Are you part of the CDP Master Race ?

 

[ The concept of the CDP master race is inspired by the idea of the PC Master Race, gamers who game on their PC. It is not inspired by WW2 Germany. ]

For modern investors who are younger Millenials and Gen Z, there is no need to understand what the Central Depository or CDP is because modern brokerages that run on the custodian system are very competitive. Trading on an old-school broker usually costs $25 per trade, while online brokerages like Interactive brokers, if charged at all, can often execute for around $2. 

Despite cheaper trades available, I still prefer to park most of my net worth under CDP, and I imagine many older investors may also like it. 

Here are my reasons for doing so. 

a) Singapore Savings Bonds or SSBs

SSBs should still be the safest investment in Singapore. Based on what I know, the only way to buy them is that you will need a CDP account to do this. SSBs are the closest thing to investing in a risk-free rate, and this should be noticed if interest rates spike one day in the future.

b) Shareholder activism

Shareholders need to know what their companies are doing, and when you own shares in CDP, they are held under your name. You can join shareholder meetings and fight for scraps at the buffet table. Shareholder activism also means voting down ideas that you do not like. While this is nothing much for younger investors, it gives the retired elderly something to do - you can also meet other people.

c) Dividends on payable date

This is a massive deal for me. For a successful setup, dividends will arrive by 5.30pm in your local bank account on the payout date. The money will come even if you do not have a recognised degree, study in a neighbourhood school, or might lie in a hospital in a coma. For custodian accounts, they will show up the following day on your dashboard, and then you need to issue an instruction to pull the dividends into your bank account. 

This causes delays and is generally more active than people think passive investing should be.

d) Easier on your beneficiaries and gifting your children

When you pass on, knowing that the bulk of your funds are in CDP will make it easier for your trustee to handle the stocks. For my dad's case, I opened a joint CDP with my mum and then moved the stocks into this joint account at $10.70 per counter. When my kids reach 18, I intend to pass on some blue chip counters while I am still alive.

For folks with online brokers, do realise that chasing freebies will result in many brokerage accounts that can give your trustee a logistical headache trying to distribute your investments. I've not done such cases, but I suspect if it is an online brokerage, it may be better to sell everything and then distribute the cash to all beneficiaries. (Ensure your kids know how many investment accounts and which brokers you have.)

Bonus: Not so much about CDP but the Supplementary Retirement Scheme or SRS

By opening an SRS account with a bank, you can set aside sums up to $15,300 to invest in the local stock market and reduce your personal income taxes the following year. These can be huge savings for folks in the high-income bracket. Amounts saved in SRS can be invested into the local stock market until you are about 63 years old. You must require a traditional brokerage account to trade stocks by drawing sums locked in the SRS account. A correct setup will give you a conventional brokerage that uses funds in your bank account or SRS at the same time.

Of course, employing CDP with a conventional brokerage is only practical in some cases.

As traditional brokerages charge more for each trade, you may only wish to use stocks you intend to buy and hold. Bluechips like DBS and low beta REITs like Fraser's Centrepoint Trust and Netlink Trust rarely make sense in high turnover portfolios, so they naturally would make a great fit with CDP. I generally employ high dividends and low beta in my core dividend-paying portfolio in CDP.

Online brokers are better for high-turnover investments. My algorithm-driven trades are all done exclusively via IBKR.

Share this article, as CDP gets little praise on social media. I think all serious retail investors should have one account.

Curse of the Hummingbird

 

This article arose from a series of discussions in the SGFI telegram group. I thought I'd share some deeper thoughts on it, as it is relevant to self-improvement and investment.

The person who started the conversation spoke about the advantages of being a jackhammer. A jackhammer has a narrow focus on hobbies; all they can do is focus on one thing and happily lead their lives. The opposite of the jackhammer is a hummingbird—something that flits from flower to flower without ever discovering what they are meant to do. The original inventor of the concept believed that the world needed more hummingbirds because hummingbirds can bring a cross-pollination of ideas and create innovative breakthroughs.

You will find many more metaphors in business literature, such as the hedgehog and the fox. 

As far as my own analysis goes, folks with an S in the MBTI, like the dreaded anal ISTJ, are jackhammers and do pretty well in Singapore, especially the government. In contrast, folks with an N tend to be hummingbirds, as they have big ideas and can apply mental models across domains. I tested ESTJ in my teens and ran with it throughout my engineering career. Still, once I started to pick up investing, the S had no choice but to give way to a more N or intuitive approach towards problems as I began to see investing as a form of liberal art where analysis can come from multiple angles. I was influenced by an old book called Latticeworks by Robert Hagstrom in the early 2000s. 

Are there investing styles for jackhammers? Indeed, using broad index ETFs to construct a 60/40 - VT/BNDW portfolio can be very effective because it can compound between 6-8% over multiple decades. Then, it's just researching ways to reduce expenses and finding more ways to optimise your day job to accelerate wealth creation. Picking this up remains the best defence against financial advisors and paying high commissions to get your money to work for you in the markets,

Dividend investing could be slightly more sophisticated, so it can be suitable for jackhammers. Just target sustainable yields between 5-7%, then stubbornly build up a portfolio of local stocks in a CDP account to reap hundreds of paychecks yearly. It's more complex than 60/40, but the folks who do this are so loyal to this approach that influencers still get cheap eyeballs by provoking and disrespecting "dangerous" dividend investors.

The transition from jackhammer to hummingbirds starts when you become dissatisfied with the Sharpe ratios you are getting. This happens when you interrogate your data and find factors that outperform. Factor investing is very rewarding for hummingbirds because when you see a new factor that works, it is interesting to explain why. Like why do low Beta strategies work? Do people take stock bets based on excitement, so boring stocks are cheaper?  

Technical analysis and charts take hummingbirds slightly further. Some folks love reading tea leaves for different patterns to emerge. I enjoy coding to discover trending ETFs and buy them for better results - that's a very technical investing approach. I've finally moved all my Terra coins into ETH, and I'm developing a momentum-driven algorithm to see whether I can juice my cryptocurrency portfolio in Binance.

However, some strategies only appeal to extreme hummingbirds, and I dislike them. I don't like derivatives and zero-sum games, so sacrificing an upside to juice dividends using covered call strategies is just there to make some folks feel really smart. I'm sure they can make money, but I don't have the time for it. 

Maybe the solution is not to be dualistic about the jackhammer-hummingbird divide.

Based on our personal resources, conscientiousness and intelligence, we have a pool of attention to devote to various interests. 

The jackhammer will narrowly allocate his attention and get deep into a few areas.

The hummingbird will speak thinly and have a passing interest in many fields.

However, many approaches need to be broader and more profound. 

• One way to moderately go into two fields and synergistically use them at work. 
• Another is to supplement a broad interest in many things with one narrower focus on one area you are passionate about.

There are several principles to guide us when determining to pick up a new area of interest:

• If you decide to pick something, a hobby or a field like finance, the opportunity cost is not picking something else, like brewing hipster coffee or writing sonnets. 
• If you keep focusing on one thing, the payoff may achieve diminishing returns. If you have a 6-7% dividend portfolio, and some folks are raving about dividend growth as a better approach, they might be correct, but how much better? Dividend yields are more visible, and dividend growth requires projecting into the future.
• Some things have a J-curve. A project may generate negative returns and frustration but pay off later after you allocate more time and effort. A 1-month violin course is a bad idea. 
• The amount of resources a person can allocate is limited by wealth and talent. Life is not fair.

Because SGFI groups have so many INTJs, it's normal to think that it's a curse to be a hummingbird, as INTJ's significant weakness is the inability to stick to a hobby. At the same time, everyone else can settle with something profound that they are passionate about, so many will die and leave a lot of half-pursued interests for their beneficiaries to plough through (how come your recently deceased uncle got a bongo drum next to a Raspberry Pi?). 

Thoughts of shallow engagements and half-complete hobbies might be a sign of high intelligence and giftedness.

Maybe to be blessed, you need to be an imbecile.

Make Investing Great Again !

 

Let's discuss the US elections objectively when things calm down. This time around, I was less keen to see a Republican victory because I thought that Trump would acquiesce to Putin and bring tremendous suffering to Ukrainian civilians. Still, after reading some analysis, I don't know if Biden's vacillation and giving Ukrainians just enough to hold back the Russians is now a good idea. According to the Economist, the latest projection is that 2025 may see fighting cease at least once, which might be suitable for preserving lives. There will be some unhappiness that Putin will get to keep 20% of Ukraine, but there's a chance Ukraine is free to join the EU. 

So this now makes me ambivalent or even rather happy with a Trump victory!

Let's first look at how investors can tilt their portfolios. This central idea is that tariffs and deporting immigrants will exacerbate inflation in the US, so interest rates may be kept higher for much longer. This would be bullish for local banks but bearish for REITs. However, to what extent can Trump implement these policies? There are still some old-school fiscal conservatives amongst the American leadership, so I don't think an all-in strategy for local banks is a good idea. There has to be a mix between banks and REITs, and I prefer REITs right now, as REITs are the less popular investment choice. My pick is to go with the REITs with the lowest betas, in case the investor might be wrong. 

Hopefully, by year-end, I can pick up some high-dividend SDRs to diversify my dividends further from my usual CDP holdings. However, I'd like to know whether these SDRs will pay dividends on the payout date. I'm still quite old school and prefer to have my more static holdings under CDP because the money arrives in the bank account even if you are in a coma in a hospital. Only some enjoy waiting for the dividends to be credited into your custodian broker account, which requires a manual step to withdraw the funds. You feel less rich this way.

At the international stage, my trend-following algorithm is performing as projected by backtests, racking close to 20% gains in about 16 months. Trending ETFs are mainly US equities, gold, and crypto, but the algorithm miscalculated and was whiplashed by China tech, although losses are minimal. 

I won't talk solely about investing in the Trump era—given how unpredictable US politics will be, I'm likely to be wrong anyway.

By now, we have a clearer idea of why Trump won. 

The first reason is that despite no recession, Americans feel poor thanks to inflation. Flat-footed economists call this a vibecession. Like in Singapore, families are dealing with larger mortgage payments and lower amounts for discretionary spending. Almost everyone is out of the country, so you can feel richer in JB or even Kyoto, Japan. I spent more than $100 on movie tickets here this week. 

The second reason is a massive backlash against the woke ideology that Kamala stands for. You can feel it here in Singapore. Almost every middle-aged guy here is unhappy with identity politics in Marvel movies and computer games. Games like Concord and Dragon Age: Veilguard angered not just white male gamers in the US. I have gamers here ranting and raving about it. 

Elon Musk knew something when he gave a speech referring to "incremental political science majors" as the target of all this hatred. This resonated with my engineer identity during my working days when any work that had to be referred to the legal department would somehow delay my project or end up doubling the workload - after a vicious dressing down from an effete but legally trained bureaucrat soy boy. You want to punch that guy's face in, but you can't, so you build up a dividends portfolio instead and then find out how this bastard was trained. 

(Marvel should do my origin story.)

So, I'm very familiar with the kind of blue-collar anger in the US. You do the hard work, maybe build up a small business. Then these tenured social science humanities types start to label you a bigot from their ivory towers, then even want your video game character to do 10 push-ups when you misgender someone. 

Yes, logically, these assholes are all different people. Still, to some blue-collar conservative workers, they are all one person -  the humanities goth-blue-haired land whale feminist Marxist scum who want to defund the police - represented by a Democrat president elect.

Wouldn't you want to vote for Trump, too?

Following the new politics is now giving us older gamers a massive pay-off.

I look forward to hearing the screams of the blue-haired land whales that pollute the RPG space in Singapore if Elon Musk buys Hasbro and owns the D&D brand.

That will make me return to regular gaming because I know the exact kind of DM that spouts unnecessary anti-PAP slogans before a game. After all, somehow, to them, PAP is neo-liberals.

I will tell him: 

Opposition is for they/them. PAP is for you!

Hobbies Update : Thank you for reaching out guys!

 

This might be a rambling post, but I'd first like to thank the readers and old pals who connected with me over the past week; as an extrovert, the conversations kept me sane, and I could enjoy myself while my family was touring Taiwan. My social diary was so active I could not start watching the DanDaDan anime, and I could not even download a single game from Steam, so this affected my hobbies, but I generally prioritise personal connections over games.

But I want to talk about one more thing before I run down the hobbies that I have at the moment. Recently, there's been some insight into the fact that ageing occurs in bursts. We tend to age a lot when we reach 44 years old, 60 years old, and then another burst at 78 years old. The effect is that those who reach 44 will have problems with their metabolic rate and might not be able to purge caffeine as quickly as before. Another impact from other sources is that our neurons fire less frequently, so we will find that time passes faster. These insights are recent, and I would probably not go for a third degree if I knew that my mind would slow down when I graduate. But all this will affect the way I view my hobbies moving forward.

Ok, let's rundown what stays and what goes:

a) Reading

Reading is so powerful that it is the hobby most women find attractive on dating apps, but to be fair, most of the stuff I read is not friendly to women. I have read a lot about finance, business, and self-help; there is nothing for me every year at the Singapore Writer's Festival. But as I slow down, I am now more open to more profound and shorter self-reflective books. In fact, every December, I will have a moratorium on non-fiction books to mop up books on gaming history, Japanese fiction, and the latest Korean genre of healing literature. 

Reading healing fiction is weirdly practical because it addresses all the post-retirement identity issues that FIRE folks experience. 

I also have a new hobby, I'm now a book scavenger at the book drops in major regional libraries, and I'm always hunting for old books discarded by other Singaporeans. 

b) PC Gaming

I'm no longer a PC gamer. I will wake up to something like Baldur's Gate 3 that lets me experiment with weird D&D character builds, but otherwise, it will not play a role in my life anymore. But I love following the politics behind gaming, where gatekeepers are waging war against developers who are incorporating Woke and DEI values into franchises people love. I'm clearly on the side of the gatekeepers because I don't like getting lectured for having conservative values, so I sincerely enjoyed reading about the substantial business losses suffered by games like Concord and Dragon Age Veilguard.

I will be willing to get into games if I can convince my son to enjoy them with me. It's hard because he is 8, so the best he can do is assemble some simple Gunpla. I'm checking to see if I can get him into Warhammer 40k, paint some minis, and then roll some dice—anything is a lesser evil than brain rot from TikTok or YouTube. 

My peers have yet to successfully share a hobby with their kids, but I still want to try. 

c) Board, TCG and RPG gaming

Some old friends from my secondary school caught up with me, and we agreed to play the games we'd slowly collected over the past. However, we needed help finding folks to play with us. These are reasonably complicated games like Dune Boardgame, Legend of the 5 Rings LCG, and Battletech. If we can get a group of about 5, I promise to run D&D 2024 for them regularly. 

I was lucky because I doubted I could fit serious gaming into my life if I could not monetise it. But I game in my neighbourhood in Woodlands, so things might work out this time. 

Regardless of what game I play, I play the same way I play RPGs. I'm constantly on the attack and will recklessly charge someone if I know the rules. I don't believe in or engage in diplomacy. In L5R, I only play the Lion Clan. For Magic the Gathering, I only play black/red cards. In Battletech... I only know... DEATH FROM ABOVE!

I'm fun to play with because I tend to lose a lot. 

Thank goodness I don't invest like the way I game.

d) Trips to Johor

This isn't a hobby, but I might have more friends who can hit JB with me on a weekday to escape the cost of living in Singapore. Yesterday, I attempted to strike a fantastic chicken chop restaurant called It Roo near City Square. Then, I went to Aeon Tebrau to visit Tsutaya Bookstore before heading to a pasar malam at Tun Aminah. Now, I'm asking friends and relatives to devise a plan for Bukit Indah as we attempt a different crossing from Tuas.  

Sometimes, we are defined by what we don't do for hobbies. I no longer care about watching shows. If Disney produces more woke series like The Acolyte, I will cancel my subscription. I no longer buy comics for the same reason. I also watch fewer movies because Marvel is rethinking how to do superhero shows.

Social Life Update : How to increase your happiness without using money.

It is time for another update as I reach my 50th-year milestone on Christmas Day. 

Today, I will talk about my social life, which has seen some tuning up recently. In 2024, as my energy and tolerance levels are dipping slowly, I've decided to create higher-quality engagements with a lower frequency. 

In other words, do more with less.

For many middle-aged folks, some social engagements add little value because the subject matter has stopped being attractive. Others may create a sense of negativity and unease, but we can get so used to them that we ignore them until they bring us down for days and permanently reduce our quality of life if we don't stop them. Lower energy levels mean disengaging from some lower-value-added activities and shifting the focus to more pleasant ones. 

This is the essence of decent ageing. A more tactical use of our time and attention, which we can default to our families.

The test is also quite simple: Does it feel better to engage in a new social activity? If it does not, then you should end the engagement as soon as possible. With time freed, try out engagements with friends you would not normally do without the spare time, and then test to see if the activities fit and feel better. 

Be open-minded to changes, and recycle your time somewhere else if you make the wrong move. 

One significant change is that I go to a Japanese Karaoke bar to sing for three hours nonstop once a month or so or when I get spare cash from government handouts. I will hog the entire karaoke because I tend to appear when there are no clients. Total damage is $44. I don't drink alcohol, just two bottles of Soda water. I am accompanied by friends who sing casually but generally prefer to be there to converse. I focus on my singing because I will qualify for Golden Age Talentime quite soon and don't want to get dragged into discussions about dividends, stocks, or legal matters.

Another change is that I've done some soul-searching about my D&D hobby, and I decided that my only motivation to run a game is if I'm paid to do so. For many years, the community has tolerated abusive Dungeon Masters who do it because it is a power trip—they get godlike powers over players who generally are doing better in life than they are. Still, players need to actually have a viable alternative. So, the professionalization of the Game Master is inevitable. We should pay good DMs at a reasonable rate. In support of that belief,  I've recently attended a delightful job interview to become a Professional Dungeon Master. Sadly, I did not get the job ( but it was probably the most enjoyable job interview I ever had), but I will look at this space aggressively as the skillset reinforces my work as a trainer and lecturer.  

Over the year, I have learned a few things about reducing social engagements and why it always works out for me. 

Because my media appearances always attract financially responsible people, the folks who invite me for dinner are generally okay, and I get to talk to people who have goals in life and are doing good things to improve their future. So, somehow, my social diaries always write themselves. 

Second, with the extra time, I've been spending some weeks trying to understand why some of my genuine fans / high-paying customers have yet to actually invest in the financial markets, even though they are loyal customers who sign up for every course I run. This bothers me a lot, but I have invested weeks to finally get at least two guys to have a small portfolio running. ( Two guys are occasional colleagues, so I guide them, but they also buddy each other. It's a sound system, but I gotta think about scaling this. )

The first reason is that people are human beings with shifting financial priorities; a student wants to get a house, so he can only start after he has moved into his new place. Another reason is that even though modern brokerages are easy to use, they tend to send many warning messages due to compliance requirements, which is very intimidating to beginners. You need the courage to tell IBKR not to display this message again. The third reason is that investors need to trade off diversified portfolios for trading fluency. To get someone into the markets, you have to start with 2-3 stocks that cost less than $2,000 to trade but to do this, the trainer must caveat that this is not a diversified mix of counters and is just a confidence-building exercise.  Finally, the odds of succeeding rests upon the student's digital literacy, so if you get someone above 60, make sure he's an engineer before you agree to help. 

Anyway, my family is out on a trip this upcoming week, but I'm stuck with lectures I need to conduct; we'll see if my social calendar fills out this week. Let's use random chance for blog readers -  I'm available Mondays from next Friday until next week. 

Some loyal readers have reached out to me in the past. Let me know if you are free.

Deeper thoughts about FATFIRE

 

This weekend, I will attempt to think deeply about FATFIRE, as I suspect that over the years, many millennials have reached their 40s and are well past their FIRE objectives. I am now trying to figure out what life goals to pursue next. As most of the folks who will play with early retirement are INTJ strategists, there is a range of other MBTI types like ENTJs ( which I am borderline ). 

The aim is to go beyond a goal-shifting exercise like ENTJs are prone to. Also, I want to acknowledge that I enjoy non-toxic work and interacting with younger people and investors. 

As I've alluded to in my latest YouTube video, financial independence is resetting your working life and trading off leisure time for work to maximise personal satisfaction. The point at which the marginal tradeoff of an hour of leisure to an hour of work produces zero increase in life satisfaction differs from individual to individual. Additionally, I suspect extroverts have a much larger point of equilibrium where marginal work = marginal leisure. I'm at about 15 hours a week on average and have a capacity of perhaps up to 21 hours - but getting back to conventional employment is impractical for me these days. I wonder if INTJs have the energy to work 20+ hours a week if they never have to work. Hence, there is a tendency for more ENTJs to go after FATFIRE.

Okay, once we've established my mental model, which is familiar to many economics majors, let's discuss how FATFIRE can redefine a new financial metric more creatively than simply the safe withdrawal rate. 

a) Safe rate of withdrawal

The conventional approach is to declare a comfortable lifestyle for yourself. If this is $10,000 a month, then a safe 4% withdrawal rate can be attained at a net worth of $3,000,000. It's easy, elegant, and quite suitable for singles. Critics can argue that this was tested to last about 35 years, but in practice, you can just lower your expenditure when things become non-ideal later. 

You are still retiring with a lot.

b) Sustainable, safe rate of withdrawal

For folks uncomfortable with ratcheting up the drawdown based on inflation, my models suggest applying a safe withdrawal rate of about 2.6% every year based on the prevailing portfolio size at the year of retrieval. The caveat is that you need a balanced ETF asset mix for this to work. 

The advantage is you never have to worry about hitting zero, as portfolio losses will lead to lower withdrawals on a bad year. However, this number also maximises your utility over time as withdrawals increase faster than the inflation rate, and your portfolio tends to grow faster.

Therefore, a portfolio of $3,000,000 will generate $78,000 a year, but it can potentially grow faster than the rate of inflation. 

The disadvantage is that you will always have money, so this is best for folks with children who can pass on a nice lump sum that will sustain them in the future. 

I don't see any point in making your nieces and nephews multimillionaires after you die. 

c) Every family member can FIRE

Another way to stretch the goalposts for folks with families is to enable FIRE for every family member. For a single person to FIRE at $2,000 per month, you need $600,000. A four-person family would need $2,400,000.

The benchmark may be lower than other forms of FATFIRE, but some may question whether it is wise to gift FIRE to your kids before they can earn a single cent in the industry. There's a lot of hypocrisy here, as many parents think spending thousands on tuition is justified to delay their retirement goals. 

d) Work until every family member is a millionaire

Finally, I want to share my new financial goals. Given that I do some work and am pretty happy with my life, reinvesting substantial amounts into my real estate portfolios, a simple and relatively visceral goal is to ensure that everyone in the household can be a millionaire. 

The resulting lifestyle is manageable, and there are plenty of things to do and accomplishments for the next generation. 

It is slightly more ambitious than (c) and provides me time to create a balanced mix of work and play without resorting to crass materialism in Singapore society. 

e) Become my definition of wealthy

Finally, I want to state my definition of a rich person. 

A rich person can live with dividends arising from dividends earned in the previous year. 

To live, do that with $2000 a month. A rich person would need about $600,000 of dividends in the previous year. At 5% dividends, his portfolio needs to be $12,000,000.

I'm nowhere close, but some folks in the social media space are there. At this stage, it's safe to assume that someone is finally considered wealthy. There's no real need to pontificate about safe rates of withdrawal or career choices at this level. 

Maybe one day, I can philosophize about being rich.

To summarise, I've never thought very highly about FATFIRE or the folks who keep harping about them. As an ENTJ, I know it's some sad excuse to postpone retirement or create some kind of barrier to convince INTJs that what they aim for is inadequate. At its base, it's just the simple idea that retirement is meaningless if you get more life satisfaction by trading off some of your leisure time with work. 

Happiness always contains a bit of entering flow from deep, meaningful work or personal accomplishments; I totally get that. However, financial independence is the essential ingredient for even realising that such tradeoffs are possible by leaving a toxic workplace and creating a career that suits your inclinations and investment of time. 

Interest in Personal Finance comes from understanding the Marshmallow Experiment

 

Given enough time, I try to transfer some of the skills and resources I have to other domains of my work to become more effective at it. The basis for doing this is to simply read aggressively - a lot of readers do not give me enough credit for the sheer volume of books I read too well in my portfolio job roles.

First, when I started teaching in a tertiary institution, I knew I had some basic public speaking skills from many years of Toastmasters work. Above all, conducting training for adults who pay thousands to attend my workshop has also thickened my skin and forced me to address every question that can possibly be contemplated over the subject matter. Paid customers deserve the best answers they can get!

So, I did not come into Adjunct Law lecturing with nothing. I come with a distinctive style adapted from the private sector. I come with software subscriptions to make training more accessible and auditable. It's a personal competitive advantage. Slide creation, rapid diagnostics, and grammatical corrections all accompany what I'm paid to do. 

So now I have to perform the reverse operation. What work do I do in the tertiary institution, and what do I bring back into my investment training?

I learned some useful stuff in my transition into teaching in public - Bloom's Taxonomy and various teaching frameworks- which can be too theoretical and not really applicable when trying to convince folks to try dividend stocks in this age dominated by US tech stocks. 

But I think everything is slowly paying off, as I'm now trusted enough to teach fundamental business law to pre-employment students or 17-year-olds.

So, I've started reading about motivating young people, which I can use for my kids.

The essence of motivating 10 to 25-year-olds is to banish the idea that teenagers are lazy and incompetent adults who lack motivation. Instead, we need to see young adults and adolescents as folks trying to jockey for a position within their hierarchy in the search for status and respect. If we can find a way to motivate them to do something to look good in front of their peers, they may be more motivated and effective than adults. The hard part for lecturers is that we must adopt a mentor mindset and set high standards while giving high personal support. Being too strict can backfire, but mollycoddling them will also not work as well. 

How does learning how to motivate teens tell us about motivating adults?

It's hard in this industry. To understand how hard this is, readers need to independently google the marshmallow experiment; the idea is that children who can distract themselves and wait for the second marshmallow tend to do better as adults when they grow up because they know how to delay gratification. The problem for experimenters is that future attempts to replicate the experiment found that folks who can resist temptation came from wealthy families who may not be too keen to eat marshmallows anyway. I got my son into NUS to run the experiment, but they offered him some KitKat, which was not a big deal. If it was a coin token for an arcade game, it would be much harder for my kids to resist.

Anyway, the experiment was done for kids who can wait, maybe 20 minutes, for another marshmallow.

Imagine what happens when you do dividends investing in SGX. 

With PEs between 12 and 13, the long-term real rate of return is about 7+%. Applying the rule of 72, we can calculate that a dividend portfolio can double itself every decade.

So this is the problem with personal finance. 

We are asking folks to give up eating a marshmallow to get two marshmallows in 10 years. And we have to tell them that the second marshmallow is not guaranteed because of market volatility. There may even be an incident when you lose that one marshmallow you've held back for a decade.

The industry has invested in many ways around the marshmallow problem. The most effective way is to cherry-pick specific investment themes that are hot with high recent returns and then maybe convince folks that their second marshmallow is just 2-3 years away. 

How can folks like me flip the script?

One way is for me to get potential clients to consider this. 

If you set aside 12 marshmallows, you can get 1 every year. With 144 marshmallows, it's a marshmallow a month. 

Follow my approach, and you will drown in marshmallows, and you will end up diabetic like me.

Financial Update : Optimism on the horizon, but it's so hard to make things work this year

 Before I begin, here's a link to a video I made with Budget Babe. Please support her YouTube channel.

Today, I will provide a personal rundown of my financial situation, which I think is much more optimistic than my business update, which feels like Sisyphus pushing a rock up the hill. 

For folks who follow my blog, I'm one of those stubborn dividend investors who invest primarily in Singapore. We have suffered for many years as interest rates have started to increase. But even before 2022, SGX was not a dynamic place to park your money. There's even a word, "moribund," to describe it. 

For folks who understand why I'm this stubborn, I am animated by the simple idea that our cyclically adjusted PE ratio remains around 12-13, which gives me a rough estimate of long-term growth, natural growth of over 7%, the bulk of it coming from generous dividends. This 7% does not include inflation. After accounting for inflation, we can expect 10+% per year, but it takes a long time to experience such returns. Markets can experience mean reversion only if interest rates drop over the next few years and MAS starts acting on market reforms. With too many if's and but's, my technique has been a butt of jokes for many years. If it does not come from crypto bros, it will come from Chinese and AI investors. 

The critics will change, and we dividend investors will outlive them all. 

Still, the mistakes I made this year are pretty legion but tolerable:

a) Interest rates play is not as easy as it looks

Last year, I had some success putting a big chunk of my assets into local banks as I had evidence of our performance when interest rates increased. This year, I tried to move some banking assets into REITS in anticipation of lower rates, but this has been a frustration as DBS continued up and my REIT picks went down. I was cautious and only bought REITs with the lowest beta on STI, such as MINT and FCT, but I think I would do better if I sat on my hands.

This is why I hate trading. 

b) China bazooka turned out to be a damp squib

The other dumb move was minimal but very stupid. My trend-following algorithms flagged momentum on China technology stocks, so I took a mere $600 position on CQQQ; it leapt 25% and initially then dropped precipitously. It's actually negative today. I seldom act on ETFs and parked about $500 each on MPACT and CLCT to see whether there is a rebound. I was wrong on all counts, and every position is negative today. The central narrative that China is a communist country that does not respect business acumen and private property remains true today.  But let's see how this plays out over the next year.

I don't think SGX investors will see the end of jokes. If we sink lower, we'd be made fun of by folks who invest in Bursa Malaysia, which had an excellent year of IPOs. 

But what about actual numbers?

Capital gains-wise, my net worth in SGX (This includes my legacy positions and partly ERM student positions, which are up with IRR of about 3%.) dipped slightly, about 9%, over the past 6 years. Still, I've also directed my funds into SRS, CPF, and home mortgage equity to optimise my taxes over this time. My net worth never really experienced a down year - all this while we spent money as a family with large sums spent on tuition. While Singapore stocks dipped or stayed flat, real estate prices spiked, and CPF returns stayed steady with a slight appreciation of interest rates. This is a testament to the common sense of local dividends investors - most of us have homes that appreciate value and locked CPF funds. We've never been one trick ponies.

So 2024 has been shaping out to be a great year; the market portfolio is up six digits, and I doubt home prices will retreat much, even with cooling measures. I still have this crazy ambition to make every family member in my household a millionaire over the next few years. We're close, but I need just one year for the markets and my business to succeed simultaneously. 

If it's not 2025, it'd better be 2026.

Is financial literacy considered cultural capital ?

 

I will see whether I can try to blog twice this week, as this discussion has some merit. I was told that in the mainstream press, someone said that demonstrating financial literacy is a signifier of cultural capital. In some parts of Singapore, it can be quite a "flex." I thought I would delve deeper into this issue because I'm deeply interested in alternative forms of capital, like social or cultural capital.

Looking at the surface, I was unconvinced that financial literacy is cultural capital. It is basic knowledge that every Singaporean should know, but the finance industry has cultivated a team of commissioned salespeople to gatekeep his endeavour. Furthermore, rudimentary financial knowledge may subtly hint that you might be a commissioned financial advisor - someone that polite society should avoid in, especially in shopping malls and MRT stations.

Nevertheless, I was able to do some Googling to find out what constitutes culture. We can then apply some analysis to see whether this is true, tapping into ideas from sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Clauge Passeron.

a) Cultural capital can be embodied.

Sometimes, you can cultivate your cultural capital by joining a profession or being born into privileged circumstances. It's rare for someone outside the legal sector to "come alive to an understanding of" something or view something as "apposite". So, these vocabulary markers might hint at being someone from that sector. 

Workplaces focusing on style rather than substance can be places of cultural warfare. An associate was shamed for loving K-pop and asked to watch Andrew Lloyd Weber instead. 

A taxi driver taught me that he knows clients are poor if they speak in absolute numbers, like a watch costing $14,000, but wealthy clients who drop off at posh locales almost always speak in percentages, like a rate of return of 7%.

Whether financial literacy can constitute cultural capital will depend on whether some part of language use is considered "atas," and I don't think that matter has been resolved yet. No matter what some people say, talking about "safe rate of withdrawal" or "sequence of return risk" is not considered posh yet. I also think that dividends in Singapore have a stronger relationship with hawker food than Michelin fare, judging from the food pictures in the Dividends chat group.

b) Cultural capital can be objectified

This is irrelevant to our discussion, but owning something can be seen as cultural capital. Art objects often play this role because they are superfluous and costly.

Not all branded goods denote cultural capital, but brands like Hermes artificially create scarcity so that their Birkin bags can claim that role. 

I believe books can signify cultural capital, but you really need to understand the genre to make this work for you. An old copy of Security Analysis by Graham and Dodd might say something about you, but only if it is a copy that is worn from use.

c) Cultural capital can be institutionalised

You can also gain cultural capital by getting some form of qualifications. This is the same reason parents want their kids to enter law or medical school; it allows their children to qualify for a different stratum of society.

For this to work, the qualification must be hard to attain. The CFA does this by failing 50% of candidates at every level, but I imagine the full qualification to become an actuary is even harder. 

Exams should not be enough to be really valuable. The best professions have their own exclusive access in the form of guilds and a specific way of communicating with each other. 

After this analysis, I don't think financial literacy is yet ready to be considered part of cultural capital. While being practical, claiming some rudimentary grasp of financial literacy is not something you wave around in a cocktail party. In fact, talking nonstop about crypto on a Tinder date is universally scorned by Singaporean women. 

But cultural capital evolves over time. In the past, quoting Shakespeare might create an impression of cultural sophistication; these days, I think you'll be much cooler if you quote Game of Thrones or Dune.

At the end of the day, discussions like this should not really matter; if a reader wishes to develop and cultivate his cultural capital, he should simply make an effort to read more than his or her peers.

Read to make yourself more knowledgeable.

Read to be able to handle a magazine like the Economist. 

The cultural capital will come with more literacy.

What am I struggling with in my business right now?

 

As I approach turning 50, I will reflect on some of the challenges I have been struggling with. I'd like to start with the most complicated area of my life, so I'll discuss the earned income component of my life.

My earned income component has been the least successful area in my life. That also sucks up most of my life energy because I've always felt that it's an essential area of struggle. After all, it answers this question: 

Post-FIRE, what are the possible career moves to enjoy a good income and quality of life? 

Sadly, I don't have a better answer than anyone else after a decade, but I'm here to show everyone my working.

a) My training business

I'll forever be grateful to Dr Wealth because I found an alternative to the back-breaking legal career I initially planned after my JD. The first three years as a trainer brought me 2x my salary in my previous job and paid off my school fees in 6 months, confirming that this is a viable career. It also allowed me to develop skills I could not acquire in my earlier career. A seven-digit revenue for ERM, followed by an appearance on Money Mind, can't hurt my resume. 

Like all businesses, that golden era appears to be over as interest rates begin to go up, but I enjoy the work of investment training a lot. It has even made me a much better investor now. Once I started coding my investment advisors and using AI to generate analyst reports, I could tolerate the work even as a sideline that generated a small allowance. 

Nevertheless, my training business will be in an existential crisis in 2025. I will either need to make adjustments and change the price point of the courses, or the business may need more time to justify the time I spend on it. 

b) My role as an adjunct lecturer in a tertiary institution

To preserve my training job and to earn a more stable income, I spent the year taking on an adjunct lecturer role in a tertiary institution teaching adults Corporate Law and Legal Technology. The value of doing this is exposing myself to life with a more conventional role with the skillsets I developed at Dr Wealth.

The initial plan was to introduce a more stable income to my fluctuating revenues without giving up my business. I would also need a "barbell" strategy in my earned income strategy: a volatile and high-earning job and a stale one that even pays a bit of CPF. 

But this job has its own set of challenges. Contract renewals are done in drips and drabs, so you cannot project your income with certainty a semester moving forward. I was initially unhappy that I was only retained for one subject next semester, but as more contracts arrived, I was too happy to complain about being overbooked. 

Payment platforms can be improved, and you often wait an additional month to be paid. 

Nevertheless, after a year of struggle, during which unhappy and sometimes entitled adult students often yelled at me, I can now sell more weekly lecture hours. 

The system is not designed as a leading source of income, but it's okay if you have a day job and plenty of passive income. 

Is a portfolio career easy compared to a conventional one?

There have been moments this year when I wanted to quit everything and start looking for a conventional job ( likely in AI ) because there were moments when I was just doing administrative unpaid work just to keep this portfolio career machine running. 

The numbers need to look better as well. I'm averaging $4k+ when my basic family expenses are close to $6k a month, so some digging into my dividend income was necessary in 2024. But this is easily the worst year of the decade, and I've already rebounded from 2023. 

But from another perspective, this is a massive win because many post-FIRE folks complain about needing a real career identity, which we are primarily conditioned to do in Singapore. When people ask me what I do, I tell them I teach investing classes over the weekends, but I'm also a law lecturer at a local institution. Afternoon swims, fooling around with my kids, and meeting folks for coffee when they have a work break doesn't hurt. 

If I sound very theoretical right now, I'd like the more savvy readers to recall Coarse's theorem about the firm in Economics. Firms are hierarchical structures that prefer to contract work that can be well-defined to someone else who can do the job better. 

My Dr Wealth work is something society contracts out to me to perform. I'm subject to the same business forces and cyclicality as every other entrepreneur. My work with a public institution puts me in a complicated bureaucracy, where a bulk of my work is administrative in nature, just to get the system working. 

There may be no way out if you want a portfolio career. 

You must have a passive income flow, actually a large one, to avoid going crazy.

Insights from my volunteering work at Raffles Institution in 2024

 

While I can still give pro bono financial seminars, I would do my best to present to any secondary school willing to have me. Even so, only Raffles Institution has a systematised programme to invite speakers from around the country to talk about special topics like Finance as part of their Gap Semester programme, which targets 16-year-olds exempted from doing the O levels by being ultra-smart. Picking someone to speak in another secondary would require a lot of red tape, and perhaps my slides, which do have controversial material, would not pass the scrutiny of the more orthodox educator.

However, Raffles Institution thinks that my material is acceptable for their students, so this is the fourth time I'm conducting "Millionaires of a Better Age." In 2024, I was invited twice due to the positive feedback from the students themselves. 

This time, I have to be careful as some folks managed to find my blog, so teenagers will be reading my posts these days. 

Firstly, I tried using the very crude MBTI survey tool I built myself for my investment courses and found that the smartest teenage boys tend to be INTJs/INTPs. They are incredibly logical, and some may not be as conscientious as the RI brand name would imply.  

Next, I wish to address something strange that happens when I openly talk about volunteering in RI. I get brickbats from social media, implying that I am helping the rich get richer. I agree—teaching dividend investing will always give the folks with more investible capital an advantage. But it is unfair to talk about this when I volunteer in RI because I've been asking around to help even in my own secondary school. 

There's no system for me to do a similar programme elsewhere because O level preparations are more important.

I have, in RI's defence, conducted a survey on pocket money they receive. 

The majority get about $100-$200 monthly, so parents can decide on pocket money based on this data. Do note that there will be outliers. I detected two whales who get over $500 monthly, but about 4 have very little pocket money. 

The savings data is also quite interesting.

Except for the same two whales (maybe they were from ACS Primary), most teenagers find it hard to save money.

Finally, folks must remember why presenting ideas to intelligent teenagers can be rewarding. Some specific points in this latest encounter left a deep impression on me.

a) When I entered the classroom, the kids updated each other that Iswaran had been sentenced to 12 months. I got the news from them because they actively monitored it throughout the day, whereas I wondered why the bubble tea in the school canteen was so expensive at $4! They must be trained well to be intrinsically motivated to follow current affairs. At their age, I'm more interested in who the current WWF Heavyweight Champion was. ( Those days, it was always Hulk Hogan or The Ultimate Warrior. )

b) The first really great question was whether knowing some kind of URA  15-year master plan can lead to the possibility of buying houses that increase in value over time. I was stunned because even I didn't follow the master plan when I bought my EC. To answer the question, I explained that knowing public information may not lead to outsized gains because other people see the information as well, which I had to explain second and third-order thinking to the audience.

c) The second impressive question was whether introducing Central Bank Digital Currencies or CBDCs would be a bullish or bearish indicator of cryptocurrencies. It was not designed to impress because students thought about both scenarios in painful detail. I told him I didn't know the answer, but I am more inclined to agree with his argument that transparency in digital currencies will drive grey and criminal use cases to employ existing crypto or Monero even more fervently. 

I have graduated with 700+ students in my ERM class, and my students include PhDs in finance, board directors, and MAS regulators. I can't get the high-level Q & A participation like what I get from these 16-year-olds. 

At this juncture, just to entertain readers, let me share the stupidest question I ever got from someone 2-3 years older than the RI youths who study in a tertiary institution I will not name on this blog. The question was," You are a millionaire, but I want to make my first million earlier than you. Can you teach me how to do this?" I was stunned like a vegetable for a moment at how dumb this was; I could only mutter, "Maybe you can do some sales job because of the unlimited upside." Even today, I pray that the person who asked me this was a troll, not an idiot. 

I can't, honestly, coach someone on something I cannot do myself.

This gives readers an idea of why I always make some room in my schedule when RI contacts me. 

But that should not stop other schools. I've also been dying to do a pocket money survey on ACS and Chinese High.  

Three guaranteed ways to make people hate your content in personal finance.

 

In the age of Social Media, there is no such thing as bad publicity. 

If you say something positive, unless you are as cute as Moo Deng, the pygmy hippo, you will not likely get much traction or eyeballs. Love and positivity are not monetizable, but hate is a different matter altogether. If you write something that can make people hate you, you might get somewhere in the race to turn eyeballs into revenue.

Based on what I know, there are three consistent ways to make people hate you in the personal finance space:

a) Claim to have $100,000 before you are 30

Getting $100,000 before age 30 is like a coming-of-age ceremony for financial influencers. For folks of my generation, this is not an easy target to reach; you need a reasonably solid job as a professional or a salesperson to have a decent shot at meeting this target. Over the years, thanks to inflation and higher starting salaries, $100,000 before 30 has become more accessible.

But the hate has not changed over the years. I got a fair bit of attention, which did quite well for book sales in 2005 and even garnered 100+ pages of discussion on YPAP BBS and EDMW forums if I recall correctly. However, the vitriol against female influencers was much higher than what I experienced with Budget Babe and MissFITFI.

I suppose commenters are more concerned by why they CAN'T get $100,000 by age 30 and seem to have some kind of defensive mechanism when faced with women who can do it. It's like gatekeepers in the computer gaming space - they are primarily incompetent male gamers.

b) Claim to be retired early

The most ridiculous public censure against someone who claims to be early retired was directed at Rebecca Lim, the TCS 8 actress, when she did an advertising campaign with NTUC Income. 

Once your audience is fed up with hearing about your $100,000 net worth, your next move is to claim that you have retired early. This attracts much more vitriol, as many fellow citizens feel stressed and imprisoned by their day jobs. They last want to know someone who can retire early in Singapore. 

I actually see a system of defences to deal with folks who claim to be retired early. The first is to pick on your status as a single person or someone married without kids. Reminding financial influencers that they are single makes people feel better about themselves. Investment Moats and AK71 seem to be criticised quite a bit for this.

Another approach is to examine retirement status with a fine-tooth comb. You may not be considered fully retired if you are taking your foot off the accelerator in your intense professional job. Ashish Kumar still does some debate coaching on the side, and I receive revenue as a trainer and lecturer—work that I enjoy.

Finally, people will inquire about your investment strategy. Most will only be satisfied if you can show that you can live entirely on your passive income. If you have a mix of ETFs, you need to have a safe withdrawal rate to convince people how robust your plan is.

Claiming retirement in your 50s does not receive as much brick-bats. I just want to take this opportunity to congratulate CoryLogics for retiring recently at 54. 

c) Insult the national religion of Dividends Investing

Dividend investors are having a great time right now as interest rates are down again. The dividends chat groups are full of fabulous food pictures posted by folks celebrating their dividend payouts. In many ways, Dividend investing is like religion in Singapore. We have rituals like a thanksgiving through food posting on Telegram, a religious doctrine on sustainable free cash flows, and a congregation of worshippers in dividend-paying company AGMs. And dividends are a miracle of Singapore capitalism - money appearing in your bank account without you lifting a finger tax-free.

Therefore, it is perfectly logical to attract eyeballs by insulting people's religion. Just say that dividend investing is suboptimal or irrelevant. Kelvin Learns Investing is the latest guy to do this (link), which has created quite a lot of unease in the dividends chatgroups. 

I just reviewed the video and found that it actually motivates dividend investing! 

His arguments against dividends are weak and a rehash of Modigliani and Miller, which many of us know. He also cherry-picks examples to make his case and rarely assesses dividends as a factor in factor studies. His arguments become very persuasive when discussing the advantages of dividend investing, which was littered throughout the video. I hope everyone will not be too hard on Kelvin, as he needs eyeballs to make money and does not disapprove of dividends all that much.

My views on dividend investing obviously clash with many others, but you can read about them here. 

Finally, I don't include blogs designed by financial advisors to get angry eyeballs in my discussion. That's so good; it should be a business model in an MBA textbook. The blog I miss the most is Money Maverick. Since he no longer has an FA license, it's not as maverick as before. 

Financial influencers who want eyeballs should stick to my three-stage formula for getting attention on this social media space. 

What kind of mumbo jumbo is Financial Independence, Retire Meaningfully ?

 

What is particularly heartwarming for dividend investors who own banking stocks is that they have surged as interest rates decline. This surge represents meaningful attempts to offset lower net interest margins with wealth management fees. As an investor in all three banks, I believe in this thesis, but I maintain that investing in REITs for the next year or so is better. Based on my backtests, rising interest rates favour banks, and lowering interest rates favour REITs. 

I can't help but detect attempts by banks to move very gingerly into FIRE territory recently, but it seems that positioning a banking product as an aid to FIRE is a tough sell, given how stingy the movement is when it comes to investment expenses. 

But lately, I disagree with the idea that FIRE can be supplanted with FIRM - the Financial independence, retire meaningfully movement. As a bank stock investor, it is puzzling to me how this can meaningfully raise wealth management fees. 

It also is a veiled attack on our movement that warrants a firm response. 

Before I begin, let me understand how FIRM works, given that no formal definition exists. The idea is that leaving the workforce early can lead to loneliness and even early death. Therefore, it is better to take a more conventional approach and save about 10% of your income to reach retirement later. While not explicitly stated, the person is invited to use a financial institution to do the strategic allocation for you so that you can focus on your day job and hobbies.

Here are my points for readers contemplating FIRM, an approach endorsed by financial institutions, versus FIRE, a grassroots movement of many who own financial institutions.

a) Does FIRM imply that FIRE aspirants live a life devoid of meaning?

As the incoming DBS CEO has a prestigious Oxford PPE degree, she might know what a false dichotomy is. The question is whether, if I live on 10% of my income, my life is somehow less meaningful than that of someone who lives on 90% of their income. Is saving inversely tied to meaning?

Over the years, there have been FIRE folks who have adopted a Stoic philosophy of life. They might be environmentally conscious and find that this extreme form of frugality gels with their outlook on life. 

Asceticism can be a life a lot more meaningful than conspicuous consumption.  

Some early retirees can be way more philosophical than many bankers; I can name Ashish Kumar as a gentleman who has developed his own approach to early retirement, which is a little more sophisticated than most relationship managers I know.

b) The dangers of conventional and late retirement cannot be underestimated.

I recently lost two friends, both aged 49. One was overworked as he was a warrior at the frontline of the COVID-19 battle. I felt that his aggressive cancer diagnosis came from the toxic and political workplace he worked in. He was manipulated to confront his incompetent supervisor, and in revenge, his job scope grade was quietly shrunk without his knowledge. The second was an unemployed IT professional who took his life about 2 months into his new job. He was despondent and withdrawn after losing his previous job. It was difficult for me to attend two wakes in a single week. 

As my friends died, there was simply no justice for what they endured at work. 

I've done a lot of work at this level; if we track PMET salary data, we can expect a 5% increment when we start work until age 45 when it mysteriously tapers off. This is also the age when Gen X faced the largest amount of ageism; if we take the risk of ageism and retrenchment seriously, we must confine the buildup of our dividends portfolio to be complete before entering this age of chaos. If we shuffle our feet and start planning late at age 35, then at $2000 monthly savings compounded to $500,000 within a decade, we will need an impossible 14.1% return to meet our deadline. 

Planning for retirement is not mathematically feasible for most Singaporeans, given what's waiting for us in the workplace in our 40s. 

I was a pioneer of the FIRE movement because I started work around the time of the Dotcom crash, and I saw the outsourcing wave affecting a lot of senior engineers of my generation. Now, AI is expected to replace some of the headcounts. 

c) Financial institutions may not dare to talk about specific performance that can enable retirement to actually happen

While there is much sturm and drang about how meaningless our lives are, we are not getting the specifics. We need to get under the bonnet and know how our investments behave.

• How transparent are our investment fees when we buy a product? Can we find the full amount on a website, including trailer fees? 
• What are the standard deviation and Sharpe ratios accompanying the latest results for these funds?
• Given our risk appetite, based on Merton's Share, what is our allocation for each asset class?
• Can a Monte Carlo simulation show us the probability of success of our retirement plan?

If financial institutions could meaningfully discuss numbers and probability, we would have a better idea of which model suits us better. 

So, what can you do as a reader?

Wealth management marketing will evolve as interest rates drop. If you see that FIRM will occupy the minds of many who read about it, the solution is simply buying local bank stock. 

For example, if DBS can credibly raise the dividends from 54cts to 60cts a quarter, there's still room for a 6%-paying blue chip. As it has endorsed a message that challenges the existential meaning in my life, I should demand 60cts in 2025, right?

In fact, use your CDP, and you can attend an AGM every year—and you may yet fight for a sumptuous buffet spread!

No management fees, no capital gains or dividends taxes. 

Maybe in next year's Seedly festival, I get to debate this topic live in front of everyone!

If you're not investing, it's fine. 

Don't let a financial professional tell you whether your life has any meaning. This is something you can figure out yourself. 

Letter to Batch 35 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 35,

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

The markets have finally become bullish after a long wait since March 2022, and the community portfolio has begun to experience a remarkable recovery. I will not try to be too enthusiastic and rejoice too much; instead, I will let the market speak for itself. Still, we have repeatedly shown that this recovery is just the beginning and that there is plenty of equity risk premium for Singapore investors.

It should also be noted that this batch of students' portfolios is 7.28%. As the batch size is small, we have created a very focused portfolio consisting of 12 stocks. We have built a barbell-like structure that combines low-volatility investments with higher-risk instruments that produce double-digit yields.

This course has reached another milestone. Students are given practice sessions on using large language models to generate analyst reports. The community will receive samples of reports on BRC Asia and Kimly. The final investment decision incorporates analysis from both ChatGPT and brokerage houses.   

These automated investment reports still need to be improved further, but ERM is now poised to benefit from future improvements in artificial intelligence. I can confidently say that we are no longer tied to analyst reports from brokerage houses and can now generate reports on local stocks that are not covered by investment analysts.

Lastly, I hope Batch 35 will participate actively in the FB group. I look forward to seeing you at the following community seminar, which is slated for Q4 2024, having not done one for so long as we have been preparing to use LLMs in this programme.

Hope to see you then!

 

Christopher Ng Wai Chung