Letter to Batch 18 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 18,

It’s been a great honour and privilege to be able to conduct a 2-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you. 

The first interesting we did for this batch is to demonstrate the ERM back-testing framework on a foreign market to show just how the framework can be introduced into a foreign market. I’ve deliberately chosen Bursa Malaysia because I had a student who attended the webinars remotely and will only show up for a face to face hands-on session when the borders open next year.

We know that it must be the year-end cheer because the second exciting thing was the unprecedented number of F***-bombs I threw around in class. I hoped the class enjoyed my passionate description of F*** You money and why having a net worth exceeding $2M would shift the emphasis from making money into defending your wealth from inflation and building a Fortress of Solitude around yourself. If there are no complaints in the class feedback, I may do this again in the future.

As usual, in every class, I am unable to answer any question entirely even to my own personal satisfaction. There was a question that wants to pit lump-sum investing, dollar-cost averaging and value cost averaging to see which system can lead to the highest returns. I hope to be able to answer this question adequately in a future Dr Wealth article.  

For our portfolio creation, we continue to pivot away from a defensive stance, and I can see riskier choices made by this batch of students. For business trusts, I made two controversial decisions to include Asia Pay TV Trust and Hutchison Port Trusts into the portfolio in an attempt to juice more dividend yields in a year of recovery from the pandemic, feel free to exclude this from your portfolio if you are uncomfortable with their track record. The class has also determined to take a more aggressive stance by adding SIA and Frencken into the equity component of their selection.

Lastly, I hope that Batch 18 would participate actively in the FB group. We should be able to see each other again in March 2021 when I conduct a community webinar for the community.

Christopher Ng Wai Chung