Why Munger's First $100,000 Still Holds for an Ordinary Singaporean — and How to Get There on the SGX

A note on the byline: This piece was written by a manifestation of my Second Brain — a local Qdrant vector database indexed over my notes, books, SIAS lecture decks, YouTube skim files, and the full SGX Research Library I maintain. Claude queried that index for everything it knew about Munger's $100,000 idea, the "$100,000 Challenge" framework from Growing Your Tree of Prosperity, my Six Workhorses model for an SGX portfolio, and the most recent dividend snapshots on Singapore banks, REITs, and business trusts. The numbers and structure are mine; the assembly is Claude's. I'm publishing it because it's a clean restatement of what I've been teaching for twenty years.

The Munger line that won't go away

Charlie Munger said it on a recording that has circulated for decades:

"The first $100,000 is a bitch, but you gotta do it. I don't care what you have to do — if it means walking everywhere and not eating anything that wasn't purchased with a coupon, find a way to get your hands on $100,000. After that, you can ease off the gas a little bit."

Munger was making a mathematical observation. At a 7% real return, a $100,000 portfolio adds roughly $7,000 a year to itself before you save a dollar. A $10,000 portfolio adds $700. The gap between those two numbers is what financial momentum feels like — and it is why getting to the first hundred is disproportionately important. Every year you delay crossing the threshold is a year you are paddling instead of sailing.

This is the exact reason I built my first book, Growing Your Tree of Prosperity, around what I called the $100,000 Challenge. The metaphor of growing a tree is not a poetic decoration. It is the literal observation that the root system must reach a certain depth before the canopy begins to expand on its own. In Singapore, with our specific tax structure, mandatory CPF savings, and SGX-listed dividend stocks, the path to that root depth is unusually well marked. Most ordinary working people simply don't know it exists.

Why the SGX is, weirdly, the perfect tool for this

People who chase the S&P 500 sometimes look down at the Straits Times Index as a sleepy, financials-heavy market. They are not wrong about the composition. But that composition is exactly what makes the SGX an effective machine for hitting Munger's threshold. The SGX is dominated by:

• Three globally rated banks (DBS, OCBC, UOB)
• A deep bench of S-REITs, statutorily required to distribute at least 90% of taxable income
• Business trusts owning regulated infrastructure (NetLink NBN, Keppel Infrastructure Trust)
• A handful of conglomerates and GLCs with long dividend histories

Dividends from Singapore-incorporated companies are received tax-free in your hands. The cash that hits your CDP-linked bank account is yours. That is a structural advantage that compounds more than most retail investors realise, particularly during the accumulation years, when every dollar of dividends can be reinvested without slippage.

The practical playbook, in the order I'd actually do it

1. Salary truncation before stock-picking

In the book, I call this salary truncation — fix your lifestyle expenses at a level well below your gross income and route the entire surplus into investments before you see it. This is the same idea the FIRE community now packages as "pay yourself first," but I think the word "truncation" is more honest about what it requires: you cap the top of your spending, you do not negotiate the cap upward when you get a raise, and you treat the gap as non-discretionary.

For a fresh graduate earning S$4,000 a month, truncating lifestyle at S$2,200 leaves S$1,800 a month before CPF deductions. That alone, invested over five years at a 5–6% blended yield with reinvested dividends, plants the first S$100,000 before you turn 30. The arithmetic is unforgiving in both directions — saving rate, not stock selection, is the dominant variable from $0 to $50k.

2. Use CPF and SRS as the floor

CPF Ordinary Account interest at 2.5% and Special Account interest at 4% are not portfolio assets you can spend; they form the platform underneath everything else. Topping up SA early in your career converts taxable income into a 4% risk-free compounder. SRS contributions reduce taxable income at your marginal rate — for someone earning $80k, every dollar of SRS contribution effectively earns you 11.5% back before you've invested it. Use SRS to buy SGX-listed counters, and you've now stacked a tax shelter on top of the tax-free dividend treatment.

3. Open a real brokerage account

A CDP-linked brokerage (Tiger, Moomoo, Webull, Interactive Brokers, the bank brokerages — pick one with low commissions and clean reporting). Brokerage choice is a low-stakes decision. The high-stakes decision is whether to open the account this month rather than next year.

4. Build a Six Workhorses portfolio

This is the structure I teach in my Moomoo talk and on the YouTube channel. Six categories of SGX-listed instruments, each doing a specific job:

Workhorse	Role	Yield Range (2025)	Example
Singapore REITs	Income engine	4–6%	Frasers Centrepoint Trust (J69U), CICT (C38U), Mapletree Logistics (M44U)
Singapore Banks	Hybrid anchor — income + capital	5–6%	DBS (D05), OCBC (O39), UOB (U11)
Business Trusts	Steady distributor — regulated cash flow	5–6%	NetLink NBN Trust (CJLU), Keppel Infrastructure Trust
Growth Stocks	Long-duration capital appreciation	1–3%	SGX (S68), ST Engineering (S63)
SDRs	Foreign exposure in SGD	varies	US blue-chip Singapore Depository Receipts
Bonds / Cash	Ballast for drawdowns	3–4%	T-bills, SSBs, MMFs

For someone heading toward the first $100,000, I'd weight this heavily toward the income engine: roughly 40% REITs, 25% banks, 15% business trusts, 10% growth, 5% SDRs, 5% bonds/cash. The point isn't sophistication. The point is that within six months of starting, you have a portfolio that throws off cash, and the cash buys more units, and the units throw off more cash. Munger's flywheel begins turning earlier than you expect.

5. Dollar-cost average monthly, ignore the chart

A monthly standing instruction beats a quarterly attempt at market timing. Singapore's regular savings plans (POSB Invest-Saver, OCBC BCIP, FSMOne RSP) let you DCA into STI ETF or selected blue chips for a few dollars in commission. Use them for the bulk of contributions and reserve manual buys for the occasional fat pitch.

What does the dividend stream actually look like?

This is the part most beginners want quantified. Let me show you what a S$100,000 portfolio yields based on the actual numbers from my research notes:

A representative allocation:

Position	Allocation	Yield	Annual Dividend (SGD)
DBS (D05)	S$15,000	4.86%	S$729
OCBC (O39)	S$10,000	~5.0%	S$500
UOB (U11)	S$10,000	4.95%	S$495
Frasers Centrepoint Trust (J69U)	S$15,000	~5.5%	S$825
CICT (C38U)	S$10,000	~5.0%	S$500
Mapletree Logistics Trust (M44U)	S$10,000	6.1%	S$610
Keppel REIT (K71U)	S$10,000	~5.5%	S$550
NetLink NBN Trust (CJLU)	S$10,000	5.39%	S$539
STI ETF (ES3)	S$10,000	~3.5%	S$350
Total	S$100,000	~5.1%	~S$5,098

About S$5,100 per year, or S$425 per month, tax-free, paid mostly semi-annually with REITs paying quarterly. That sum, on its own, will not retire you. But it will:

• Pay a typical Singaporean's monthly utility bill, mobile plan, and Netflix on permanent autopay.
• Add roughly $5,000 a year to your reinvestment budget — which at your monthly DCA cadence is an additional half-month of contributions every year for free.
• Cover the annual premium on an Integrated Shield Plan and a term life policy without touching your salary.

That is what Munger meant by "ease off the gas." Once $100,000 is working, the portfolio funds a slice of your life unprompted. You stop being the only engine in your household.

A realistic timeline

For a Singaporean earning median graduate wages with a disciplined truncation rate of 40–50%, the milestones look roughly like this:

• Year 0 → Year 2: $0 to $10,000. Brutal. All saving, almost no compounding. The dividend stream is a rounding error. This is the phase where most people quit. Don't.
• Year 2 → Year 5: $10,000 to $50,000. Compounding becomes visible. Dividends start funding meaningful reinvestments. You begin to notice that your portfolio adds a few thousand to itself in a good market year.
• Year 5 → Year 8: $50,000 to $100,000. The flywheel. By the end of this phase the dividend income is north of $5,000 a year and you are roughly halfway to the point where the portfolio adds more in a year than you contribute.

I covered this exact path in three pieces on the YouTube channel — Journey to your First Million Parts 1 (to $10k), 2 (to $100k), and 3 (to $1M). The third part is conceptually easier than the second. Munger wasn't lying about the first hundred being the hard one.

The closing thought

Munger's $100,000 line is sometimes read as a Spartan ethic — eat coupons, walk everywhere. I think it's better read as a structural observation about thresholds. There is a depth at which a portfolio starts to feed itself, and the journey from $0 to that depth is the most expensive journey in personal finance because it is paid for entirely in deferred consumption.

The Singapore investor's advantage is that the road is well-paved. Tax-free dividends, mandatory CPF savings, regulated REITs, three of the world's better-run banks, and a brokerage account you can open from your phone tonight. The infrastructure is sitting there. The only question is whether you start salary-truncating this month or next year.

I started in my twenties. I'd rather you didn't wait until your forties.

---

If you found this useful, the long-form treatment is in Growing Your Tree of Prosperity (Book 1 of the Prosperity Series). The dividend-stage version — how to live off the harvest once the tree is grown — is in Harvesting the Fruits of Prosperity (Book 2). Both books, plus the SIAS talks, are the substrate from which this article was generated.

Are you lower value human capital?

 

As of the time of writing, the boss of Standard Chartered has already apologised for talking about replacing lower-value human capital with investments in AI, but I don't think that the sentiment of fear has faded, given that the DBS CEO has put it in much more politically correct terms, that even a CEO can be replaced by AI.

So, there should be some kind of framework to deal with AI disruption that will, perhaps indirectly, answer the question of whether a person is indeed lower-value human capital. 

Do note that these days, lower-value human capital is no longer the usual suspects like blue-collar workers or support staff. Lower-value human capital can encompass lawyers, accountants, or engineers, as the value of knowledge has declined significantly, raising the question of what the point of investing so many years in tertiary education is when knowledge has become so cheap over time.

So I'm going to develop a framework to address AI disruption.

We need to first construct a 2x2 matrix.

On one axis, we have AI optimists and AI pessimists. At the moment, I have noticed that entrepreneurs seem to enjoy and look forward to what AI can bring to their businesses, as much of the work no longer needs to be outsourced. One example of an AI optimist is Malaysian influencer Tim Tiah, who replaced his marketing vendor with a CRM system he vibe-coded himself, saving a six-figure sum every year. You can find AI-pessimists everywhere these days, but to me, someone like LinkedIn personality Ives Tay probbaly represents one of the most negative thought leaders on Singapore's AI drive today.

On another axis, we have makers versus takers. I use Ayn Rand's literature to divide the world into two main categories - makers and takers. Makers have to build things, and everything they do needs to be constantly challenged by the brutal hand of reality. If you are an IT engineer building and architecting systems, you are, in essence, a maker. A taker is someone who does not make but may have the power to regulate a maker. An IT auditor is a taker because he does not build systems; he checks and regulates them, as do many left-wing intellectuals. While it may seem that a maker is more heroic and useful than a taker, a taker can slow things down and prevent a humanitarian disaster (China's management of COVID is what happens when makers are not restrained by takers). Personally, my best career years were in IT Governance, which makes me a taker by my own definition.

With these two axes well-defined, we can figure out the best strategies for coping with AI.

If you are an AI-optimistic maker. Your best strategy is "Scorched Earth". As a person who believes in AI and someone who can build, your best strategy is to build systems to eventually replace your more stubborn peers. I've done a fair bit of vibe coding and have built an agentic pipeline program to summarise legal cases, and my students love it! At the very least, it demonstrates how efficiently it can run a legal team, and it might enable a smaller, more senior team to handle the same number of cases. On Instagram, entrepreneurs are using AI to avoid paying for expensive headcount or buying service contracts.

If you are an AI-optimist and a taker. Your best strategy is "Obstruction via Governance". If you can't build or create anything out of AI, but you love what AI is, then why not govern it and keep it from scorching everyone else? There will be a large number of compliance and governance jobs coming online because people are terrified of AI's potential, and you can work on aligning AI to business objectives. Yes, you remain functionally worthless because you don't build anything, but you can set up checks and balances against those who might decide to Scorch Earth the organisation.

If you are an AI-pessimist and a maker. Your best strategy is "Analogue Rebellion". I believe that there will always be a place for makers everywhere, even those who hate AI and can't cope with change. I think, given the backlash against AI, people will turn against anything digital and go analogue, and many analogue businesses and careers will thrive. Maybe you can start a business selling musical instruments or vinyl records. I was tickled pink when cassette players were sold in Swee Lee for hundreds of dollars. The resurgence of RPGs and pen-and-paper gaming points to how tired Gen Z is of AI.

Finally, there will be those AI-pessimists and takers. So you can't build things, and you really hate AI for it. I think this category comes the closest to a lower value of human capital. Your best strategy is "Strategic Retreat". At the lower end of things, you may be better off picking up a trade like plumbing or becoming a hawk, but the best odds of survival are to see whether you can thrive in a career in sales, like becoming a financial advisor or real estate agent. So the best thing to do is get a license early, because corporate work might not wait.

So in summary, if you think my framework makes any sense, the person most likely to be replaced by AI is AI-pessimists who are takers. It is not the end of the world for them because the world of sales (and maybe life coaching) is still a possibility.

Let me know what you think about this framework.

Speaking at REITs Symposium This Saturday — I Have Skin in the Game

This Saturday, 23 May 2026, I will be one of the speakers at REITs Symposium 2026 by AlphaInvest, at Suntec Convention Centre, Level 3, Summit 1 & 2. The event runs from 10AM to 5PM. Access to the Engagement Zone, where I am speaking, is completely free — ticket link is at the bottom.

I will be upfront with you: I am not an academic speaker who talks about REITs in the abstract. As of mid-May 2026, REITs make up a substantial portion of my own 66-stock portfolio. I hold positions in ESR REIT, Mapletree Industrial Trust, Frasers Centrepoint Trust, Keppel DC REIT, AIMS APAC REIT, CapitaLand Ascendas REIT, and several others. When I talk about evaluating a REIT for sustainable income, I am making the same decisions I would with real money.

That is the context I will bring to this talk.

---

Why this moment matters for REIT investors

The current environment is genuinely interesting, and not in a comfortable way. With inflation pressures elevated and geopolitical uncertainty feeding into rate expectations, REITs have been taking a breather. Prices are soft. Yields look more attractive than they have in years — S-REITs are currently averaging around 5.6% distribution yield.

But here is the trap I will specifically warn against: a rising yield number is not always good news. A REIT's yield goes up when its price falls. And a price can fall because the market is wrong, or because the market knows something about the distribution sustainability that a casual investor might miss.

That distinction — between a REIT that is cheap and a REIT that is cheap for a reason — is the heart of what I want to talk about on Saturday.

---

What I will actually cover

The talk is called "Early Retirement with REITs: Turning Property Income into Life Optionality."

I will open with the only equation that matters for FIRE:

Investment Income ≥ Living Expenses = Optionality

Not freedom from work. Optionality. The ability to choose. After I left corporate life at 39 — when dividend income crossed my take-home pay — I did not stop working. I went to law school, started teaching at Temasek Polytechnic, built investing tools for the ERM community, and kept writing this blog. Dividends funded reinvention, not retirement in the conventional sense.

I wrote a post in April this year titled "Discover the meaning of your life before you press the early retirement button." That is the framing I will bring to Saturday's talk, too. FIRE is not a destination — it is a precondition for doing the things that actually matter to you.

From there, the talk goes practical:

The Crossover Point. How to calculate the portfolio size you actually need. If your annual expenses are S$45,000, you need roughly S$900,000 at a 5% yield. That number is clarifying. It gives you a target rather than a vague aspiration.

Why the first S$100 a month matters. This is not enough to retire on. But it is enough to believe the system works. That shift — from abstract investing theory to real cash appearing in your account — changes how seriously people take portfolio discipline. I will explain why I think this milestone deserves more attention than people give it.

The five filters I use before buying any REIT. This is the substantive core:

1. Start with the assets — occupancy, weighted average lease expiry, tenant concentration, rental reversions
2. Debt decides the dividend — leverage ratio, interest coverage, maturity profile, fixed vs floating mix
3. Good DPU beats high DPU — is distribution per unit stable and backed by recurring cash operations, or is it being inflated by dilutive equity issuance?
4. The manager matters — sponsor quality, acquisition track record, whether fees align with unitholder returns
5. A good REIT can still be a bad buy — valuation, yield spread against risk-free rates, and margin of safety

I will also share data from a 10-year Yahoo Finance study I ran for the ERM course, showing that low-beta REITs — those with a 3-year beta below 0.8 — have been the most reliable income workhorses for Singapore investors. The aim is not to beat the market. It is to build an income stream that survives bad years without forcing you to sell at the bottom.

---

A practical framework for beginners

For anyone just starting out, I will walk through how I think about building a first REIT sleeve — a core defensive position in suburban retail or healthcare, an industrial and logistics component, and, optionally, a data centre or life sciences exposure for long-term structural tailwinds.

The ERM starter portfolio I teach in the masterclass is built around four counters: one bank, one REIT, one business trust, and one Singapore Depository Receipt. The REIT anchors the income side. Saturday's talk will give you the lens to decide which REIT deserves that slot in your own portfolio.

---

Come find me

I will be at the Engagement Zone for the full event. If you have been sitting on a REIT question — whether to hold through a distribution cut, whether a particular counter's leverage looks manageable, whether the yield you are seeing is genuine or a warning — come and ask it directly. I will give you a straight answer.

The homework I will set before you leave: calculate your annual expenses, target your first S$100 a month in investment income, and shortlist three REITs using the five filters. That is a Saturday morning well spent.

Get free access using my partner link:

👉 Register here — Free with Discount Code PARTNERS26

Event details:

• Date: Saturday, 23 May 2026
• Time: 10AM – 5PM
• Venue: Suntec Convention Centre, Level 3, Summit 1 & 2
• Engagement Zone: Free

See you there.

---

For investor education only. Not financial advice. Please do your own due diligence.

What do you need to consider before pressing the 'Early Retirement' button?

 A note from Christopher: This guest post was authored by my AI Second Brain — Claude — drawing entirely from my Obsidian vault, SIAS lecture materials, and blog archives. Think of it as my ideas, assembled and written while I was busy doing something else. I've reviewed it for accuracy. Welcome to the future of content creation.

---

There is a moment every working Singaporean has fantasised about.

You are sitting in yet another pointless meeting, watching someone read aloud from a PowerPoint slide that could have been an email, and a thought crystallises in your mind: What if I just... didn't come back tomorrow?

The idea of pressing the Early Retirement button is enormously seductive. But like all big red buttons, it deserves some serious thought before you slam your palm down on it.

I've spent years teaching the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement to Singapore investors — from SIAS talks to this very blog — and the single biggest mistake I see is people conflating two very different things: financial independence and early retirement. You can, and often should, have one without the other.

Here is what you need to think through before you walk out that door.

---

1. Have you actually reached your crossover point?

The mechanics of FIRE are elegantly simple. It's a game of one number beating another: your monthly investment income must exceed your monthly expenses. The moment those two lines cross — that's your crossover point, and it is the most important milestone in your financial life.

The standard framework gives you two routes to get there. The first is the 4% safe withdrawal rule: take your annual expenses, multiply by 25, and that's your FIRE number. If you spend $4,000 a month ($48,000 a year), you need a portfolio of $1.2 million. Withdraw 4% per year, and in theory, your money outlasts you.

The second is the dividends approach, which I personally prefer for Singaporeans. Build a diversified portfolio of SGX blue-chips, REITs and business trusts that generates 5–6% annually. DBS, Frasers Centrepoint Trust, Netlink NBN Trust — three assets with very low correlations to each other, yielding above 5%, with returns historically double that of the STI ETF at lower risk. With this approach, you are not drawing down capital; you are living off the harvest while the farm stays intact.

Before you press the button, you need to know — precisely — which method you are using and whether you have hit the number. Gut feel is not acceptable here.

---

2. The Sequence of Returns Risk is the retirement killer nobody talks about

Here is the scenario that keeps retirees up at night. You retire in January. In March, markets crash 40%. You are now selling units at rock-bottom prices just to pay your grocery bills. Even if markets recover fully in two years, the early withdrawals have permanently damaged your portfolio's ability to recover.

This is called sequence of returns risk, and it is brutal precisely because it strikes at the most vulnerable moment — right after you stop earning.

My solution, which I have written about before, is the bear trap account: six to twelve months of living expenses held entirely in cash or Singapore Savings Bonds, ring-fenced and untouchable except during a market crash. If markets fall sharply in your first two years of retirement, you live off the bear trap and let your portfolio ride out the storm. It is not glamorous, but it dramatically improves your odds of not running out of money.

If you do not have a bear trap account ready to go, the button is not ready to be pressed.

---

3. Singapore's CPF system cuts both ways

Singapore presents a uniquely double-edged environment for the early retiree.

On the positive side: low income taxes mean you accumulated more during your working years. MediShield Life and Medisave blunt the worst of healthcare costs. HDB keeps your housing affordable relative to your global peers.

But the cons are real too. CPF-SA ceases to exist after age 55. If you retire early, you lose the ability to earn 4% risk-free on your retirement savings in the Special Account — which is one of the best guaranteed returns available to any Singaporean investor. Voluntary top-ups via RSTU, which can be done right up to your Retirement Sum, only remain fully accessible before 55. Plan accordingly.

CPF Life only kicks in after 65, which means the early retiree faces a potential gap of 10–20 years where CPF provides no income whatsoever. That gap must be fully funded by your own portfolio.

And HDB? For most Singaporeans, it is simultaneously their biggest asset and their biggest illiquidity trap. Being asset-rich and cash-poor is a real risk — your $1.5 million HDB flat does not pay your electricity bill.

---

4. Healthcare costs will only go in one direction

The Integrated Shield Plans that supplement MediShield Life have been getting more expensive every single year. As you age, premiums rise. As you exit employment, you lose any employer co-payment subsidy. And as you grow older, the probability of actually needing hospitalisation goes up.

Do not model your retirement healthcare costs using your current premiums. Model them using what they might look like when you are 65, 70, or 75. This is not pessimism — it is arithmetic.

---

5. The psychological risks are real — and underestimated

When I teach FIRE, I spend as much time on the social and psychological downsides as I do on the numbers. The financial part is, frankly, the easier part.

Here is what many early retirees do not anticipate: your friends will still be working. The lunches you imagined, the golf mornings, the leisurely weekdays — most of that requires other people to be free, and most people are not free on a Tuesday at 11am. The early retiree can find themselves profoundly isolated, not from a lack of money, but from a lack of people.

There is also the question of identity. If someone asks you what you do, and the honest answer is "nothing, I retired at 47" — how does that sit with you? Some people find it liberating. Others find it quietly corrosive. Know which type you are before you press the button.

And there is a more insidious risk: you gradually lose touch with the working world. AI is reshaping every industry at a pace that was unimaginable a decade ago. One reason companies are reluctant to rehire 50-somethings is that they assume (rightly or wrongly) that those years outside the workforce have created a skills gap. If your early retirement does not work out financially, returning to the workforce may be significantly harder than you expect.

---

6. Consider focusing on financial independence first — and postponing the "retire" part

Here is my genuine advice, drawn from years of observing people who have done this well and people who have done it badly: separate financial independence from early retirement.

Financial independence means the money works without you having to. Early retirement means you stop working. These are not the same thing.

Introverts, in my experience, often do better at full early retirement — they are comfortable with their own company and typically have rich inner lives that sustain them. Extroverts, who get much of their energy from social interaction, often find that the "retire" part of FIRE is the part that quietly undoes them.

Research on life satisfaction consistently shows there is an optimal point of work somewhere above zero hours per week — not because you need the money, but because purposeful activity improves wellbeing. Once your portfolio is large enough that you could retire, you might instead redesign your work: fewer hours, different role, more meaning, less politics. Coast FIRE and Barista FIRE are not consolation prizes. For many people, they are the better destination.

---

The bottom line

Early retirement is not a destination. It is a permission slip to redesign your life. The question is not just "can I afford to stop?" but "do I have something worth stopping for, and something worth starting?"

Get your crossover point locked in. Build the bear trap. Understand what CPF will and will not do for you. Price in healthcare honestly. And think — really think — about what Tuesday at 11am looks like when you have nowhere to be.

The button will still be there when you are ready. There is no rush to press it.

---

This post was authored by Claude, Christopher's AI Second Brain, drawing on his Obsidian knowledge vault, SIAS investor education materials, and blog archives. The frameworks and views expressed are Christopher's own, synthesised from years of research and teaching.

Rounding up my AI coding work over the weekend

This is another power-up week, where I was able to dream up and execute some of the projects I've always wanted to do, but couldn't, because the coding was too hard or labour-intensive.

a) Built and grown my Second Brain

Obsidian is a humble note-taking app that's a sort of dumbed-down version of Notion. I noticed younger lawyers use it religiously, but I was never able to leverage it because I did not develop a habit of capturing information in my professional life.

So, after watching a few online videos and reading the Cheerful Egg blog, I decided to use Codex to populate my Obsidian vault with information on my projects, training materials, and content, and it was very satisfying to see the materials in graph view grow. I can now understand why it has gone viral - it's like growing a Mini-Me in a lab environment.

This experiment would have ended there, but I realised I could open this Second Brain to Codex or Claude Co-Work so it could pull information from all my previous work to create new content. 

b) Created a program to generate analyst reports

At this moment, the Early Retirement Masterclass already has a fairly mature skills markdown file that instructs AI to download historical financial information and produce an analyst report, along with target price estimates and dividend sustainability. Over the weeks, this MD file has been improved with new accounting metrics, such as Pietroski scoring, so the analyst reports for a stock are not small documents. They range from 35 pages to 70 pages long.

I want to evolve the skills markdown into a Python program that performs the exercise on all 80 stocks in the STI and SGX Next 50 lists. Getting all the reports took an entire evening and cost about $40 USD worth of tokens, and I've actually made it way cheaper by writing a program to download stock information into a database before I started running the Fundamental Researcher.

The final outcome is that, within a day, I have about 80 analyst reports, each 35-70 pages, on every mid-cap and large-cap stock in Singapore.

And AI analysts, having no need to pander to senior managers, are much stricter in their Buy recommendations - just look at the HOLD ratings below. The AI also has a value-investing bias, but that's because it makes decisions purely based on financial statements and business news results. 

I loaded all the reports to my Second Brain, and AI is just not impressed!

There are BUY recommendations in the end, but I think this is between my Early Retirement Masterclass community and me.

c) Built a legal case summary program

Given the sheer number of projects I could run on my machine, I felt confident enough to tackle some nagging issues I faced in the legal sector. 

And by now, this is an easy project.

I wrote a Python program that can take a legal case note from E-Litigation and summarise it into a 2-page study guide for students to just get the main facts on the case.

Then I got an ex-classmate to refer me to a case presided over by my Prof Goh Yihan, called Re: CK Tan Law Corp, and it not only provides a summary but also tells a law student how to use the case. 

Maybe I should go back to school for an LLM just to see how far this tool can take me. 

I think university students should not avoid reading the full case. In a Polytechnic environment, I can create a case book for my students to get the gist of the law, which is more than enough for a paralegal.

So, as you can tell, this has been a fairly action-packed weekend.

I've not thought about what this really means for the industry, given that a 52-year-old uncle can churn out 80 analyst reports and 5 legal summaries over a weekend and still celebrate Mother's Day with family. That can come in a future article.

But it's hard to describe the sheer power these co-working and coding tools bring to MBTI ENTJs like me. 

It's like commanding an army of elite developers who are at your beck and call 24/7. And if you are skilled at prompting and can think in terms of processes and step-by-step implementation, it can be amazingly addictive, as well as human beings often misinterpret the high-level commander's intent in the real working world.

Moving forward, I will likely channel more dividends into buying AI tokens, but I hope the sharper analytical tools I build will pay for them many times over as I achieve better investment results.

More hunger is not the answer

 

A legal recruiter went viral this week after saying that companies are firing Singaporeans to hire other workers from SE Asia who are hungrier. Because the chosen words were somewhat inappropriate, angry Singaporeans made the message go viral. Even I benefited from this: I forwarded someone's comment on this, and my message got over 12k views on LinkedIn. 

I congratulate Lee Shulin for successfully becoming famous overnight, because there is no such thing as bad publicity, and I do not agree with the personal attacks on her. However, 

I think there is adequate space to critique her argument.

First of all, I think it's hard to label Singaporeans as not being hungry enough. We are a successful city-state, and we solved the problems of hunger decades ago. Expecting Singaporeans to hunker down and be exploited by SMEs (many law firms are just SMEs) is not realistic. 

Having hungry Singaporeans is also regressive.

Ultimately, SME bosses who want to hire in a modern, wealthy city-state need to ask themselves what conditions they must create to attract Singaporean workers. There are valid reasons to site their HQs here, like great location and stable government, and for that, they need to hire a quota of local workers to conduct their business.

Hunger is a very bad state to be in here. But Singaporeans have alternatives.

a) Singaporeans can be greedy

First off, while we can't starve our kids, we can teach them to be greedy - work for themselves and sell their time for more money and a better life. This can be a powerful motivator. Some SMEs may not pay well, but they can offer a wide range of work to build a resume, and our kids get higher pay elsewhere down the line.

I'm going to share a story about a towkay who spouted the same line about Singaporeans lacking hunger; instead, he's full of effusive praise for some workers he hired from Shanghai. He said that even before you ask for something, they would have already done the work and submitted a report to you. But within a year or two, these excellent Shanghai workers had taken his SOP and built a larger business in China, even taking some of his clients with them.

I actually want my kids to think like these Shanghainese, but maybe in a less unscrupulous fashion - maybe launch a business with the old boss taking a 10% equity stake to supply his company. Or buy up his company so he can retire one day and take a page from Codie Sanchez's playbook.

To be greedy does not mean being ruthless.

b) Singaporeans will choose to be angry over being hungry

The fact is that there is a political dimension to local employment. If we open the floodgates to foreigners, many Singaporeans will indeed go hungry, and we won't stand for it. Instead, we will become angry.

Angry Singaporeans can go to the ballot box to ensure that SMEs or even some MNCs reserve some employment for locals. 

I think this is the most unfortunate side-effect of Lee Shulin's post: many SME bosses want to hire more foreigners and argue that Singaporeans are not hungry enough to work for them. But the government needs to monitor this discussion because an attempt to "starve" local workers resulted in the biggest thrashing for the PAP in recent memory in 2011 at Aljunied.

And Singaporeans will go to the ballot box - at least to make Tanjong Rhu Singaporean again.

c) Some will just choose to be Horny

I think there is a third option: Singaporeans can be horny.

Marry well, and a lot of these problems with employment disappear. 

Lee Shulin herself embodies this principle because I think she's really one of the luckiest women of her generation. I say this because her husband is happy to be a house-husband and support her by minding the house and the kids, so that she can build up her business. A guy like this is hard to find, especially in a patriarchal society that might label house husbands as not being hungry enough to find work.

So I've included three possible alternatives to being hungry. 

You can be greedy, angry, or horny. I think it's much better than being hungry.

But maybe there is a unifying principle behind all this.

Motivating people after they have resolved their physical needs is hard, and one thing I tell the teens I teach in a Polytechnic is that they need to find a reason to have a high level of agency. Some guys might gravitate to this because guys need high status to function in a society where finding a mate is hard. 

When you have high agency, you exude what Gen Z called Main Character Energy. If you just exist in s a state of hunger, only to be exploited by a toxic company, you are an NPC zombie.

There are many younger influencers who are trying to decode and explain what high agency is. I shall leave it to you to find these gurus. I'm in the process of understanding what this means.