkind, who is also a plagiarising fantasist.

Looking at the lenses through which the Gaokao matters, I can now see why the PSLE makes sense to us. Even though we are not (that) corrupt, a tournament gives everyone some kind of a hedge in case corruption rears its ugly head in the future. It's also a powerful way for the government to determine what is rewarded in society in the future.

How can we improve the system?

Right off the bat, eliminating the T-Score in favor of Achievement Levels does nothing for parents or kids because the PSLE remains a centralized, hierarchical tournament. I might even argue that A levels would be even better if they were T-scores, as that would provide greater transparency in determining who gets into top professions.

Reforms would be better if we examined the ITE and Polytechnics,  and disabused this notion that investing in Poly and ITE is like "throwing good money after bad," as allegedly said to the Education Minister in the 1990s by Tony Tan.

If the median GPA of a polytechnic graduate is higher than that of a university A-level graduate, then it makes sense to reduce A-level intake and increase polytechnic intake for that degree course. I'm seeing decent ITE students performing in a polytechnic, and perhaps a similar adjustment can take place for those few elite diploma programs.

So any alternative to the A-level system should not be another centralized tournament like the IB (which is like rich people paying to avoid A-levels by picking an easier alternative); it should be a brutal tournament based on a single score, with exams designed locally. The most direct road to a middle-class lifestyle and a profession should remain a tough road of pain and struggle.

On the other hand, Poly and ITE can have their own assessment systems, and universities need to constantly adjust their admissions based on alumni performance. Continuous assessment, project work, and skills development, rather than a winner-takes-all exam, should be a valid option for smart, ambitious Singaporeans to achieve a middle-class lifestyle. Our universities should also consider alternatives to the PhD. Keep two research universities, but some kind of new accreditation system should award doctorates for practical inventions, patents, and even for producing jobs for the economy.

Finally, I don't think any educational reform can address the major lack of social and cultural capital among Polytechnic students compared to JC students right now. This has always been a problem hidden in Singapore. Despite many attempts to make our society more inclusive and equal, we can only measure things like salaries and personal wealth.

Parents are not dumb. If my child does well in both JC and Poly and eventually gets into a University, I will still choose the option that exposes them to more peers who may end up as doctors, lawyers, or businessmen. And even with a strong social network, some environments simply allow a person to develop better "taste".  

Policy makers have a tough nut to crack.

The curious case of Colin Lau's Early Retirement

 

When the video about Colin Lau came out, a lot of friends forwarded it to me. Some folks even mentioned that there's now someone to give me a run for my money, even though there are folks like AK71 and Investment Moats who probably have a safer financial margin than me.

I thought it might be useful to blog about the strengths of Colin Lau's approach to financial independence and its inevitable weaknesses. I'm not coming from a position of being a critic; I actually think that Colin Lau's work is admirable, and it is a sad waste that the media took a while to recognise his effort doing charity work for the Philippines.

So here's what I think are the key takeaways:

a) You do not need to be rich to be financially independent

Colin's technique is hyper-frugal but also relied on the economic situation during the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-2009. In 2007, at 35, Colin bought a S$87,000 three-room flat with about 64 years left on the lease, paid in full, with no mortgage, since he felt loans "lose a lot of money." He rented out a room for S$900/month, which paid off the flat's cost within eight years. He still collects that rent today, and the flat has since appreciated in value.

b) You don't even need to buy stocks if you can minimise your personal expenses

He saved 80–90% of his income during his working years ("Everybody was spending money like water, I was spending like a test tube"). He now lives on under S$150/month, with total monthly cash flow of about S$2,500 (rental income plus insurance payouts bought when younger). He's saving the surplus for future eldercare, since he's a bachelor with no children. His philosophy: don't pinch pennies on small stuff; instead, cut the big-ticket items like housing.

This is a number that no one in my family can live on, not even my kids, because they have enrichment. Amazingly, Colin does not employ equities because all it takes is a 5% dividend stock portfolio of $36,000 to generate $150 cash flow every month on average.

c) You still need to do a bit to take care of your health

A serious health scare in June 2025 left him hospitalised for 62 days with 15 surgeries and a S$146,000 bill that is covered fully by insurance and subsidised ward class, so he paid nothing out of pocket. I'm actually surprised that he is willing to pay for some kind of insurance plan. 

Nevertheless, I think his planning and possible C/B2 class ward stay are the reasons why he's still alive today.  I can't help but feel quite sorry for him after looking at this episode.

Of course, this video raises a lot of questions as to whether someone can find a tiny little flat to live in without paying for a home mortgage. I doubt it's possible if you want a remaining lease of 60+ years, but if you are in your 60s and want something with less than 40 years, it might be possible. Also, I suspect the government may allow low-cost rental housing for singles in the future, so it's possible to build a dividend portfolio to pay off the rent for a one-room flat. Whatever it is, Gen Z would need to find a creative solution to replicate the same results.

Finally, there's no way to sugarcoat this, but Colin Lau is making the same mistake as the other ultra-frugal FIRE thought leaders in Singapore, all of whom are frugal single men.

What is he going to do to deal with loneliness when he gets older?

I think charity work is an important component of having a meaningful life, but being frugal to the point of remaining single might mean a lonely existence when you enter your 70s or 80s. There are some things that having a family and children can do for you - if you need to go for an operation, at least your kids (if raised well) will be there for you.

You can Google the number of deaths from loneliness; it kills at three times the rate of heart attacks. And men tend to be even lonelier than women as they get older.

But no FIRE blogger really wants to blog about the endgame when they hit their 70s; they just want to showcase their frugality porn on the web.

How an investor can benefit from the Feynman Technique

 

I still get a lot of questions about why I teach. 

It's always a variation of the question, like, "If you have such a successful formula for investing, why do you want to share it with others?" 

For quite a while, I argued that by teaching the subject deeply, I am forced to progressively simplify the concept and understand it based on first principles; this is further honed by serious students with genuine questions who expect answers because they pay top dollar to attend my Masterclass.

Now, with AI and teaching an actual Data Analytics class, things have gotten crazier.

It's no longer about deepening a person's understanding when a lecturer teaches a subject. The lecturer can build something in real time to test the theories they learn and see whether it holds up in reality.

So here's a concrete example. 

One of the things my students have to do is linear regression; they might need to figure out which attributes result in better fitness, like lower blood pressure. For every topic I teach, I ask myself how to make it relevant to me and incorporate it into my Portfolio Manager Windows program, which I vibecoded using Claude Code.

So I tried to create a simple regression that looked at just stocks in my portfolio and determined whether a PE ratio and dividend would affect investment gains after a year. And I can see that a low PE ratio resulted in superior performance, but the high dividend stocks in my own portfolio would actually drag down returns after a year.

Upon closer examination, the reason is less dramatic; the outperformers in my portfolio are the AI Tech stocks on SGX like UMS, AEM and Frencken. With the exception of Frencken, I owned these counters when they were still dividend stocks a number of years ago.

Another thing I make my students do is to conduct K-means clustering. It employs an algorithm to divide a data sample into K parts. It's like dividing the class into 5 groups using AI based on the data fed to it, so that insights can be gleaned from this categorisation.

So when I teach this topic, I try to get my students to use their intuition to make a case for how the categorisation is done ( groups like "Fit Daddies" or "Bored Tai Tais" using gym data). It is not an easy task because it's highly subjective.

So after teaching, I began to eat my cooking and tried to cluster the stocks in my portfolio using stock ratios, and it somehow grouped banks with stable REITs, the Tech-based growth stocks, and high-yielding REITs with less prestigious sponsors. More interesting is a cluster of orphan stocks that include First Shipping Trust, Global Investments and, probably unjustified, Capitaland India Trust. 

Where analysis can be done, data can be ingested in a built-in AI chatbot. 

So, I've gone even further and given my software chatbot capabilities to answer questions about what I should do with my portfolio. In this example, the AI tells me to ditch ESR REIT for Sabana REIT.

My journey continues; this article is to get folks to look out for a future video on whether AI can replace Financial advisors with the good folks of The Financial Coconuts. I suspect the video might not do that well because it is easily one of the most technical talks I've ever done.

Catch me on Chills 276: The Smarter Way To Build Wealth While Working Full-Time

Most people trying to get rich faster are optimising the wrong variable. They're looking for a better fund, a better broker, a better entry price — when the portfolio is still too small for any of that to matter. That was the starting point for this week's Chills with TFC episode, where The Financial Coconut put three of us in one conversation: Chris How (semi-retired, retireby50.me), Chris Chong (ex-accountant, 45K-subscriber FIRE channel), and me. One commenter in the video called it "Chris's universe" — accurate, and a reasonable summary of how the hour went.

The core argument won't surprise anyone who's read Growing Your Tree of Prosperity or sat through my $100,000 challenge material: for someone in their 20s or 30s, the return on a small portfolio is noise compared to the return on growing income and controlling spending. Financial independence is a cash-flow engineering problem before it's an investing problem. Salary truncation — fix the lifestyle cost, direct the surplus, invest it on a system — still does more work than any stock pick. That hasn't changed since 2005. It's just less interesting to say than "which counter should I buy."

The more useful part of the discussion was what's aged badly, and why. Not just a list — the reasoning behind each one:

• Crypto hype rewarded timing, not process. Most people who made money were early, not right, and the strategy doesn't survive being repeated.
• Thematic funds chase last quarter's winner into your portfolio at the point it's most expensive, with a fee structure built for the fund house's marketing calendar, not your holding period.
• Job loyalty as a wealth strategy conflates tenure with security. It ignores that the employer's incentives and yours diverge the moment restructuring becomes cheaper than raises.
• Over-reliance on one strategy fails the same way concentrated stock positions fail — it works until the one condition it depends on stops holding, and there's no second system to fall back on.

We also went through robo-advisors, brokers, CPF, and regular savings plans versus the newer dynamic RSPs — and the thread connecting all of them is that every platform has an incentive that isn't automatically yours. A broker earns from turnover. A robo-advisor earns from AUM regardless of your outcome. That's not a reason to avoid them; it's a reason to know what you're being sold before you decide whether it fits.

Which is the real question the episode keeps returning to: not "what gives the highest returns," but "what game am I actually playing, and does this strategy fit my life?" Same question I put to students in the "Are You Investing or Just Collecting Stocks?" sessions — most retail investors can show you a portfolio but not a strategy, and the gap only becomes visible after something breaks.

Disclosure, since it's directly relevant to the RSP discussion: this episode is sponsored by Webull, and part of the conversation covers their Dynamic RSP — reportedly the first of its kind in Singapore. Mechanically, it adjusts contribution size to price: more when prices fall, less when they run up, instead of the fixed monthly amount a standard RSP commits you to. That's a variation on dollar-cost averaging worth understanding on its mechanics, not its marketing. Webull is also running zero-fee US stock and ETF trading — no commissions, no platform fees — separate from the RSP feature and worth checking regardless of which savings plan you use.

Cry for Govtech if you wish, but you should be crying tears of joy

About a week ago, one of my very skilled first-year students asked me to write a letter of recommendation so she could get an internship at GovTech. I said no.

My student is not just one of the most highly skilled students in my class; she also has a lot of gumption, having personally led her team in hackathons, and is mature beyond her years. So I explained that while GovTech produces some pieces of software that many of us know and love, like Singpass, I told her that to grow in the organisation, she might pick up some bad habits from HQ, like ringfencing her work, backstabbing her colleagues, or stonewalling useful initiatives. I also did not want such a capable student to be hurt when joining an organisation with a different career ladder for scholars and farmers; perhaps her stint in ITE and N-level grades might be held against her. I told her that I would be more than happy to provide a glowing recommendation to a tech firm or a bank, and that she should have the confidence to aim higher in life.

Then, almost like a miracle, the news of GovTech's retrenchment of 93 employees hit, and I was stunned. So I decided to pen my thoughts on this blog.

The first point I wanted to make is that on social media, I've noticed little sympathy for folks affected by the reorganisation. Most private-sector workers and businessmen felt it was the right move, and that removing all the "dead wood" could result in a more dynamic and forward-looking organisation. So if folks are generally positive about this news, I actually believe civil service leaders should be blamed for not doing this sooner. I remember during my time, some of the things I had to do were patently absurd. One presentation I had to make to senior management was explaining what an API was (initially I thought I had to explain what a REST-based API was, but no, it's just an API, you know remote function calls ). My technological skills atrophied so badly that I, somehow, became a subject-matter expert in food catering, the only thing I'm good at, given that none of my procurement papers succeeded. 

The second point I wanted to make is just how wonderful the retrenchment package is. It's one month for every year worked up to 25 years, plus an extra 3 months! And too little credit went to AUSBE. AUSBE are the real heroes in this story. When I was there, having come from NTUC-ARU, I volunteered my time with AUSBE because I had learnt to respect non-degree associate staff from my NTUC days, and you will not find another group that so doggedly works for their fellow employees outside office hours. This package is so attractive that I know some folks who left GoveTech lamenting that, had they stayed, they would have been able to FIRE immediately with it.

The third point is that government and statutory boards are winners, not losers, in this restructuring effort. The biggest losers are the vendor organisations like NCS, HCL, DXC or even IBM as the government begins to move work in-house. Work will dry up for these organisations, and believe me, when they start retrenching tech workers, there will be no 25 months or 3 months' extra notice when engineers are asked to leave. There's no AUSBE to negotiate for these guys, and many of them are people I know. 

A final story of my days should include a personality we all had to take called Emergenetics. And I vaguely recall that a director had to apologise for the personality test results in the HQ organisation. The reason is that the only kind of personality that can survive in HQ tends to be Green or structured, conscientious types with low openness to new experiences, whereas higher flyers tend to be more yellow or conceptual thinkers or blue, who are analysts. The saddest part of the survey is that folks who "red" or people who have empathy and love interacting with people are noticeably absent in the entire organisation.

This restructuring will bring balance to the organisation, and I'm particularly pleased that the 93 retrenchments are just Phase 1. There are more phases to come, and, if executed well, could mean that no part of the government is safe from obsolescence. If we make our bed with a Tech career, we should never expect an iron rice bowl. 

So, I actually come from reading this with a sense of hope and optimism for GovTech.

Next week, I will return to class and tell my student that I stand corrected in recent events, and I am now willing to complete her recommendation letter to Govtech.

 

Personal Update - Cheating Death and Getting Diarrhoea

 

Today I wanted to take a different spin on a personal update and talk a little bit about my health situation.

Some time ago, I started on insulin jabs, and while I'm seeing improvements in blood sugar, they don't seem to be improving fast enough, and I'm tuning the amount of insulin I am getting on a daily basis. So there is obviously some fear that I won't live long enough, given my short-lived ancestors are kind of short-lived.

So longevity is of great interest to me, and I've been reading a lot of books on it. And the logic is simple - the longer I live, the longer I can compound my wealth, the longer time I can guide my kids on how to manage their finances. 

So immortality is the ultimate game-changer, and I will take personal and financial risks to extend my life just a little bit.

So this billionaire, Bryan Johnson, launched a longevity mix called Blueprint, and I decided to pay about $200+ for two packs of the mixture. You can Google the contents of the mix. I don't think the contents are revolutionary; it's just a mixture of various compounds, all purported to extend your life, in a single package so you don't have to buy them individually.

So I started on this mix based on the recommended dosage and ended up with diarrhoea for a couple of days, and I also experienced bloating and nausea. Then AI told me it's a known issue for folks who take this mix. So I halved my dosage, and I've been able to do this for more than a month already.

I've since been trying to Google the immediate benefits of taking this mix and have found the effects fairly subjective; some people report feeling more energetic, which I can easily get from a cup of coffee, so it's no big deal. Others claim it gives them better sleep, but for me, I have more vivid dreams I remember when I wake up.

Anyway, while I'm still in the middle of this regime, I found out that Bryan Johnson has developed some kind of autoimmune disease that really ruined his plan for immortality.

I think at this stage, what humanity has achieved, you can't cheat death at the moment.

Instead, you get a lot of diarrhoea trying.

Anyway, if any reader is taking this mix, do share your notes with me on how it has changed your life.

Personal Update - Books I am reading

 

The effect of moving funds to my CDP from the higher-turnover IBKR is that I'm more relaxed about financial thought leadership, can take a chill pill, collect more dividends every quarter, and read material beyond the finance domain. 

So one of the effects of being really into using AI to create portfolio management tools and streamlining my work is that I actually think that it's now warranted to pick up new technical skills. But these are not the traditional coding skills that engineers need to do their work. To utilise AI to become a stronger builder, one has to pick up skills in technical architecture, which is too steep a learning curve for me, as I lack the basic foundations to start. 

So naturally, I turned to AI to suggest a plan for me based on where I am and where I needed to go as a builder. 

And AI pointed to The Pragmatic Programmer by Thomas and Hunt.

This turned out to be an enjoyable, relaxed read, and the advice is so powerful and general that I suspect the skills transfer across domains. After all, a legal contract is just a piece of code in English, ultimately parsed and compiled by a human judge or the counterparties. Simple maxims like "Don't Repeat Yourself" and Orthogonality are useful even in contract drafting or hardware systems design. 

Looks like I might have to find an excuse to teach my Data Analytics students this if they aspire to higher education.

( For folk in Law, the equivalent text is Learning the Law by Glanville Williams, which Min Shan recommends every law student read 4 times before embarking on a legal course. I must be so mediocre because I read it only once. There is, sadly, no equivalent in finance; The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham is great but does not come close.  )

Of course, that's not the only book that was interesting.

Last year, I was crazy about Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, but this year I found a series that topped it. 

Dungeon Crawler Carl is the flagship offering in the LitRPG genre, and the author likely has years of gaming experience to write a work as absurd and entertaining as this series.

The story is about a guy named Carl and his girlfriend's Persian Cat called Princess Doughnut, going on a dungeon crawl and starring in a reality show watched by almost every alien in the universe.

The most exciting thing about this book is that I was raving about it so much that my 10-year-old son has started reading it. 

Parents who read the book will note how violent and vulgar it is, but I'll do anything to get my own to read a book that is just words.

Ok, this summarises the personal updates on my blog. We will get back to regular programming on this blog after this.