Personal Update - Waiting for things to get back to normal.

Unlike other fellow citizens, I am starting to tune out of the local political news to focus on investment matters and leisure.

a) Training business

My personal theory is that the recession has just started for the training business. It has been harder to conduct previews as we are really competing against mainstream news events. I am eagerly waiting to see whether things will get back to normal next week. Fortunately, I also got a break from conducting previews so that I can relax and focus on improving my course materials and doing more exploration of financial markets.

b) Coding shenanigans



Once your programs start to mature, you just need to make some tweaks to them to answer some of the questions you have in the markets, so I have yet to do up any new programs as of now.  My code to visualise stock prices now has semivariance information and what we're seeing the ABF Bond Fund interposed on STI ETF. Sadly, even the safest Bond ETFs do not have semivariance of 0.

I am supposed to start coding up some web-apps this week depending on whether I get some time to do this. I will be using the Python Streamlit framework to get this done. My aim is to share simple tools with my community.

c) Books I am reading



Some friends have been asking me to read The Joys of Compounding by Gautam Baid. Actually, I am already halfway through the book. The book is part self-help and part investing.

The self-help component summarises core ideas on lifelong learning and model thinking into a convenient volume, but the investment component of the book misses the mark as it was done somewhat in haste and lacks detailed worked examples. This is not Baid's fault as value investing can be quite subjective and a lot of experts are unable to create a unified framework and run readers across one working example.

I expect many investment blogs to gush about this book over the next few months, but for me, the real winner is not Gautam Baid.



I read only one chapter of Richard Hamming's The Art of Doing Science and Engineering and it freaking blew my mind!

This is one of those rare books that is missing from a good engineering program. Engineers and scientists do have a style at work that is hard to capture in the text but explains why engineers are so highly sought after in the business world for often non-engineering reasons.

My regret is that read this book too late. I think if this were published 20 years ago, I would not have to go through years of suffering thinking that engineers are doomed to a lower socioeconomic status because of IT outsourcing in the 2000s. A lot of mental frameworks taught in science and engineering can shift through different domains and I certainly did not have to pay for two degrees to find that out.

Hamming does not shy from using equations to illustrate how common sense has a firm mathematical foundation. Chapter 1 requires a basic understanding of Integration and Calculus.

d) Leisure and Hobbies

I stopped painting miniatures as I expect a second lockdown maybe in a month or two so I now have lot of paint and lots of miniatures. There will be plenty of time to paint then.

For anime, I am going deep into Isekai genre rabbit-hole. I watched The Rising of Shield Hero and thoroughly enjoyed it.

For reasons known only to anime fans who read my blog, I am ashamed to say that I also enjoyed Kono Suba. It was probably written by a troll.

My favourite character is Darkness.

Anyway, I will see you guys over the weekend after the elections are over. For those who miss my financial write-ups, you can expect a pretty decent article maybe this weekend on the Dr Wealth blog.