Personal Update - Business

 

Ok, so now for my second personal update. 

You should have noticed that some of the trainers who were active five years ago are nowhere to be found, so it does not take a genius to figure out that my industry is practically dead. My Early Retirement Masterclass has been running for about 8 years, and it no longer pays the bills directly; it has become more of a hobby to me.

The inclination to just quit the business is quite strong given such poor numbers, but the primary reason I remain in this industry is that it forces me to maintain my knowledge of financial markets, and teaching it sharpens my investor instincts, as years of using my programming skills to suggest financial trades and backtest different scenarios give me an understanding of financial markets that is rare for such a small, insular market like SGX. And we've come a long way from queuing up to use a Bloomberg terminal at Lee Kong Chian Library to figure out whether a low-PE strategy worked against the baseline investment across all STI stocks. These days, I vibecoded a solution to run 3,200 backtests on the top 80 market-cap stocks in about 30 minutes.

So I can safely say that it's not my superior investing skills that made me an investment trainer. It's the fact that I can teach investing that supercharged my investing ability for the past 8 years. ( This is called the Feynman Technique )

Technically, for ERM, we can probably lower prices to drive more revenue. But a poorer business and falling numbers also mean that folks who cough up the fees are serious investors, probably very motivated to do well for themselves, and that almost everyone is someone worth networking with and guiding along their investing journey.  

So work has become more pleasant.

But there is a counterweight to all this.

I have gigs teaching at public institutions that now pay a larger share of my earnings, and this adds a new dimension to my development as an instructor. I have a fairly privileged position in that I teach Law and Data Analytics simultaneously, and this work may even expand next semester, as I am negotiating to teach a hardcore maths module as well. 

In these gigs, I cannot set a price filter to find the students I want. I have to take anything the system throws at me, so I can continue to struggle to grow. Truth is, I've been scolded in class by angry students (who make up their view of what the law is) and disrespected by some colleagues at a level I will never experience as an investment trainer. So, as someone with a five-figure passive income, I find it takes some philosophising to justify doing all this for just $100/hour.

Over the years, there have been people who cruise when passive income hits a certain level. 

I'm no longer keen to live like this because now I believe that if a person removes all suffering and inconveniences from life, which financial independence can do at the drop of a hat, meaning gets wiped out as well. I also have no wish to become a bad influence on my kids. They need to see me do some work, like my dad when he became a production operator after selling shares of the pet shop he founded.

Finally, having some kind of tenuous link to the world allows me to continue to understand what any workplace can be like, and it has an effect when I pitch my investment courses. Of course, not needing that income is itself a shield that allows me to keep carrying on like playing an arcade game. I get a nasty encounter on Thursday night, and I sleep it off till Friday morning. 

So this year, folks will notice that I'm doing more. My talks at SIAS are proceeding, and I'm seeking speaking opportunities with brokerages. Not all the gigs will pay, but they are a good marketing effort.

My next talk will be on CPF in August with SIAS, but more details will follow soon.