End of one month of not reading tech or business titles

As I spent the greater part of the year immersed in technology and finance books, I would now go through December intensely, reading things I would not usually read for my work. And the experience is actually more negative than I expected, even though I would enjoy a few fantasy novels. Still, then I would veer into the unknown, and last year I found this book, The Singapore Grip, by J. G. Farrell, really dull.

So this year, I will detail three books I did not enjoy, but I suspect some readers of my blog might find them worth reading.

1) I'm not lazy, I'm in energy-saving mode by Dancing Snail

This book's success is probably based on a single idea. Introverts read, but introverts are not as valued in the real world as extroverts. So let's make introverts feel good about themselves.

I finished this book in one day because it's mostly pictures and someone sharing inane thoughts. South Koreans are so stressed that a particular genre of cosy self-help is emerging to save some stressed workers from the toxic cultures they are stuck in. 

Authors in Korea can make a lot of money by simply telling everyone it's okay to be like that.

Maybe the working title of my next book should be My PSLE grades are shit, but I also want to eat  Chwee Kueh.

2) To the Moon by Jang Ryu Jin

Reading this book actually angered me. 

When I read a fictional story about cryptocurrency, I expect it to have a pretty shitty ending, with the crypto crashing and dreams and friendships getting dashed. It would be a moral lesson for the reader.

So imagine my shock that the book actually has a good ending with a plausible reason to exit ETH at its peak, and everyone lives happily ever after that.

I was initially afraid this would be used as marketing collateral for the next wave of shitcoin crypto schemes, but I realise that crypto bros and incels might be too dumb to read a work of fiction to understand its value.

Still, if you happen to be a deluded crypto bro who loves talking up shitcoins in your Tinder dates, this book is for you. 

3) The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa

I bought this book because I judged a book by its cover - and I paid the price for my folly. 

The edition with autumn leaves on its cover looks good on the shelf, except that nothing of note actually happens in the story on the Hankyu Line. 

Some unpleasant people met some less unpleasant people on a train, then conversations happened, some wisdom was shared, and some relationships shifted as a result. 

(You do realise that I enjoyed Warhammer 40k fiction, and Inquisitor Eisenhorn can lose an arm in the prologue of a novel and would eventually bind a daemon to his loyal friend's corpse, why the f**k do I care about annoying tai-tais reserving seats on a train?)

But I can imagine Western audiences lapping this up as its chapters are named after the stations on the line, with some flavourful local references, so it doubles up as a travel guide as well.

A local English Literature major can replicate the success of the book. Just take an MRT from Jurong East to Marina Bay, and at every station, something random but funny happens, like an uncle starts gooning an OL between City Hall and Raffles City and gets blanket-partied by a section of NS men.

4) So what's a good read?

Ok, some readers might get upset with me that I'm only sharing my worst reads this holiday, so what book of fiction should I recommend to a Singaporean reader?

It's not wise to judge a book by its cover. 

But I can judge a book by the hefty advance, and the author gets to write a work of fiction.

My favourite local book this year is The Original Daughter by Jemima Wei.

Just buy and read this for 2026. If you are very giam then wait for the Culture Pass to be enabled for local books.

See you tomorrow night for my article on 2026!

Personal update as I hit my 51st birthday

 

I get three chances to plan for any upcoming year. First round on Christmas Day, which is my birthday. Second round in the New Year, a week later. And a final round, which is quite far away in 2026, on Feb 17 for the Chinese New Year.

But as of late, whatever I have planned for 2026 is already in progress. I'm definitely winding down all my initiatives as I'm already around the 2/3rd mark of my life. I currently see three medical specialists - one for my diabetes, which I forcefully transitioned into insulin jabs to reduce my dependence on my drug cocktail, one for thyroid eye disease and now I have physio sessions to deal with my frozen shoulder.

a) Financial Markets

This is a rare year where folks who invested locally won big. I could not see it coming at all. Even though MAS had that EQDP planned, no one foresaw that Liberation Day would eventually push funds out of US bond markets to the rest of the world, with Singapore a favoured haven for its stability and strong currency. Valuations are still reasonable, and next year would not be as solid as 2025, so there's some more upside to go, especially for REITs. 

I'm one of the few folks who actually agree with DBS's forecast that the STI will reach 10,000 by 2040. I've been a believer even during the years when dividend investing on the Super Terrible Index was considered a "dangerous" thing to do. Now my family has reached a million per capita, thanks to this stubbornness, without a single person holding a "real job". 

I tell people that dividend investing in Singapore is a broken clock, but a broken clock can still be right twice a day, and you only need to be right once to get rich.

At around 5,160, I will take some steps to consolidate my assets. 

b) Work initiatives

Other than lucking out in financial markets, work has not been great, with lecturing gigs being sporadic and unreliable. Business is also bad in the training field. I expect 2026 to be the worst year ever. Still, I see myself updating course materials to sharpen my proficiency as an investor, incorporating LLMs into them and refining prompts to improve investment results.

In this area, I'm glad I actually did what I wanted to last Christmas: get the ACLP with my Skillsfutures credits.

The big deal in 2025 is that, as my gigs start to dwindle, I was able to create a fully monetised YouTube channel, opening another career possibility as a YouTuber. I'm cautious about advancing this area as I want to work on a more measured pace and build helpful videos once a week, but I can capture 1,000 views in a week. I doubt the investment of time would pay off without sponsors, but I am not willing to work with financial institutions that can give me a unique voice in this space.

c) Learning Goals

I'm not going to make big moves until I get the metaphysical readings right for the Year of the Fire Horse, which augurs a fairly terrible year for me. Right now, I'm enjoying singing lessons and taking them quite seriously. My school is fun, and students will be performing in April 2026, so I want to participate in my first-ever singing concert.

If gigs dry up in 2026, I may pursue a serious course and see whether I can get mid-career support from the government, but this is limited to 2 years for all Singaporeans, and I might want to save it for a rainy day.

d) Hobbies 

With singing and content creation, readers of the blog will notice that I've been contemplating quitting D&D for a while. You need to empty the cup before you can fill it with something else. But I don't think that it's time to make such a decision yet - it would be made if my kids have no interest in my hobbies. 

In fact, I spent $400 getting the deluxe versions of all three rulebooks and planned to game this holiday season. If the year of the Fire Horse is going to be that bad for me, I need more avenues to destress.

I would talk more about the year ahead next week. 

Useful instagram channels for you to enjoy this holiday season

As we head towards Christmas, I wanted to share a few Instagram channels I follow that can sharpen our investment savvy over time. I do not zoom into financial channels because I prefer to read to further develop my expertise. 

Hence, the channels I love focus on geographical regions I'm interested in. 

a) Tim Tiah for insights on Malaysia

Timtiah gives a more accurate view of the Malaysian economy than reading newspapers like The Star or The New Straits Times, which spend too much time on politics. Tim's reporting is very even-handed and paints a relatively optimistic picture of Malaysia. Over time, I suspect Tim's strength lies in his focus on the economy rather than on politics, so Singaporean fans won't be frightened off by UMNO's racial politics.

You can follow Tim here.

https://www.instagram.com/timtiah/ 

b) Yuan Pu Huang for insights on China

This space is actually getting crowded. Yuan is an interesting channel as he is a scholar who has made it his personal mission to help the Western world understand China a little more. China is too big to analyse as a whole, with Chengdu being a chill place and Shenzhen being way faster than cities like New York, so Yuan is a valuable guide to help us better understand China.

Like all media from Greater China, we have to absorb both the negative press from the West, such as The Economist magazine, and, while I found Yuan quite balanced six months ago, he has recently become more critical of the West and more defensive about China. 

Nevertheless, it's not easy to find balanced reporting, and we need to read books by Dan Wang and Hu Anyan to better understand China. This is a lifelong educational process.

Whether you like it or not, China will become more critical to the next generation. 

https://www.instagram.com/yuanunpackschina/

c) Nicholas Wu for insights on Indonesia

This channel is a guilty pleasure for me because Nicholas Wu is a seasoned businessman who has experienced a lot in Indonesia, and it's where he voices his frustrations about what it's like to be a Singaporean there. 

Singaporeans who want to build their credentials but prefer to do it in Hard or Inferno mode may want to try Indonesia instead of the unusual places like China or the US. It's videos like this that make me grateful for being Singaporean. 

https://www.instagram.com/paknicaman/

Why do I like channels like this?

I suspect it's probably a realisation that I've spent most of my career in Singapore and feel like a frog in the well. In hindsight, the most successful Gen X careers involve a long stint overseas.

Would I have been able to generate the same amount of wealth and cruise after age 39 if I had built an engineering career elsewhere? I can speculate. Fortunately for me, I no longer have a need to explore that.

But I want this option for my kids in the future. 

Made a rookie mistake contributing into Medisave this year.

 

I just came back from a 3-day holiday in Bintan and wanted to talk about it, because reading this might help someone else avoid the same mistake I made.

Earlier this year, my mum got hospitalised, and the hospital debited $12,000 from my Medisave account. As I wanted to lower my tax liability, I took dividend payouts to reimburse my Medisave, since all 5 members relied on it, as I have no ISP. 

So that was my first mistake: the maximum claimable tax deductible is capped at $8,000, at least based on what Havend's CPF guide said. The excess $4,000 does not do squat for my taxes.

I realised my second mistake two weeks ago when the CPF board wrote to me to say that I still need to make about $4k+ contributions to my CPF-MA from my freelance work in 2024. 

That was my second mistake because I thought my $12k contribution would perform double duty and offset the $4k owed from income earned in 2024. I found out the hard way that it was not the case. 

So I spent the day at the CPF Board to ask around if there's anything I can do to avoid the $4k contribution. The staff there cannot do anything for me, so they asked me to submit an appeal online.

But rules are rules, and I did not read the fine print. Even if the CPF Board can bend the rules because I am acting as a responsible member throughout the year, I'm not sure how many hoops I need to jump through to finally get the $4k waived.

In the end, what made me give up on pursuing this case was hearing a sad story about someone who got scammed. I imagine my funds safely tucked in my CPF-MA, and the only way I can get "scammed" is a policy change when every Singaporean gets scammed together.  

 

I went beyond just paying what I owed to my CPF-MA; I secured my mortgage for the upcoming year and covered family expenses. The damage to the liquid funds was profound, and I still need to have enough funds through January 2026 and the Chinese New Year, which is a dry dividends period.

Then I had an idea.

I have a toy leverage account with IBKR that I use to teach leveraged investing to my students. It's been collecting my training fees for a while, and I've not touched the dividends for aeons, as it was just there to offset the amounts owed to the broker. 

Looking at the interest rate, I realised that it has fallen so low that it is around 3.3-3.4%, lower than CPF-MA, and I am not counting the meagre tax benefits I get from my contribution. 

So I withdrew a small amount of SGD to cover my cash needs through January and February.

Right now, my leverage ratio is conservative at x1.6, invested in a dividend account that offsets margin account fees. 

But it's funny that I'm borrowing money to contribute to my Medisave. 

So am I a guru or a goondu?

Anyway, the moral of the story is, if you want to top up your Medisave, cap it at $8,000; there's always next year. 

Letter to Batch 40 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 40,

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

We begin Batch 40 with substantial changes to the way we conduct this course – 40% of the course has been overhauled.

The most significant change is the introduction of the Starter Portfolio, a simple 3-stock portfolio designed for beginners and stable. It can provide a reasonable 5% dividend right off the bat while being more robust to interest rate changes. This makes investing a whole lot easier and less intimidating than portfolios built for previous batches.

We also stopped segregating our blue-chip equities exercises from the REIT exercises, combining the STI and SG Next 50 stocks into one category for three levels of factor back-testing. In this exercise, we saw the importance of free cash flow yields and dividend growth in assessing how good a stock counter is.

Also, we experimented with ditching analyst reports in favour of a series of LLM prompts to deep-dive into a particular stock counter. We first have the LLM assess the stock price purely from financial statements, then compare it with analyst reports available online. We concluded that analysts' reports are overly optimistic compared to analyses based solely on reported business results.

Our outcome is a 16-stock portfolio designed to yield about 6.2%, which I am proud to put my money where my mouth is.

As AI developments further disrupt investment training, expect changes to how we conduct our course.

Lastly, Batch 40 will participate actively in the FB group.

Hope to see you then!

 

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

On rage quitting and understanding when to let go.

 

I've been hearing a lot of stories about rage-quitting in my loose gamer networks. Folks, my generation just rage-quits a game halfway through, which is actually really disrespectful to the other players on the board. But at a broader level, Gen X is really starting to get into the habit of quitting, whether it's relationships, underperforming investments, jobs, or just hobbies.

Quitting something is a two-sided affair. People get cranky when they get old. Sometimes the other party is indeed an asshole, but other times, it's the quitter who no longer has the emotional reserves to tolerate shit in their life. For folks in my generation, quitting can only increase, as sometimes we just want more peace and don't want to deal with others' eccentricities. 

We can build a logical framework to determine if it is tied to quitting something.

The first question to ask is straightforward: Does life get better when we subtract something from our lives? Test this hypothesis, take the matter out or cut the person off and see if life really gets better; if so, it passes the first test.

The second question is whether other people have quit for the same reasons, or if we can find a way to describe the mischief.  This is something I learned from Gen Z: while it is convenient to quit something, there should also be room to exercise mercy, because you can work on yourself to cope better. 

The book Red Flag/Green Flag by Dr Ali Fenwick is instrumental because Gen X lacks the vocabulary to label toxic behaviour. 

What kind of relationship is a situationship? Why is such and such a behaviour intolerable? Is it because someone is trying to undermine you by amplifying your insecurities? Some behaviours look like innocent green flags to Gen X but are red flags to Gen Z, and we stupidly tolerate them while the younger person will run away!

If the toxic behaviour can be categorised and labelled, then there is at least a precedent for other people deciding to end a relationship. So it passes the second step.

The two-step test is a firmer guide than just flagrantly rage-quitting, but to be fair, some folks really have been tolerating substandard behaviour for too long, and I know some of them, and I quietly wish them all the best.

So lately, I've been asking myself this question: 

Should I quit my D&D that I have been playing for 40+ years?

Amazingly, quitting D&D passes the first test!

I would save on the amount I spend on D&D books, and I already have a plethora of hobbies to take their place, as I'm now a content creator, trainer, and actually in singing classes. I can move into wargames, or even play CCGs again, as my kids are into trading cards. My courses are like a game run as a DM anyway. From a utility perspective, D&D no longer offers me a lot other than my obsession with running through combat mechanics in my head and dreaming up doing tons of damage to imaginary monsters, which I can apply to programming trading algorithms anyway and make lots of real money.

It's the second test that I am ambivalent about.

Yes, there is precedent for D&D going woke, and people are quitting because of the change in art direction. It's also not returning to normality, unlike the game and movie industries, where wokeness is now exacting a heavy financial penalty on the companies involved. D&D has, in fact, doubled down, and the demographic has become more diverse. But the wokeness does not affect or offend me, as I can tolerate the player base I play with if I pick older gamers or even fellow financial influencers. 

So the second test fails, but writing this article took a lot of effort, as D&D has been a part of my personal identity for almost my entire life. I suspect my kids will be a significant factor - if they are not interested in my hobby, I will have to eventually let go so they don't have to dispose of it themselves. 

Hopefully, before the year ends, I either get to play or DM the 2024 ruleset a few times with some pals.  

I've been away from the game for a while now, but I'm enjoying the reads and keeping some networking ties with the gaming community.

Financial Nihilism is the evil we have to name

As we reach December, I will be slowing down to conduct my course next week and to do some reading this holiday month. 

December is now becoming a nice break because my reading hobby is intense for the rest of the year, focusing on serious finance topics. Giving myself a month to catch up on fiction is more utilitarian than practical. 

I'm currently two-thirds of the way to Eisenhorn Omnibus. The gateway novel to the Warhammer 40,000 universe. You can access the link here.

Immediately after this, I will start Han Bo Reum's Every Day I Read. I buy some fiction from bookstores every now and then, since someone needs to sustain these cultural spaces in Singapore, right?

As for videos, I only created one video before the holiday began.

I've recently learnt of this term "financial nihilism". In societies like the UK, young people who are locked out of the housing market have given up on financially responsible behaviour and taken on ridiculous risks, like buying altcoins. In Singapore, we don't have a real estate problem because HDB keeps housing affordable. Still, the financial nihilists are usually folks who didn't get the right paper qualifications to do well here, so they get into things like altcoins, NFTs, drop-shipping and even day trading for a living.

The video that discusses this phenomenon will be out tomorrow afternoon:

With no new videos out for the next two weeks, I will be updating this blog more often. In a week, I will be sharing some pretty dramatic changes to my work in investment training if the STI continues to rise.