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