CB Prosperity Diaries #5

Ok, time for another update.

a) Last night's webinar was successful

Our first community engagement was a relatively successful endeavour with over 350+ attendees, most of which are curious members of the public. I have enough data points and feedback to adjust the community engagement program to make it better in mid-May where I will be doing the speech that was supposed to be presented in the cancelled Seedly event.

I know folks will struggle with some concepts I tried to teach last night, which is about Z-scoring to build a multi-factor metric to do stock screening. I just want to see how far I can stretch the mind of a retail investor. My survey results showed about a one-third felt that the material was too difficult. 

For my business partner to warm up to future events beyond the CD period, last night's events must be monetizable. I hope that within a week I will find out whether this is feasible from a profit perspective.

b) Financial matters - Deferring my Mortgage

Deferring my mortgage payments were relatively stress-free. I took a bus to town to a CIMB Bank branch and was told that there is no need for physical presence. Bank staff made me fill an online form. Three days later someone called me to ask whether I wish to defer the entire payment or just the principle. As I have ample cash reserves, I decided to continue to pay my interest payments. At least for the rest of 2020, I can devote my income to buying more stocks.

c) Financial matters - Compulsory Medisave contribution

Let's just say that with my income taxes declared for last year, the government will not let me get through 2020 on Easy mode. I was asked to contribute a decent amount into my Medisave within the next 30 days. I just contributed the lump sum on the CPF website but it was an unexpected black hole on my cash reserves.

A see a lot of self-employed folks getting the same letter as me these few days. Better brace yourselves for a hit to your cash reserves.

If you have a great 2019 but now stuck with no revenue, good luck to you.

d) Python coding

I am starting to get a hang of Python coding so much so as I can start writing scripts to build visualizations to enhance my course materials. I am taking both a text-book and online learning approach to picking up bits and pieces of Python coding.

I paid $200 USD to Data Camp to get a year's access to an unlimited amount of Python training materials. It even provides me with an online interface to run my code and corrects me based on my mistakes.

Doing this completely blew my $600 payout from the Singapore government.


e) Readings

I had to give up reading at least 2 books because the material was shallow and writing was quite bad. I dd manage to complete Book 2 of the Black Company.