Why men will always be a slave to their ambitions.

 

Someone on social media was promoting some event that is all about finding some safe space for men to express their emotions. The idea is that we live in a very destructive competitive environment and the current definition of what masculinity is is very narrow. 

While I will not openly oppose any attempt to rewrite what masculinity should be, I am old-school and believe that boys will be boys. 

I am also aware that it is very difficult to disengage from ambition. I struggle with it personally, and when I finally made the decision to suit up and go to a law firm, a lot of what I do had to do with my son who's watching my every move. If he gets winds of the idea that it's possible for a guy to basically do nothing at home and still earn a nice 5-digit passive income, one possible reaction is to just stop striving. 

I think that loss of motivation takes away a greater part of the meaning of life.

Another perspective I have on masculinity is that it’s not ultimately up to men (or worse, single men who actually have the time to think about moderating their masculinity) to determine what’s masculine. The main determining factor is women. We should ask ourself what kind of guy actually attracts women in Singapore, gets to settle down, and have kids. Women ultimately gate-keep because they decide what kind of men gets to propagate their gene pool.

For example, in Shanghai China, women don’t really care how good looking a guy is, he just needs to be able own an apartment. In such societies, savings rates amongst men are one of the highest in the world. When there is a real estate boom, so much attention goes into real estate ownership, workers become more disengaged at work.

So if we adopt this approach to determine the evolution of masculinity, we should start with a survey conducted by Lunch Actually recently on what Singaporean women want in a guy. In a nutshell,  a guy should be highly educated, have a high income, and have a compatible religion with the woman. In other surveys, it was also found that guys actually don’t really mind higher earning girlfriends, but a large swath of the female population would not be able to accept guys who earn below them.

So if I want my son to be successful in starting a family, he needs to study really hard, gun for the best paying jobs, and be a free-thinker (as opposed to being an atheist like me) so he gets to be as flexible as possible when it comes to religion at a later time. Another words, I don’t think it is wise for my son to focus on developing traits like kindness and empathy. These traits can be a bonus, but I’d put a bigger premium on traditional masculine traits like being decisive, ambitious, or even a little confrontational.  Case in point, not having a degree in Singapore means halving your income. So if we already know that women prefer high earning men, missing out on a local degree is like getting castrated.

Of course, this analysis should also consider whether there is an equivalence of dividend income and earned income. There are no surveys on this yet, but I suspect when women talk about high earning men, they are more interested in traits of conscientiousness and disagreeableness when looking for mates. This would actually put a higher weight on earned income compared to dividend income. So I would conclude that even if you have a nice $5,000 passive income every month, you may want to hold a job that gives you amount of status in society. 

The singlehood status of many guys in the FIRE movement may attest to this possibility. 

So this is why men will always be a slave to their ambitions, because women like ambitious men and ambitious men continue to propagate the gene pool for humanity’s next iteration.

More details on why I ditched my carefree life to practice law

 

When I wrote my last article, I thought it was a casual personal update. People who study law and get admitted to the bar eventually become lawyers. I've also had plenty of time to plan for my career transition. 

Interestingly, the last article attracted a lot of attention.

Investment Moats Kyith was the first to contact me through Whatsapp. He was wondering why I was urgently making a career switch. It should be noted that no one is as obsessed with the "safe rate of withdrawal" as Kyith in the financial blogosphere, so I suspected that he thinks my finances have become wobbly.

15-Hour Workweek went even further with a hilarious but scarily accurate breakdown of my financial situation.  You can read it here. 15WW is mostly correct, but he "see me too up" and overestimated my wealth. Rising interest rates do affect dividend portfolios negatively, and I took my fair share of poor performance, although it's nowhere near the folks who dabbled in tech, China and crypto. 

I just want to add some perspectives on why I transitioned into law 7 years after leaving my IT career.

a) I mentally divide my assets into "earned" and "inherited" wealth

I'm very public about inheriting money, but spending it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, so I segregate my assets. Even dividends from the inherited bucket go back to it. As a consequence of that, Imagine my "earned" bucket as being barely enough to sustain my family expenses. I can't objectively live on 4% of that, and I can barely live on 6% of it, but it motivates me to start an investment course and engage with the world, so I refused to break these silos down. 

The consequence is that I feel hungry and deprived all the time, but if we account for the inherited bucket, I would not need to get up in the morning, and my family can go to Japan three or four times a year.

Still, the inherited bucket is useful. It is helpful for medical emergencies, and I will be generous regarding children's tertiary education. My dad kept emphasizing giving me an education in his will, so I will carry out his wishes in spirit for his grandkids. 

Do note that my SRS, Mortgage and CPF voluntary contributions, which I have been so aggressively pursuing lately, come from my "earned" bucket, so you can imagine how deprived my life really is given how poor my business revenues are. 

I'm very transparent about this approach, but I don't recommend that readers do this. My mum thinks I go hungry when I go to work and shoves me a few bucks when we eat together. 

b) I learned that FI can induce boredom, and you become jaded after a while

As I've stated before, Financial independence is a networked good. If there get there early, congratulations, but your friends may take another 20 years to reach your stage. Not all of them can travel with you then. 

I'm fine being the only person who is financially free, but recently, as a result of growing old, I've lost interest in everything I used to like. When I was younger, I could anticipate a new RPG or game and could hang out at Comics Mart to talk about my hobbies. Now by the time anything arrives in a Singapore store, I reviewed it in PDF format and can even sell it to noobs at the game shop.  I've also closed my mind to newer games, they always seem sort of derivative of an older Euro game, and there are textbooks on game mechanics that deconstruct everything. 

And these days, all I do is deconstruct everything.

Lately, I've begun to feel the same way about books. The assertion of management books is rarely backed by empirical data, so I've grown to disdain it. Some authors just back their ideas with long-winded stories which are entertaining but ultimately one data point. Philosophy repeats the ideas of dead white men and feels like subjecting the reader to a painful cultural vasectomy. Investment books are still ok if they are self-serving, but I can't just subsist on investment books.

I need variety too. 

Legal practice, on top of my investment training program, is one way I can take theoretical ideas and solve practical problems with them and see the real consequences. If I can pick my pace of work, there's a chance I might even enjoy it.

c) Timing issues with my CFA qualification

I passed level 3 of my CFA in 2003, and then I just carried on as an IT professional. Years later, after I determined that I should start an investment training business, I figured that running my training program full-time could allow me to earn this qualification that has eluded me for nearly two decades. After getting a sizeable portfolio, I realised that to have an investment career, I was often prevented from investing on my own account by company policy.

So the clock started ticking for me to get my CFA in 2017, and I just got it about two months ago. So I'm really only free to pursue my legal career recently. 

d) I don't want to corrupt my kids

In my entire life, I've only been retired for six months. That was in 2014 when I awaited my acceptance into law school. Beyond that, I've been studying, doing a training contract, and running an investment course.

I don't want my kids to imprint on the idea that a dad is just a retiree. In fact, my kids need to understand why they will end up side-hustling and having multi-hyphenated careers.

Seeing a dad chillax every day might corrupt them. Even if I can make them FI on their first day at work, imagine how much I would have robbed them if they lacked the motivation to earn accomplishments in their lives. 

e) People have lost their Financial Independence in this downturn

Times are bad; we went from a pandemic to a war in Ukraine, a breakdown in supply chains, and multiple crypto meltdowns to a hawkish Fed. I know folks who have lost their FI of late, and it's unpleasant to get back to the workforce without bargaining power. 

Imagine updating your resume, and there is nothing to write about. 

I've experienced discomfort this week. I returned to fighting the morning crowd and fought off sleep after taking too many carbs on lunch break. 

It's uncomfortable, and you don't ever want to do this because you need the cash, so better do this while you don't need the money.

Lastly, students and readers are inquiring about my new vocation. I've spent the week getting to speed and may refrain from business development activities for now. I still need to process the rules on touting for lawyers, so if you have an issue you need help with, write to me at my normal email waichung.ng@gmail.com. 

Will share more when I get my name card.

Personal Update : A New Dawn

 

Last week was the last ERM session for 2022; as the training business faces one of the biggest challenges ever in 2023, I've begun making some moves in my career, at least to stave off irrelevance, if not to pay the bills. 

Starting 1 December 2022, I should have restored my practising certificate to resume legal work in a firm as an Associate. My area of work is community law, and for a start, I will take on any case my supervisor will be working on. Over time, I expect to find an area I'm comfortable with.

That's not all; starting tomorrow, I will be tagging along to attend the trial in the State Courts as an intern to get back into the swing of things. For folks who are my long-term customers and friends who do look forward to working with me in my new role, please be patient as I will only share details of my workplace on Thursday after I clear my communication with my firm; lawyers have a strict no touting policy. For future updates on my new venture as a rookie lawyer, I expect to use LinkedIn as my major form of communication. 

( Facebook is where I go Goblin mode, and my career will be very short if I talk about the law there. )

For folks who have been following me on this blog because of investment training, don't worry. I negotiated to be a lawyer and an investment trainer at the same time. If anything, I may even become more useful to my clients and friends. The next ERM course will be in February 2023. I will need to see what kind of time pressure my new role entails, and I might get back to the deeper articles on Dr Wealth if I do not have the bandwidth to make new videos. 

Some changes in my life may include :

• This blog may reduce its update frequency; we'll likely see maybe two weekly articles. 
• I probably can't read as fast as before since I still have to process my Business Times, The Edge and Economist weekly. 
• Probably limit my Netflix and Disney+ watching to a minimum.
• My volunteer work in schools will have to be scaled down to almost zero, but I do suspect that I will spend more time with disadvantaged citizens once I get into the swing of pro-bono legal work under CLAS. Given my lack of revenue pressure, I will likely ramp up on this to sharpen my career skills. 
• My gaming life has been dead for over a year. It's part of growing old and seeing D&D turn more woke than I can handle. I still hope to visit conventions and look forward to Comic-Con this year.

Some readers might want to know how my finances work at the back end. 

So even though I now have a hyphenated career as a lawyer-investment trainer, to maintain my flexibility, I do not draw a monthly income (how else can a middle-aged Singaporean man get employed ? . Everything is based on effort/results, so if no payment is made by clients, I get nothing. To sustain this for at least a year, I've already set aside a full year of household expenses and mortgage payments in my savings account. 

The only risk to me is my mortgage payments which are still floating rates loans. My dividends in 2023 can likely take care of that. As I am still developing my basic skills in my new role, I am likely to continue to rely on passive dividend income to make this career transition successful. 

Of late, I have been feeling quite conflicted about this career decision. Even though I was cleared of all my medical issues two days ago, a younger and fitter good friend had a mild stroke, and I can't help but feel that all this is just vanity and a desire to maintain my relevance in middle age. My only solace is through giving legal representation to those who cannot afford it to build up my reputation and skills in the meantime.   

The biggest question at the end of the day is whether there will be an interesting story to tell my students next year. I'm likely the busiest man who has completed the FI of FIRE. But the idea of dividends powering a hyphenated career is an interesting one,  and maybe I can author a series of new articles in mainstream media about this. I won't just talk about retirement; I'll talk about transcending it. 

Now the question is whether I can teach, code, draft and counsel out of this period of rising interest rates?

I'll blog again in the middle of the week. 

  

Letter to Batch 28 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 28,

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

On 26^th September 2022, I anticipated a nasty market downturn when the Fed started to turn hawkish, so while leveraged student portfolios still had a tiny profit, I told the community to exit all leveraged positions. I liquidated everything in all my margin accounts, hoping to return at a better time. The ERM portfolios will continue after conducting its 28th class of students.  

Batch 28 has its unique challenges.

As interest rates have only risen on March 2022, I’ve made a judgment call to only backtest year to date performance of both STI blue chips and REITs. Furthermore, I also took the liberty to decide that it was high time we took on some more risks and limited our REITs universe to twenty REITs that gave the highest dividend yields. This decision was made even whilst high-yielding REITs underperformed compared to the baseline performance.

The first reason is that as REITs are cheap, thanks to rising interest rates, higher dividends can cushion losses moving forward. The second reason is that if interest rates rise longer, REITs, where landlords struggle with increasing rent, will start behaving like bonds, and REITs with the highest dividend yields will have the lowest “duration”. They will preserve their value better as the overall REITs sector fall further out of favour.

Also, as the class size is small, each team had to review many counters before lunch.

The final result is possibly the highest-yielding portfolio we’ve ever built as a programme, with an average yield of 6.88%. I look forward to investing in this portfolio with my SRS funds. Folks anticipating a return to a leveraged portfolio will have to wait a while longer as margin rates remain relatively high.

Lastly, I hope that Batch 28 will participate actively in the FB group. Sometime in Q4 2022, we should meet for an online community webinar.

 

Hope to see you then!

 

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

Market Deployment #4 : The future of Ang Moh is being more Kiasu

 

Being a parent in Singapore is like being tossed between the philosophies of two different civilizations. I just met my son's kindergarten teachers and can see this clash of ideologies in full swing. My son's English teacher is very cheerful, and encouraging and seems to want to make learning more fun, emphasising creative thinking and life skills. His Chinese teacher, an immigrant from PRC, reminded me that if a child can eat three times a day, doing three pages of exercise should be easy peasy and laments the reduction of Chinese Spelling in primary schools next year. 

Over time I can imagine this effect on kids. They will evolve like me, and even though they willingly invest heavy amounts of time in CL2 and work hard to get great results, they will likely align themselves with the Anglophonic world as it allows them to express their individualism more. 

This game is played throughout the world stage.

Investors should try to read books that attempt to predict the future. One periodical that does so is a special issue of The Economist that will talk about the world in 2023. For the extremely long helicopter view, Hamish Mcrae talks about The World in 2050. These predictions, while not fully accurate, are based on long-term trends.

I don't want to spill all the beans on this excellent book, but I just want to talk about one point I find extremely interesting. 

It is the idea that the future of Ang Moh is more Kiasu.

The book's main premise is that the US will retain its dominance even after losing the no.1 spot in economic size to China sometime after 2030. The main reason is that the US remains a very fertile country that supplements its population growth with many enterprising immigrants from other parts of the world. China, on the other hand, will become an ageing population like Japan and will lose its economic vigour as we head towards 2050. 

One possible side-effect of these long-term trends is that, over time, Asians in America will dominate higher education, politics and even pop culture because Asians just work harder and have a strong preference for STEM subjects. As the US Supreme court was to take out some forms of affirmative action that privileges blacks and Hispanics at the expense of Asian Americans, the work ethic and rigour of Asians would influence the West, so we may see Westerners become less individualistic and adopt more kiasu practices towards their studies. 

Let's face it, if I were a white guy, would I let Asians just walk over me in maths class and tech startups? I don't think so; I can adopt some of the work ethic of my Asian classmates. Similarly, as an Asian in the US, I would also like to be seen as cool. 

Cool might mean being more like Simu Liu than CZ, for example.

There are long-term implications for this. 

Singaporeans who cannot make it in the local system may think they can fly off to a place like Australia or UK where they can academically walk over Caucasians and get GPAs they will never attain in NUS had better be ready for a big fight when they get there. This is because second-generation Singaporeans might already be trying to spoil the market for everyone. 

As for my work deploying my funds in the markets, I've already started to regret moving some DBS to high-yielding REITs as DBS has increased even further. But mistakes are part and parcel of investing life; I've made money even as I thought a red tsunami would sweep Democrats out of the Senate. 

I expect to deploy some funds into the portfolio built by my students this week, but I do not expect any big moves for now. Expect REIT DPUs to be on a downtrend for the next 3 quarters, but prices have already adjusted to account for this fact. 

 

Market Deployment #3 : Will banks conquer the book retailing business?

 

As I run my 28th batch of ERM class tomorrow, I decided to take a short break to visit the latest BookXcess outlet at Wisma Atria that seems like more like a partnership with OCBC bank. This was such an amusing experience that it deserves a blog article on its own.

I've always been a fan and customer of BookXcess and look forward to visiting the branches whenever I was in KL and sometimes in JB. It's not a bookstore like Kinokuniya that stocks the latest an greatest books that support my ambition towards thought leadership. BookXcess has an innovative way of procuring books at rock bottom prices that they get to sell at prices way below e-book prices on Kindle, but you can't be too fussy with titles. You have to take whatever's available on discount.

That being said, I was able to find a few good finance titles and the newage FIRE bible Quit Like a Millionaire can be found there.  It's also selling cookbooks and comics for the cheap.

What I really like is how innovative the arrangement was made with OCBC. If you come for the banking services, the seating is arranged as part of the bookstore, so you can browse while waiting to be served. 

The most amusing part of this bookstore is that banking staff will there to serve you and even help guide you to the books that you want. I've been buying books since I was 7 years old, and I've never seen such an overeager sales team trying so hard to serve me when I'm browsing for books. Of course, along the way, they would remind me that paying for with an OCBC card entitles me to a further 10% discount on books. 

But you know how defensive I get when I meet financial salespeople, so I pointedly asked them whether they sell banking services or books. When they told me that are bankers, I said I'm not interested in banking with them, but I complimented them on the performance of their OCBC stock, and thanked them for the 4+% which beats endowment plans and some structured notes.  

So if you think about OCBC has done something truly brilliant and innovative for readers in Singapore. 

As much as I liked BookXcess, I never believed that they can survive the rents in Singapore. Their KL branches is easily staffed by the stupidest people I know. One counter staff in the Cyber Jaya outlet shoved all the hardbound books I bought into one flimsy plastic bag and pretended not to notice after the bag broke (lucky I brought a haversack). 

With this collaboration, all these problems are solved because the bookstore will be supported by highly motivated finance professionals. Rents can even be shared. Even if you don't like books, this sophisticated "man-trap" has a fairly good hipster cafe and some kind of craft gallery. 

At the moment, I have my doubts about whether this arrangement is sustainable. Here's how I think things can be better:

a) The discounted titles of Bookxcess are not the best partners for a bank. I prefer a more tactical selection of the latest business and self-improvement books to "trap" folks who can be more easily convertible to bank customers. Book title selections should be determined by data scientists.

b) Where money meets books, talks by finance and self-improvement professionals will create more traffic. This is where trainers, speakers and bloggers can work with OCBC to liven up the area.

c) I heard good things about the cafe, but it's located right next to Toastbox where the kopi is probably half the price. 

Within the grander scheme of things, I'm delighted that in a high rental area like Orchard road, we can actually accommodate one Kinokuniya, a Zall bookstore and and a BookXcess store. This is only possible because a banker thought it might be a way to drive more sales of banking services. 

The alternative is having no bookstore on Wisma Atria. 

I guess you can just ignore the bankers when you are browsing books.

The latest inflation numbers are good because they came in lower than expected. The following day, I liquidated 25% of my DBS holdings and placed them into high-yielding US office REITs and business trusts. I still like DBS a lot, but it also went up after going XD, so it's time to spread out my investments quite a bit. 

The next Fed decision to raise inflation rates will occur only after another inflation report in December, so a lot of investors are confirming a real rally on after that event. I think a calculated gamble that inflation will head lower is a good idea as we should only be seeing the lagged effects of the first 75bps raise dome months ago. 

That being said, shifting to high yielding REITs and business trusts is not a really ballsy move.

I leave the ballsy moves to the younger bros. 

Market Deployment #2 : The second crypto Cataclysm.

I consider the First Crypto Cataclysm as the fall of the Terra Blockchain. I lost about $15,000 in that disaster and considered myself fairly lucky, but my crypto course that is focused on passive income folded as stablecoins were found to not to be as stable as presumed. The loss of the course really hurt due to all the man-hours put into coming up with the lab notes.

Thereafter, I thought that the safest strategy would be to buy coins that have already crashed and got some LUNA  and some UST at a fraction of a cent. For the rest of the time, I treated my tokens as amusement park tokens and farmed it on Mirror and Apollo DAO at ridiculous yields of between 200% to 300%. Even today I make about $8 to $10 USD every day from liquidity pools, especially the VIXY-UST pool in Mirror. Every 2-3 days, I put 1000 USTC into a new liquidity pool I find on Apollo / Mirror / Astroport. 

Mirror protocol had its own disaster as of late as the entire developer team stopped supporting the project, Amazingly, someone else compiled the open sourced code found on GitHub and the website was brought back form the dead in multiple addresses. I tried to continue farming some MIAU-UST and, thankfully, avoided getting fleeced so far. 

Instead I continue to make stupid mistakes which cost me $20+ when I tried to use SimpleSwap to convert my LUNA to LUNC but omitted the text in the memo field. 

Even after retreating from a leveraged account for my equities portfolio, I decided to pour in more collateral for my leveraged ETH on Compound, the idea was initially to take advantage of the Merge, but even the merge turned out underwhelming for ETH investors. 

Today ETH is my last leveraged position.

Two days ago, my now tiny position in crypto dropped a further $3,000 USD and I found out quite late that FTX is in trouble. 

To me, this crash is more unexpected than the one that occured on the Terra blockchain. FTX’s SBF is a nice guy and there was nothing to suggest that FTX can become insolvent. It’s easy to talk about hindsight, but even the really smart guys in Temasek did not see this coming. 

I think just like the collapse of LUNA, the collapse of FTX will create ripple effects that will hit other parts of crypto ecosystem, so folks should at least try to move your coins to a decentralised wallet in case your exchange starts to halt withdrawals. 

The question is whether in the grander scheme of things, should investors ditch crypto completely as an asset class?

I don’t think so.

Investors who are sitting on a property and already have a nice equity portfolio, you should continue to put up 1% of their net worth into crypto. If you are risk averse, just put it in BTC and ETH. As volatility is really high, the time difference between An All time Low and All Time High would not be too far apart and we could be talking about a totally different market in 2025. 

Lastly, I think we can learn to enjoy this moment. I’ve always despised the crypto and tech stock pumpsters who were at the top of the world last year telling everybody else to “Have fun staying poor”. If they win, no one would respect prudent risk management anymore. Now that they are silent, I hope they would stay that way. 

Update on my DBS position. I should be expecting some decent dividends from DBS this month end and regardless of the outcome, i have a nice counter-weight to the rest of my REIT position. I’m sceptical of the recent recovery in local stocks as I expect inflation to remain high and herald a more sustained effort to raise interest rates by the Fed. This means more pain for REITs but also a longer time to get some bargain hunting done. 

In fact my DBS position is a bet that folks will underestimate the conviction of the Fed and we will see a battery of 50 basis point raises all the way until June 2023.  

Week after next, I expect to invest funds into student portfolios without leverage, so money has been earmarked beforehand.