This is what privilege looks like

The last blog article did really well, and I hoped it was circulated amongst ACS alumni. It's time to broaden our discussion to explore what privilege is, as sociologists like Teo You Yenn should consider studying it in greater detail. We are so obsessed with poverty and inequality. Still, privilege exists at opposite ends of the spectrum, and greater equality can emerge if we address both privilege and poverty in society.

Singapore was a British colony that gained independence and has a Chinese majority, so it comes as no surprise that Singapore is all about academic excellence, as it is something that both Anglo-Saxons and Chinese are highly valued. Similarly, privilege is centred around schools.

ACS-MGS is just one of the spheres of privilege, but so is RI-RGS and HCI. So, a hypothetical scammer could be from any of these spheres. In that case, it should be fair game for the press to mention schools, because when privileged members of society commit crimes, it's an area of significant public interest.

Consider this imaginary scenario: Suppose a man was caught fornicating with an alpaca in the Kazakhstan steppes. Would it be of great public interest if he also turns out to be the brother of Lady Gaga? At the very least, the news would capture eyeballs. 

How does privilege operate?

Better resources and access - I was privileged enough to give a financial talk at both RI and ACS-I, and I find their campuses to be lovely, far surpassing those of other secondary schools. And what a great privilege for them to have access to me before their O-levels! Other adults pay thousands to listen to me. 

If we can be serious, RI's gap semester is one of the best programs a teenager can access. 

Symbolic Power - Doctors and lawyers who continue to wear their secondary ties are projecting the symbolic power of their brands. The schools I mentioned have ridiculous band power. You think parents will stop their kids from going to ACS because of one Cambodian scammer?

Network Capital - Being part of the right old-boy networks can provide access to lucrative jobs in highly sought-after sectors, such as the finance sector. 

Intergenerational Continuity - Alumni can enrol their children in the appropriate primary school, where it is easier to utilise affiliation bonuses to secure a place in the secondary school. In this sense, RI-RGS is the only privileged sphere that does not grant affiliation any advantages (Thank god!). 

With these four features, privileged institutions can propagate through culture and class.

With these points, I will address the classic defences that privileged friends tend to erect when the news of Finan Siow comes up.

But I did not use my privilege to get to where I am today.

Just because you did not use the networking power of your privilege does not mean that you did not utilise the other aspects of privilege I mentioned here.  If your child is enrolled in your own primary school, you are trying to extend your legacy.  You put ACS in your Tinder profile, you're projecting symbolic power.  However, even if you never exercised any privilege, it still exists as a real option (yes, like a Black-Scholes financial option) that can potentially "come into the money" in the future. 

Why does the journalist not mention the other schools of the other scammers?

Since the other schools are not systems of privilege, the research would not be worthwhile. It is simply not in the public interest to know that a scammer is from Changkat Changi Secondary School if that wer the case. 

The funny thing is that the ACSOBA is doing everything wrong to address the issue. Every day, an older boy of higher status wades into the conflict, which just demonstrates how privileged they are as a group.

If I were in charge of public relations, I'd hire an undischarged bankrupt who is part of the gig economy to discuss why ACS privilege is not a significant issue. 

In my own family, there are at least two ACS alumni who have criminal records. 

Ok, back to my YouTube channel, we are discussing DBS's projection for the Singapore economy in 2040. We are looking at whether SGD will reach parity with USD in this video.

What did I miss out when I refused to enroll into ACS

 

A couple of months ago, this guy who bullied me and a bunch of smaller kids in the landed property estate I grew up in died of cancer. He was about a year older than I was. 

Bullying was quite typical for folks in my generation, and I'm not here to recount my personal trauma or seek pity. The bullying was actually relatively mild compared to what some other kids had - I was shamed because the ET BMX bike I rode was allegedly an imitation. Much more seriously, my bully organised "field trips" and invited his ACS classmates to shoot other kids in the estate. The weapon they employed was an air pistol called a Thunderboy, which shot light blue 7mm pellets from a high-pressure chamber, and it really hurt like hell. 

I was never able to confront my bully.  The karmic burden would have been too much - do I really want to go after someone who has survived multiple bouts of cancer? Apparently, according to his social media, he graduated to organise trips to actually shoot and kill animals in Africa and was a famous shooting coach before he passed on. 

Today, I console myself that my bully grew up to be a nice guy ( but not to the animals he shot ). At least that seems to be the case, given the comments on his Instagram after he passed away.

As I get older, I have begun to count the cost of the bullying I experienced.

The immediate effect of this was that, despite scoring 255 in the PSLE, I qualified for ACS but chose to attend the school next door, Swiss Cottage Secondary School. I told my dad that I don't think I will do well in a brand-conscious environment; they will probably despise me, and I wouldn't be able to go around canvassing for donations every year - it would be awkward. I also played too much D&D to endure those religious sessions in a Methodist school. 

As I got older, I began to realise what a terrible mistake it was to avoid a branded institution just because of a small roughing up I experienced as a kid. I met fund managers, who are ok people, and they told me that it was much easier to get a foot in the door because they also have an ACS senior in the industry. 

Worse of all, I started to meet friendly and warm people who came from ACS. NJC in my year "Headhunted" their head prefect, who became student council president for my year and is an all-round great guy, and I have since met the alumni of their wargaming clubs who are keeping one of my hobbies alive today. This realisation hurt most of all: there are great people from ACS with whom I could have connected really well if I had chosen that school. 

So parents now know this - while every school is a good school, not every old boy association can open the same doors for you. 

Reading books about the sociology of privilege and class confirmed my suspicions even more.

ACS-MGS is a system of privilege, not unlike elite high schools in the US, such as St. Paul's or Eton in the UK- it exists to solidify privilege among a particular group of Singaporeans. To do so, invisible barriers need to be erected. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would term this the habitus of ACS. So, donation cards, a certain cockiness, big cars at the drop-off area, strange religious rituals, and a great-sounding English accent actually keep smart Channel 8 heartlanders out. 

Where ordinary Singaporeans do gain entry, they are likely to be relatively intelligent and ambitious, which helps maintain the sense of privilege associated with the institution. And I have evidence - Look no further than the AL score differentials between affiliated primary schools and everyone else. You want access to this old boys' club, you need to be either generally speaking, very smart or very rich.

So now with a neutral perspective, someone asked me what I thought about election candidate Jeremy Tan, who performed exceptionally well in the last election. 

As impressive as Jeremy Tan is, his ACS credentials can provide me with a specific insight into how to approach this class of very prominent men. Imagine different men from different schools. If a boy's school is exposed to materialism and wealth. A subtle shift happens.

A boy will either be very chill and classy because he is old money, or he will literally die trying to make sure that he does not land at the bottom of the totem pole the next time the alumni meet.

So what happens? 

We can express this mathematically!

I spoke about an old equation called the Merton share, where the investor's risk appetite is represented by a variable that looks like an inverted y or gamma. In most cases, this variable is approximately 3; we tend to be risk-averse and take only a third of the risk associated with the optimal equity portfolio.  Seasoned investors have a gamma of about 2. Individuals who are confident or very cocky, such as Sam Bankman-Fried, tend to have a gamma of 1. 

For every Jeremy Tan who excels in crypto and comes from ACJC, you will find ACS alumni like Finan Siow, featured above as a Cambodian scam operator, and Mitchell Ong, a financial advisor turned murderer.

All men exhibit a high willingness to take risks and a gamma tending towards 1. As lambda tends towards 1, all I can say is this: 

The best is yet to be, but the worst is yet to come. 

So, if you ask me whether Finan Siow should not have been given the ACS label when his buddies are all criminals, I would say, for the reasons I stated in this article, that I support what the editor (probably an RI boy-troll from a rival privileged habitus) did.

However, my ACS pals do not need to feel aggrieved - so long as the old boys' network continues to nurture the cultural and social capital of the alumni, this is something to be proud of. None of the neighbourhood schools can do this, not even PM Wong's school. But RI and Chinese High networks come close. 

Okay, let's digress to my YouTube channel, where I'll be talking about STI reaching 10,000,  which can be accessed here. Enjoy!

No one will have kids that will end up in other people's lunchbox

I put up this article on my FB and questioned why the mainstream media is celebrating the Liangs' efforts to get out of the education arms race in Singapore. People were very puzzled about my position, so I decided a blog article was in order.

You can access this article here.

In summary, the article discusses the Liangs who left Singapore for Thailand and later Malaysia. Their daughter can barely cope with the education system here, so they decided to leave the system. After leaving the system, the Liang kids thrived, and the daughter got the world's highest Maths score under the iGCSE system. The mainstream media views this as vindication of their decision to pursue an alternative lifestyle.

Like most readers, I praise the Liangs for taking a bold move to exit the system here. If the article had merely mentioned the steps they took to leave and how they managed their lifestyle elsewhere, I would have been fine. 

But the Liangs deserved a fair bit of opprobrium for leaving the education arms race only to try to win it in a different environment. So losing under Singapore's regime is bad, but winning in another regime is great. And it's worse that mainstream media is trying to celebrate this fact. 

So the moral of the story is - It's clear that you can take a person out of Singapore, but you can't take Singapore out of the person. 

To elaborate on my point further, let's talk about what a lunchbox is in the context of the Korean blockbuster Squid Game. 

In season, the contestants came out with the concept of a lunchbox. A lunch-box is a loser that gets beaten up and designated as a sacrifice so that everybody else can advance into the next level of the Squid Game. In the show, the contestants drew lots and managed to find a lunchbox, but the person refused to play the sacrificial lamb and committed suicide, leaving the group to hunt for another sacrifice to clear the level. 

This is a potent metaphor for our education system today. 

No parent will voluntarily produce a child to become another child's lunchbox in our education system. I have relatively average kids that I love to death, and I'm broadly aware that my kids are up against kids of assortatively mated couples, like that sweet couple who are both summa cum laude in law school and lovingly texting each other as fellow JLCs (they might still ad this blog)  or the kids of my two professors who fell in love in SMU. It goes without saying that I have a financial arsenal prepared for my kids to survive in the future economy, because, otherwise, I'm not playing this Squid Game, either.

You see, the problem with the Liangs is that they left the Squid Game only to participate in another one where their kids can emerge winners, and our mainstream press wants to celebrate them for it. The Liangs know it's not fun to be the lunchbox, but it's fine to play a game where someone else, in the international iGCSE system, plays the lunchbox instead.

Suppose the newspaper article describes a family that left mainstream education, and now the kids are working in a circus or have successful careers as windsurfers. In that case, it is absolute freedom and a true moral victory against the Singapore system. You escape the arms race into a totally different thing that might not even be a race.

This is why parents should be rightfully upset about the article. To a certain extent, unless our kids are going to be President's Scholars, we volunteered for reasons of our own to keep playing this Squid Game in Singapore and risk letting our kids become the lunch boxes of other kids. I play because it's not that bad to be 50th percentile in Singapore. 

Claiming to stop playing the Squid Game and then proceeding to win it somewhere else is the most incredible hypocrisy — and ultimately the MOST Singaporean thing to do!

I still have a nagging cough after my flu episode, so I'm not producing videos at 3 times a week yet. My latest video summarises the different positions on investment-linked policies.

Enjoy!

Lost a week of work due to a nasty flu

 

The worst thing about the flu is that I lost my voice, so course previews, a singing course try-out and the making of YouTube content would have to stop temporarily. Of course, having a low-productive week due to my illness is no joke. 

So I don't have much to talk about this week. I'm in the middle of a book on Culture that I will review next week. 

Otherwise, before I recovered, I was able to produce this video for your enjoyment. 

Better material should be headed our way this upcoming week. 

Lawyers vs Engineers

 

Unfortunately for me, my flu lasted longer than a week, and I have to do the unthinkable: stop creating videos because I have no voice. I can't sell courses either, as my previews last 2 hours and will make my recovery even slower. So my YouTube video is just injecting shorts at a rate of once a day until I am ready to create videos again.

But this means that I can create a blog article in the middle of the week, so today I'm going to talk about possibly the best book about China vs the US at the moment, which is Breakneck by Dan Wang.

Dan reframes the entire contest between two superpowers not as a struggle between Capitalism and Communism, but as a contest between an engineer-led society versus a lawyer-led one. China's engineer-led approach can uplift millions out of poverty, and decision-making is quick. But literal-minded engineers can also mess up terribly and lead to atrocities, like the One-Child and Zero-COVID policies. In contrast, the US is a nation being led by lawyers, and while checks and balances are outstanding in theory, lawyers tend to obstruct the good and the bad. It's clear that the US needs physical infrastructure badly, but gridlocked politics make it resemble a society in infrastructural decline. Dan's conclusion is that instead of focusing on their rivalry, both superpowers can learn from each other. China can build more checks and balances and give people a bigger voice in how things are done. The US can afford to remove red tape and ramp up its construction powers.

I can understand why Singapore has done well so far. 

We've balanced the lawyer and the engineer well. We were ruled by a lawyer during the LKY years, but he worked well with engineering types, and we were very much of an engineered society in the 60s to the 80s. Amazingly, Lee Hsien Loong, a mathematician, actually created a more consensus-driven society along with the support of lawyers like K Shanmugam. 

But what kind of a function is required to emphasise the lawyer or the engineer as and when needed? Singapore is driven mainly by economists. Utilitarian calculus and cost-benefit analysis are necessary to understand how to reform the rules for continuous innovation and improvement. This is how nation-states evolve beyond the engineer-lawyer tradeoff. 

If a society can transcend lawyer-engineer duality with strong economics, then we will need to understand societies that do not excel in either field, nor are they sound engineers or lawyers.

It's not too hard to find societies that suck at building or creating order. But I want to talk about the case of Europe, which is in severe decline. Just look at the French and how their government is collapsing in front of our eyes.

While politically incorrect, these are Philosopher societies. So much navel gazing and theorising that society is crippled from building and unable to stop things like strikes and crimes. A historian might get a brain aneurysm reading this. Still, my theory on why the Roman Empire fell is that when the Romans conquered Greece, they fell in love with Hellenism, adopted Greek Gods, and, as a result, became enamoured with ethical questions about virtue, happiness, all the humanistic shit that can't put food on a table or jail a tyrant. 

The Roman Empire fell because it got woke. 

For folks who are curious about China and frustrated with the unbalanced reporting in The Economist or various propaganda organs coming from the mainland, I would say Dan Wang is the best read so far.

This blog has written about Red Roulette by Desmond Shum. 

Another excellent book on China is by Keyu Jin called The New China Playbook.

Thoughts on Unretirement

 

Recently, the word "unretire" has been gaining some traction in the mainstream press. So I'd like to talk further about my own personal struggles to unretire. For the past 12 years, I have protected my weekday 9-5 hours, but I've always felt that if I found something meaningful, I would gladly trade them off for good money and some valuable experiences in my life. 

However, I was never successful in doing it.

My first attempt was to start my legal practice as an associate, but it was quickly upended when my Graves' disease came back after 14 years, and I lost so much weight I thought I had cancer. The following April, I ceased renewing the license. Even today, I have another law firm willing to offer me a seat if I paid for my insurance, but I prefer to hold back until I can find a meaningful file to work on. 

My second attempt was some kind of Technology training attachment with financial institutions. I took multiple technical and aptitude exams, and DBS found my results interesting enough to ask me to apply to their teams. However, I was bummed out after the personality test rounds. So technically, I failed the personality tests. 

My most recent attempt was the AIAP, where I submitted an entire machine learning solution to qualify for the final rounds. However, the finals were tough, and I had to compete against professional developers, so I did not manage to be eligible in the end. 

The AIAP will serve as the template for companies to determine how to hire new candidates in the future. Technical assignments are challenging; you have to present and defend your solution, and finally, work in a team under high pressure. Even the rejection from the program felt really good because it explained what went wrong with my solution and how it could have been improved. Over the short term, my ready-made code base can be used to crunch any data. Still, in the long term, my lack of proper software development skills, such as basic Git use, and my incessant use of ChatGPT to debug code probably lost me the traineeship, as there are younger professional developers who want deep-skilling in AI. 

At this juncture, I want to compare my positive experience of being rejected by the AIAP with the negative experience of scraping through my ACLP training. ACLP training is highly contrived. I always have to be forced to teach something in a particular way, then I would parrot a few moves to ensure that I meet the bare minimum non-negotiable objectives to pass. Even a pass feels very inauthentic because I know none of my paying customers would pay me to behave this way in a real course. 

( Does passing the CMFAS papers feel the same way? )

Anyway, I look forward to seeing what will happen to all the Ah Beng ACTA and ACLP trainers next year after the reforms. SkillsFuture can only pay for a narrow range of courses that are mapped to employment outcomes. This means I no longer need to obtain an ACLP as a defensive manoeuvre in case another investment trainer finds a way to secure government support for teaching an investment course. My preferred scenario is that all investment training receives no government funding, allowing us to compete in a fair arena. 

Where trainers need to prepare individuals to qualify for government support, many trainers will become jobless after the changes next year. 

Anyway, I can't dwell on all my failed attempts to unretire, because my gigs pipeline is healthy with a new semester in Poly coming up. Also, unlike most folks trying to unretire, personal finances are not my key motivation. I am sad that I cannot try for the AIAP again in the next round because the tech scene is changing faster than we can learn about it. The old Machine Learning algorithms are great, but the world has moved on to LLMs and Agentic AI.  I really need to find a way to break down my investment lab sessions into an interaction between different AI agents. If you know of a good course for that, please let me know.

There are no new videos as I've completely lost my voice after a nasty bout of flu. But at least one set of slides for my next video is already done. 

My channel will release one YouTube short a day until I can make videos again.

Celebrating 20 years of Growing Your Tree of Prosperity !!!

Today, on 5th October 2025, this blog celebrates its 20th birthday!

And what a ride this has been.

When I started out on this blog in 2005, I had just published my first book, and I needed a platform to promote the sales of my first-ever product. Along the way, I turned the blog into a diary where I share my thoughts on personal finance and some musings on living in a modern, fast-paced society in Singapore. 

Along the way, I achieved financial independence, made my first million, attended law school, and inadvertently became an investment trainer, despite initially thinking it was just a side gig. Now, in my latest incarnation, this blog has morphed into a small personal finance YouTube channel. 

The financial markets have also experienced significant growth over the past 20 years. On 5th October 2015, the STI stood at 2091.91, and as of today, it is 4,411.95. 

At this point, the evolution of my media presence continues. It does not take a genius to figure out that blogging is no longer as cool as it once was, and many of the bloggers who began this journey with me twenty years ago are no longer in operation today. A new generation of content creators has now taken over on platforms like TikTok. 

To celebrate this blog's birthday, I have finally agreed to pay for my CapCuts Pro subscription using the blog revenue I have just collected, and I have launched my second mini-course on the Journey to becoming a Millionaire. Hopefully, the video quality will be better as I have added noise reduction and audio normalisation to my videos. 

As for this upcoming week, I have no previews of the videos I will post, but the following 2-3 videos will be related to the SGX Next 50 mid-cap stock counters.

Are there any valuable insights or narratives from this twenty-year-old journey?

As we get older, we can only connect the dots in hindsight.

My interest in personal finance was built up the old-fashioned way, through rigorous examinations and taking a leap of faith into buying stocks after stubbornly thinking that unit trusts provided better diversification.

My book was published to prove to some people that publishing a book can be easy if a person puts their mind to it - it is not some kind of dramatic hero's journey that animates others. 

Musically, Growing Your Tree of Prosperity was written as a "diss track". It was self-published for shits and giggles. But little did I know that it would only reach the non-fiction bestsellers list at 10th position for just one week, which is a ridiculously terrific win for a rookie author. 

The blog was born because there is power in putting thoughts into words. 

Along the blog's evolution, I was swept up in BigFatPurse's grand attempt to "unionise" financial bloggers and get us together for drinks and parties. 

We even incorporated a small, but very profitable company together called BigScribe. In its early days, BigScribe organised paid financial seminars which sold out at every event, which led me to seriously consider the possibility of becoming an investment trainer after I was admitted to the bar. 

I've been an investment trainer for nearly 7 years, graduating over 700 students across 39 training batches. This is longer than any IT job I have previously held. 

So moving forward, where am I headed next?

For one thing, many attempts to unretire have failed. When I tried to become an associate with a small firm, my Graves' disease returned, and I was only able to get off the medication yesterday. This year, both attempts to secure a training internship in AI were unsuccessful. I will share details when the report arrives later next week.

But we live in a brave new world, and so long as there are SkillsFutures credits and we can get paid to attend full-time courses, we can become anything we want to be. 

However, at this moment, I feel old and tired, having not travelled for two years, as I also play a minor caregiving role for my mum. I will aim to complete all my courses and part-time obligations.

Thereafter, I will attend some singing voice and vocal projection courses. 

Maybe you'll see me on Golden Age Talentime next!