Letter to Batch 43 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

It has been an honor and a privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.

Three months ago I wrote to Batch 42 that the Straits Times Index at 5,212 was a generational milestone, and that a rising index compresses dividend yields. Both statements have held up. Neither went far enough. The index has kept running, the leadership on SGX has shifted decisively towards growth, and the hunting ground for income investors in Singapore has narrowed to the point where your own portfolio exercise produced only twelve names.

The Index Is at a Record, But the Real Money Was Made Outside It

The STI closed at 5,801.96 on 4 September 2026, a fresh all-time high and roughly 35% above where it stood a year earlier. It returned 13.1% in the first half of 2026 alone. By any historical standard for this market, that is an exceptional run, and the banks did most of the heavy lifting inside the index.

Now look at what happened outside it. In the first half of 2026, AEM Holdings returned 512%. UMS Integration returned 132%. Nanofilm returned 113%. Frencken returned 106%. Against an STI that gained 13.1%, the semiconductor supply chain not only outperformed; it made the index look like a savings account.

Every one of those businesses is tied to the same story: AI capital expenditure flowing into semiconductor equipment and precision manufacturing. The market spent the first half of the year repricing that exposure, and it repriced it hard. As of May 2026, AEM traded at around 42 times earnings versus a historical average near 14, UMS at around 38 times versus 16, and Frencken at around 29 times versus 11.

I want to be direct with you about what this means, because it would be dishonest to gloss over it. If you had anchored on dividend yield in January 2026, you missed all of it. None of these counters would have passed the screens we ran in class. Their yields are small or absent, their earnings are cyclical, and their current multiples price in an earnings recovery that has not fully arrived. That is a real cost of the discipline you have just learned, and pretending otherwise would insult your intelligence.

The question is what to do about it, and my answer is nothing. You cannot build a retirement income stream out of counters that pay you almost nothing and require you to be right about the AI capital expenditure cycle. The market may well be correct that these businesses earn into their multiples. It may also be wrong. Either way, the exposure does not do the job you need done.

Singapore Is No Longer a Comfortable Market for Dividend Investors

When I started writing Tree of Prosperity, assembling an SGX portfolio yielding 6% required patience but not much cleverness. Dozens of counters with decent balance sheets paid above 5%. That is no longer true, and I think you should hear it plainly rather than discover it slowly.

The banks' re-rating is the clearest illustration. OCBC sits in your portfolio at $24.61, yielding 3.84%. That is a good business, well-capitalized, with room to continue returning capital. It also pays you less than 4% now, even though the same franchise yielded well above 5% not long ago. The market has repriced quality income upward. What remains cheap on a yield basis is, more often than not, cheap for a reason.

This is the structural shift. Singapore equities have become a market where good income is expensive and cheap income is fragile. The gap in between is where your work has to happen now, and it takes more effort than it used to.

REITs Remain the Exception, and That Is Where the Bargains Are

While the STI was setting records, the FTSE ST All-Share REIT Index fell 8.2% over 2026 to early September. The two moved in opposite directions, and that divergence is the single most useful fact in this letter.

The iEdge S-REIT Index now offers an average distribution yield of 6.3% to 6.4%. The sector trades at roughly 0.86 times price-to-net-asset value, a 14% discount to stated book value. With the 6-month T-bill at about 1.70%, the yield spread is close to 460 basis points. Historically, spreads above 400 basis points have been attractive entry points for investors who can tolerate the associated volatility.

The weakness is driven by rates, not operations. Markets are pricing at least one more Federal Reserve hike by the end of 2026, and the Singapore 10-year government bond yield has risen about 0.53 percentage points over the past year to 2.38%. Rates are the weather that REITs live in, and the forecast turned hostile.

What did not turn hostile is the cash. Most S-REITs grew distributions year on year in the first half of 2026, with several posting double-digit gains. Keppel DC REIT and OUE REIT both posted double-digit DPU growth. Prices fell while distributions rose. That combination is precisely what expands the yield available to a buyer, and it is why REITs occupy five of the twelve slots in your portfolio.

Three checks before you add to any REIT position. First, the proportion of debt that is fixed rather than floating, because a REIT with 70% fixed-rate debt is insulated in a way that one with 70% floating exposure is not. Second, the interest coverage ratio and gearing indicate whether the distribution can survive a hostile refinancing. Third, whether the discount to book is a mispricing or a judgment about the book itself. A REIT at 0.7 times NAV because the market disbelieves the valuation is not a bargain; it is a disagreement you have to win.

Why Your Final Portfolio Has Only Twelve Stocks

You made a batch decision I want to put on the record, because it was more rigorous than what I usually see.

You set a portfolio yield target above 6%, and then refused to reach it the easy way.

The easy way was Deep Value. Every screen we ran surfaced counters trading below net cash. Anchun International at 30.5 cents against roughly 67 cents of cash and short-term deposits per share. Fuxing China at three to four times earnings and 0.13 to 0.16 times book, among the statistically cheapest names on SGX. HL Global, where cash per share exceeds the share price. Asia Enterprises, Nippecraft, Koyo, VibroPower. On a spreadsheet, these are the cheapest things in the market.

You eliminated all of them, and your rejection notes were consistent: severe illiquidity, controlling-shareholder influence, no formal dividend policy, and earnings that were project-driven, one-off, or negative. The line one of you wrote on Anchun was the sharpest thing produced in the whole exercise. You are paying 30.5 cents for something holding roughly 67 cents of cash per share, but you need management to eventually unlock it, and cheap can stay cheap for a very long time.

Cutting the Deep Value bucket removed most of the high-yield candidates in one stroke. Twelve counters survived, with a projected portfolio yield of 6.21%. The five-year backtest on that basket returns 19.91% annualized with a standard deviation of 12.02%, a Sharpe ratio of 1.41 against a 3% risk-free rate, and a maximum drawdown of 12.21% in October 2023. Those are respectable numbers for a portfolio built to pay you, not to beat an index.

Twelve is fewer names than I would normally want. Be honest with yourself about what that means: with twelve holdings, a single suspended distribution costs you roughly 8% of your income. The mitigation is that your cash flows come from genuinely different places, including banking, suburban retail, healthcare property, data centers, fiber infrastructure, energy, steel, regional beverages, and two Hong Kong listings. Diversification is about the drivers, not the count. Even so, treat twelve as a starting point. Add names as your capital grows and as your watchlist throws up better entry yields.

Putting It Together

Batch 43 enters a market where the exciting money is in counters that do not pay you, and the counters that do pay you have been marked down because of the interest rate cycle. That is an uncomfortable position for a new dividend investor, and I would rather you understood it now than felt it later.

On the evidence, it is also a reasonable time to buy income. A sector yielding 6.3% at a 14% discount to book, with distributions still growing, is not a market that hates your strategy. It is a market that has temporarily marked it down.

The framework you learned holds. Buy businesses with durable earnings and a record of returning cash. Buy them when the yield is attractive relative to the alternatives. Check that the balance sheet can survive a bad refinancing. Spread the income across sectors so that no single rate decision can break it. Review the portfolio thoughtfully, not obsessively.

Persist

The hardest part of this journey is not the analysis. It is the first few years, when the dividends are small next to your salary, and the compounding has not yet become visible. A $200,000 portfolio at 6.21% pays about $12,400 a year, or a little over $1,000 a month. That does not replace an income. It buys your groceries. It is still the beginning of what will eventually replace your income.

You will also be tempted, repeatedly, by the AEMs of the next few years. Someone in your circle will have made 500% while you collected 6%, and they will mention it. Hold two facts in your head when that happens. Their return is unrealized until they sell, and you have no idea what they did with the other 90% of their capital. Your portfolio is built to pay you whether the AI cycle continues or breaks, and that is a different objective, not an inferior one.

Measure yourself against your income, not against the index. Count the dividends received this year against the dividends received last year. That number is the one that determines when you can stop working, and it is the only scoreboard that has ever mattered in this course.

Keep buying. Keep reading the annual reports. Keep the watchlist current and the cash ready for the days when the market offers you a better entry yield than it does today. Those days come around more often than you would think.

I am proud of the work every one of you put into Batch 43, and the Day 5 portfolio was among the most disciplined I have seen. I look forward to hearing where your journeys take you. As always, my door remains open.

Good luck, and invest wisely.

 

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

Tree of Prosperity

19 September 2026

Are local racists leaving money on the table in the stock market?

 

It's understandable why the government is concerned about local racism. Some hurtful comments were made about ethnic Indian Singaporeans in response to the disaster in Nepal. I'm another case: criticism of Singapore's investments in Air India attracted another round of racist comments about Indians in general. 

As an investor, I think we should not politicize a company's business decisions. 

• If you believe that SIA can turn around Air India's fortunes, then you should buy the stock. 
• If you are indifferent like me, stay out of the SIA share market. 
• If you are super-confident that SIA would lose money, then muster the courage to short the counter instead of politicizing this issue. 

India has a rising middle class and superb GD growth, and this should get some investors excited.

Today, I want to ask a provocative question. 

Are local racists leaving too much money on the table in the markets? 

And to illustrate this further, I drew a scatterplot of all the stocks in my portfolio, plotting Return on Equity (ROE) against the Price-to-Book Ratio (PB), using data from Yahoo Finance. Then I fit a least-squares regression line through the data points. Points furthest above the line may indicate drastic undervaluation.

So the most undervalued stock is Laopu Gold, which will be the subject of a future blog article an it;s my latest acquisition.

But note that a close second is CapitaLand India Trust, which, in my opinion, has superb performance at a steep discount to its market price.

I did further research by invoking a quick stock research skill I built into my Claude Co-work, and this is what it had to say:

Stock Name: CapitaLand India Trust

Ticker: CY6U.SI

Current Price: SGD 0.950

Analyst Target Price: SGD 1.33

Fundamentals: PE Ratio - 4.7 | PB Ratio - 0.77 | Current Yield - 9.8% (8.3% run-rate — a 1.44c advanced distribution put three payouts in the trailing window) | ROE - 15.3% | RSI 180 days - 46.8 |

Business: A Singapore-listed business trust owning Indian real estate — 22.0 million square feet of completed IT business parks, industrial and logistics facilities, and data centers across Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai.

Revenue Source: 1H 2026 total property income of S$137.6 million (INR 9,923 million) is almost entirely rent from IT business park tenants, with a growing data center and industrial slice, supplemented by interest on S$417.9 million of receivables from six forward-purchase development assets.

SWOT Analysis: 

Strengths - Net property income margin widened to 78.1% from 76.1%, driven by 24% positive rental reversions and 91% committed occupancy, lifting distributable income by 8% to S$64.2 million, while the Navi Mumbai data center Tower 1 was fully leased and handed over to a hyperscaler in July, with full income from August. 

Weaknesses - The rupee fell 12% against the Singapore dollar, converting 13% DPU growth in INR into just 1% in the currency in which unit holders are actually paid, and only 53% of borrowings are hedged back into INR. 

Opportunities - There is 4.9 million square feet of development potential inside the existing IT parks plus 6.4 million square feet across the forward-purchase pipeline, funded from S$1.1 billion of debt headroom, with a July INR 5.5 billion drawdown alone expected to add 1.6% to DPU. 

Threats - Gearing of 38.0% is at the high end for an SGX-listed trust, and with 25.5% of borrowings floating, Indian rate moves hit distributions quickly — the units already sit at their 52-week low of S$0.95, down from a S$1.28 high.

Typical Dividend Months: March and September

From this quick examination, I can conclude that everything under management's control has been decent, with high rental reversions. But the PE ratio is single-digit, and dividend yields are close to 10%. But everything seems to be ruined by movements in the Indian Rupee. But even though analysts have a high target price, the REIT's six-month momentum is negative.

Of course, this doesn't mean there's actual racism behind such low valuations, but I think the weakening Rupee would still make this REIT a tempting buy.

At this point, I already own this REIT. It's generated some capital losses, but after accounting for dividends received, I'm still up on my purchase price.

Same rules apply.

If you think the Rupee's weakness could push the REIT lower, then stay out of the markets. 

But if you believe that there's somehow a thin veneer of racism that is similar to what you've noticed in social media comments about SIA, and it's a reason for this discount, then you may want to risk some capital to see if you are correct.

What Should I Do With $100,000?

 

Three general approaches, compared on the same basis: expected return, effort, and reversibility

$100,000 is large enough to move the needle on a Singaporean's finances, but where it should go depends on what stage of life you're in and how much ongoing work you're willing to put in to keep it compounding. There are three general approaches worth comparing: put it into yourself, put it into the world's stock markets through a low-cost fund, or put it into SGX income assets that pay you cash every quarter. Each has a different return profile, time horizon, and level of ongoing effort required.

1. Grow human capital: a credential that raises your income

For a younger person, the highest expected return on $100,000 is often not in a portfolio at all. It is in raising your own earning power, because a salary increase compounds over the 20 to 30 working years still ahead of you, in a way that a lump sum invested at market returns cannot match on the same time horizon.

The INSEAD MBA is a useful reference point because the numbers are public. INSEAD's own financing page puts full tuition at €109,860, with total cost of attendance (tuition plus a year of living expenses) at roughly €140,000, or about S$200,000 at current exchange rates. $100,000 does not cover that on its own. What the salary outcomes show is why people still borrow the difference or draw down savings to make up the gap: INSEAD's latest employment report puts median base salary post-MBA at €100,000 (roughly S$145,000), a 111% increase over pre-MBA salary, plus a median signing bonus of €28,900. [Source: MBA Crystal Ball, INSEAD Employment Report 2026.]

This is why the approach specifically favors younger people. A 28-year-old who doubles their base salary captures that uplift, compounding through raises and promotions, for another three decades. A 50-year-old capturing the same percentage increase has a much shorter runway to compound it, and by then may have less appetite for a year without income. The expected return here is real but not guaranteed the way a bond coupon is: it depends on the specific program, the specific industry you're targeting, and your ability to convert the credential into an actual offer. Not every credential pays off like an INSEAD MBA. A CFA, a specialist diploma, or a technical certification can produce a similar effect at a fraction of the cost, which is often the more sensible use of $100,000 for someone not aiming at a top-tier full-time MBA specifically.

2. Globally diversified UCITS ETFs on the London Stock Exchange

For $100,000 that isn't going toward a credential, the next question is how much ongoing effort you want to put in. A globally diversified UCITS ETF, domiciled in Ireland and traded on the London Stock Exchange, is close to the lowest-effort option available: buy, hold, rebalance occasionally, and let the index do the work.

Two commonly used building blocks are the Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF (VWRA, accumulating) and the iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF (IWDA), both giving exposure to well over a thousand companies across developed and emerging markets in a single trade. Ireland-domiciled UCITS funds are the standard choice for non-US investors, specifically because they avoid US estate tax exposure and benefit from a more favorable dividend withholding tax treaty than a US-domiciled ETF held directly.

On returns, be careful with the headline number. VWRA's average annual return since its 2012 inception has been about 13.4%, but that period captured an unusually strong bull run in US equities. [Source: stockanalysis.com, VWRA historical performance.] For planning purposes, a more conservative long-run assumption of 6 to 8% a year is the more defensible number, in line with long-run global equity history before the 2010s. At 7% per year, $100,000 grows to roughly $197,000 in ten years and $387,000 in twenty years, before any further contributions. This is a total-return vehicle, not an income vehicle: there is no cash paid out to live on unless units are sold, and it carries the full volatility of global equities. Currency exposure (the fund is USD-denominated; your costs are in SGD) is a real variable too.

3. Dividend stocks: banks, REITs, business trusts and SDRs on SGX

The third approach is building a portfolio for cash income rather than total return, using SGX-listed banks, REITs, business trusts, and Singapore Depository Receipts (SDRs). At current levels, a 5% blended yield is achievable without reaching for yield traps: DBS trades around a 4.6% trailing yield, OCBC around 5.9%, and UOB around 5.0%. [Source: StashAway Singapore, DBS/OCBC/UOB 2026 outlook.] S-REITs typically yield 4 to 6%, a function of the regulatory requirement to distribute at least 90% of taxable income, and business trusts, backed by contracted, often regulated cash flows, can run 5 to 8%. SDRs provide access to a small basket of Thai blue-chips in SGD, but the segment is newer and less liquid, and is better treated as a satellite than a core income holding.

The arithmetic is simple: $100,000 at a 5% blended yield is about $5,000 a year in additional income, paid mostly in quarterly installments. What the arithmetic does not show is the ongoing work. Unlike the ETF approach, this is not a buy-and-forget portfolio. It requires continuing to check that the dividend is covered by free cash flow rather than just the headline yield, watching balance sheet risk and refinancing schedules, and reinvesting distributions with the same discipline. That work does not stop once the first $100,000 is deployed. It continues for as long as you keep building your portfolio, which, for most people pursuing financial independence, means years, not a single transaction.

Comparing the three

Approach	Expected return / income	Ongoing effort	Best suited to
Human capital (credential)	High but uncertain; compounds through career, not the portfolio	High upfront (1-2 years), then none	Younger people early in their career
Global UCITS ETF (LSE)	~6-8% total return p.a. (conservative planning assumption)	Very low: buy, hold, rebalance	Investors who want low effort and full market exposure
SGX dividend portfolio	~5% cash yield, roughly $5,000/year on $100,000	Continuous: monitoring, reinvestment, position sizing	Investors building a spendable income stream toward financial independence

The honest answer

Personal finance is personal. The right split across these three depends on your age and how many working years are left to compound a salary increase, how much of your net worth is already tied up in CPF and property, and whether you actually have the temperament to keep doing the ongoing work that option three demands. A 26-year-old with most of their net worth still ahead of them gets more out of option one than a 55-year-old does. Someone who wants to set it and forget it is better served by option two than by a dividend portfolio they won't maintain.

I've run option three for over two decades. It was not the lowest-effort choice, nor was it guaranteed to outperform a global index fund over that period. What it gave me was a growing stream of cash income I could see and use, the discipline of checking dividend coverage rather than chasing yield, and a fit for a temperament that wanted to stay actively involved in the portfolio rather than hand the decision to an index. That is a personal fit and not a universal recommendation. The framework above is what I'd use to help someone else find theirs.

The Ten Years That Fund Your Retirement Open at 30 and Close at 40

What MOM's own retrenchment data says about a window most Singaporeans assume is still open

In the Early Retirement Masterclass preview, the slide that draws the least argument is the one that deserves the most.

The model is three numbers. You need roughly $500,000. You have about ten years to build it. You save $2,000 a month. People will argue with the $500,000, usually by telling me their expenses are lower. They will argue much harder with the $2,000. Almost nobody argues with the ten years, because ten years sounds like a generous allowance rather than a binding constraint.

It is the binding constraint. Singapore's own labour statistics say the window is narrower and harder-edged than the model lets on, and that the cost of discovering this late is not linear. Lose three years at the front, and you do not need 30 per cent more savings. You need closer to double.

The window opens at 30, not at 25

Nobody saves $2,000 a month out of their first job.

The years from 25 to 30 go to finding out what you actually are professionally, servicing a study loan, getting married, and paying the first tranche on a flat. This is not a discipline failure. It is the normal shape of a Singaporean's twenties, and any model that assumes serious saving capacity at 25 is describing somebody else's life.

Real surplus starts around 30. That's the window opening, and it is the least controversial part of the argument.

The window closes at 40, and the data is not subtle about it

The closing edge is where most people's assumptions break. The common belief is that the 40s are the peak earning decade, therefore the peak saving decade. The first half of that is true. The second half depends on staying employed, and MOM's numbers show that this is precisely where the risk arrives.

From the Labour Market Report 2025 (Tables 3.6 and 5.1):

Age band	Retrenched per 1,000 resident employees, 2025	Back in a job within 6 months
Under 30	3.0	70.8%
30 to 39	7.0	68.9%
40 to 49	9.8	62.5%
50 to 59	11.1	45.2%
60 and over	4.9	37.8%

Read the two columns together, because separately each one understates the problem.

A worker aged 50 to 59 was retrenched at roughly 3.7 times the rate of a worker under 30. That is the first column. The second column is worse: fewer than half of those retrenched in that age band were back in a job within six months, against seven in ten of the under-30s. So the same event, a retrenchment, costs a 52-year-old roughly twice the runway it costs a 28-year-old, and it arrives nearly four times as often.

One caveat on the last row, because the number looks reassuring and is not. Retrenchment incidence falls for the 60-and-over group partly because the pool has already shrunk. Many in that cohort have left the labour force rather than survived within it. A low retrenchment rate among those still standing is not evidence that standing is easy.

Your degree is the part of the profile that raises the risk

The same report breaks retrenchment down by qualification, and the direction surprises most rooms I teach.

Highest qualification	Retrenched per 1,000 resident employees, 2025
Post-secondary, non-tertiary	2.9
Below secondary	3.4
Secondary	3.5
Diploma and professional qualification	6.0
Degree	11.7

Degree holders were retrenched at more than three times the rate of the secondary-educated. This is not a story about capability. It is a story about cost and structure. Graduate roles sit higher on the payroll, cluster in the sectors that restructure first, and are easier to consolidate when a firm decides that four functions can be done by two people with better tools.

If your plan for the 40s rests on the idea that qualifications buy stability, it runs against the data. The qualification bought you the earnings that make the ten-year window possible. It does not buy you the years.

The gap that nobody budgets for is 50 to 65

Here is where the Singapore-specific arithmetic bites.

From 1 July 2026, the statutory retirement age is 64, and the re-employment age is 69 (MOM). Those provisions restrict an employer from dismissing you on grounds of age below those thresholds. They do not oblige anyone to hire you, and they do nothing at all about retrenchment, which is a business-grounds exercise rather than an age-grounds one. The protection covers the job you hold. It does not cover the job you need to find at 53.

Meanwhile, CPF Life payouts begin at 65 by default. A worker retrenched at 52 with a 45 per cent chance of re-entry within six months is looking at a stretch of up to thirteen years that must be funded from somewhere other than salary and CPF Life. That stretch is what the $500,000 exists to cover. That is why the target isn't negotiable downwards just because someone feels their expenses are modest.

What losing years actually costs

The base model is $2,000 a month for ten years, totalling $ 240,000. Note what that implies before going further, because it is the assumption people skip.

$2,000 a month for 120 months is $240,000 of your own money. The other $260,000 must come from investment returns. Solve for it, and the model implies roughly 14 per cent a year. That is a demanding number, and it deserves interrogation rather than assumption, which is a separate discussion. But hold it constant for a moment and ask what happens when the window shortens.

Years left to save	Monthly savings required	Your own money over the period
10	$2,000	$240,000
8	$2,930	$281,000
7	$3,620	$304,000
5	$5,900	$354,000
3	$11,360	$409,000

Assumption: same implied return, same $500,000 target. Only the runway changes.

Three years of delay takes the requirement from $2,000 to $3,620, an 81 per cent increase in monthly savings to buy back a 30 per cent reduction in time. Five years takes it to $5,900. The relationship is not linear because compounding does its heaviest lifting in the years you no longer have, and no amount of later intensity replaces early duration.

This is why the ten years matter more than the $500,000 or the $2,000. Both of the other numbers are levers you can adjust. Time is the one input that only moves in one direction.

If you are already past 40

Most people reading this are, and I am not going to pretend the window is still open when it is not. Assume the ten years are behind you, then answer four questions honestly before deciding anything.

1. What is your actual remaining runway, in years, to the point where your income becomes unreliable? Not to 65. To the age at which your industry stops hiring people who look like you. For most PMET roles, that is closer to 50 than to 60, and the table above is the evidence.

2. What is your real monthly surplus, measured over the last twelve months rather than estimated? Take the bank statements, not the intention. The table above tells you what the number needs to be for your remaining runway. If the gap is large, you have found the binding constraint and it is on the savings side.

3. If the gap cannot be closed by saving more, which of the three variables are you actually moving? There are only three: the target, the time, or the return. Lowering the target means permanently auditing expenses down, because every recurring dollar of expense raises the capital required by roughly 300 dollars at a 4 per cent withdrawal rate. Extending the time means accepting a later date rather than a worse plan. Raising the return means taking on the work and the risk that go with it. Pick deliberately, because doing nothing is the same as picking the third option by accident and hoping.

4. What happens to the plan if you are retrenched next year? Run it. If the answer is that the plan fails, the plan was not a plan; it was a projection that assumed the one thing the data says you cannot assume.

The honest position for someone at 45 is that the plan is now shorter, tighter, and more dependent on the return on savings than it would have been at 32. That is not a reason to skip it. It is a reason to stop treating the timeline as an abstraction and start putting real numbers against it.

That third variable, the return, is the one most people have never seriously worked on, and it is what the Early Retirement Masterclass spends its time on. Not because returns are the whole answer, but because for anyone who has already spent part of the window, it is the only lever with enough leverage left in it.

---

Data source: Ministry of Manpower, Labour Market Report 2025, Tables 3.6 and 5.1. Retirement and re-employment ages under the Retirement and Re-employment Act, as amended, with effect from 1 July 2026. The savings calculations above are arithmetic based on the stated assumptions, not a forecast.

A fun experiment with "alternative investments"

 

Just for fun, I've decided to get into alternative investments. In this case, "alternative investments" means buying a box of Riftbound boosters and holding it for several years to see whether the price appreciates.

Riftbound is currently one of the hottest new CCGs in the market, with a major tournament actually happening over this weekend in Singapore. It is based on League of Legends, I believe. I was taught how to play this game a few months ago and found that the gameplay is quite simple, but the competitive strategy can go really deep.

At the moment, Riftbound is still an affordable game with a decent starter box at about $25. Players tend to be more about enjoying the game rather than collecting rare and premium cards, although there are cards costing over $1,000 USD, just like Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon. What's important to me is that I can still buy the first Origins set in English at a reasonable price, something I couldn't do with MTG in the 1990s. 

So I guess this blog would be a fun way to track the price of my box of boosters compared to (1) DBS stock and (2) Bitcoin. I see Riftbound as the equivalent of paying for an altcoin. It certainly does not have the stability of Pokémon cards, or the longevity of Magic: The Gathering. If the game dies out in a year, I'll probably suffer a small loss.

While current players disagree with me on the longevity of Riftbound, I've been around to see better games fail in the market, like Legend of the Five Rings and Versus. So I'm effectively betting against myself.

Just for the record, I paid $360 for a box of Origin boosters. 

A DBS stock is $78.65 today. 

BTC is trading at $79,680 when I wrote this article.

For folks who also play the game, I have no intention of opening my box. I have a "pauper" attitude toward collectible card games: get a set of playable starters, find a character my kids and I have an affinity for, then search for free or cheap common cards to build a fun deck to play at home. Collectible cards can teach children strategy, and trading cards can teach them a little about speculation.