Growing your Tree of Prosperity is an introductory investment guide written specifically for Singaporeans who wish to take their first step towards financial independence.
Saturday, January 31, 2026
Levelling up before the Year of the Fire Horse
Thursday, January 22, 2026
Malaysia will not be cheap forever, you know...
The first major mistake was booking the hotel directly. KSL charged me $120 SGD for one night for a superior room with two beds. It included breakfast, albeit a really bad one, valued at about $40 SGD for two pax. The experience at Tower 1 KSL was very negative as the wifi did not work well, a power socket could not charge my phone, and there was barely any hot water, even at the hottest setting. But it's only one night, so I can soldier through it.
The second mistake was eating the usual at Meng Meng Duck. We ordered a meat platter, some hot-and-sour vegetables, and even shared a plate of rice. The total bill was $104 MYR, which is quite high for an essential meal for just one person.
The third mistake was ordering a stingray in the area outside KSL. There's been a change in management, and a boisterous Chinese lady has been calling the shots. The food is no longer undercooked and quite tasty, but one medium stingray, some kangkong, and two bottles of mineral water cost is $110 MYR. And the entire place is so absurd that a family was playing firerackers in the midst of the open-air eatery! I would be fine, but it really annoyed the hell out of the stray cats in the area, and no one stopped them.
So basically, if you don't manage your spending well in JB, even with the mighty SGD, JB can be expensive sometimes. The damage from one night's stay is equivalent to almost a week's rent I collect from my property there.
Is the experience still cheaper than SG? Sure, but in SG, I stay in a house I own and know where to get $2.80 chicken rice.
When Singaporeans think about investing in JB, there are definitely places heating up near Bukit Chagar, and some FIRE enthusiasts consider Malaysia a retirement destination. Heck, in my lessons, my students almost always do the sums to work out how much it costs to survive in KL each month.
But we need to think about second-order effects as well. With better transport links, more Malaysians will want to work in SG, and to prevent them from doing so, salaries need to go up across the board for service staff, which will impact how much Singaporeans enjoy their weekend trips.
In time, the JB discount will shrink, and Singaporeans will question whether the hilarious bad service staff who can't even count change is worth the trouble, why the jacuzzi's water is lukewarm, or why someone is throwing firecrackers within 2 metres of me while I'm eating an overpriced sting ray.
All these problems will come home to roost. And don't get me started on the oversupply of property coming to JB soon.
Ok, now let's turn to my content creation this week. I don't have a new video, but I have a collaboration with the Financial Coconuts on The Assembly Place IPO. Enjoy!
Saturday, January 17, 2026
In which I present a useful framework to understand one's personality?
The OCEAN model is best in class because each factor, Extraversion, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Openness to New Experience and Neuroticism, can be traced to a physical structure of the brain.
I'm quite familiar with my own personality here. I'm highly disagreeable and justly more conscientious than my peers. I should do ok with money matters, as I enjoyed being rude to financial advisors. They are not as well-trained as I am, and when I buy term and invest the rest, I really invest the rest.
c) MBTI - Also available in many places online
The MBTI does not need to be strongly validated by psychologists. The power of MBTI is that it maps to an easily identifiable stereotype that HR professionals can use. It is also quite dynamic and contextual.
I tested ESTJ when I was 18, and I continue to be very data-driven and empirical, but I was raised by N, so I am quite intuitive and trust my gut before I make a trade so over the years, I shifted to ENTJ, and now as I get older I become more antisocial and AI rates me an INTJ when it reads my blog. So I pay more attention to ENTJ weaknesses, like being blunt, when I read notes on social media.
Today, I still identify more with ENTJ, but I'm less reckless with age and still enjoy hanging out more than my friends, who are getting more and more reclusive over the years.
In this layer, you will find many alternative models that generate significant revenue for consultants like DISC, Gallup StrengthsFinder, and Emergenetics. I have done them all and conclude that it's profitable to do this.
d) Enneagram
If you can accept MBTI and its lack of a variable to include neuroticism and how it shifts from context to context, then you will have no problem using a simple 9 personality archetype system like the Enneagram.
For me, I'm a type 3 Performer that is gradually shifting to a type 5 Sage because I'm an investment trainer. I don't find Enneagram particularly useful, but it's good for cocktail conversations.
You will also find other fun diversions like Kingdomality in this layer. Also, for folks who are into philosophy, some questions, like whether you tend to be a Stoic or an Epicurean, can reside in this layer too.
e) Bazi - Chinese Metaphysics
As we reach levels where models can hardly be validated by science or even conventional logic, why would someone like me enjoy analysing my Bazi?
If you follow Bazi experts like Joey Yap, you will notice that Chinese Metaphysics have evolved from fortune telling into life coaching, so Joey Yap videos are as fun to watch as TED talks or presentations from McKinsey Consultants. Also, I think it's very hypocritical to challenge Chinese metaphysics and believe that stock prices will bounce off a resistance level or any projection from an economist.
But I have a deeper rationale that might astound even Joey Yap - I use LLMs to analyse my Bazi, and I suspect that AI has somehow trapped my writings and content in its training models, giving the readings with an eerie accuracy that a human astrologer couldn't possibly predict. I will provide more content on this on the Chinese New Year, but here's just a small snippet.
According to Bazi, my favourable element is Earth, my unfavourable element is Fire. And throughout my decade of life, investments with an Earth theme have always done well for me, despite years of underperformance. I held AIMS APAC REIT until I have my full capital returned to me in the form of dividends. And yet, even when I identified Palantir as early as during my time in IDA, when it first came to town, invested in it early, and participated in its IPO, fate intervened to prevent me from making real money from it.
I would not use Bazi to make specific investments, but my Earth element ensures I will always hunt for a margin of safety, steady dividends, and a low beta in my portfolio. Even when I invest based on trend-following algorithms, which is a Fire endeavour, my algorithm has led me to commodities like Lithium (Metal or Earth investment), which has made me the most money.
Even if you discount the predictive power of metaphysics, there are two practical applications of metaphysics. You can identify a stance in the way you live your life. Earth is defensive, patient, long-term and trundles along slowly. Also, as you identify your elements, you begin to arrange events in your life into a more coherent framework to understand the meaning of your existence.
I'm still not at the point of paying for expensive consultations, but I strongly urge you guys to just try it out for fun with LLMs. I intend to do a more specific article on how to do this with a paid version of ChatGPT.
Depending on your culture, you would also find Western Astrology in this layer, which I intend to play with soon enough.
Conclusion - Build your stack
In summary, I am proposing a much more open-minded approach to understanding your personality so that you can make better decisions in life and derive more meaning from the events that happen to you.
You can use some hints on where to find these personality tests, and do share with me how things go.
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Dividends and Dopamine, that other D&D I play
Capital gains may create a different chemical cocktail in the brain, which may explain the stubbornness of dividend investors and why it's not as simple as telling them to sell parts of an ETF to generate synthetic income.
Monday, January 12, 2026
I survived a nightmare scenario for CDP investors
So the TL;DR of the story is: if a dividend is late, check the Direct Credit Scheme for the account; if it is suspended, just re-activate it using the bank account it was previously tied to.
But the story is not over.
Before I even received my dividend, CDP decided to conduct a KYC check on me. Initially, I wrote back in anger, asking whether KYC was a prerequisite to re-establish my DCS, as it felt like a punishment when the processing mistake was theirs.
At the moment, I submitted all my KYC documents as I did not want to delay subsequent payments, but that took at least 2 man-hours to generate my pay slips and bank statements.
So all-in-all, 2026 has been an administratively tough year because my dividend pipeline broke.
I have no idea what would happen if the investor is an old boomer who suddenly finds his cash flow cut off and would need to go online to re-establish the link.
Thursday, January 01, 2026
It's 2026 ! Happy New Year everyone !
So right now I'm waiting for Joey Yap to release details on his projections. Joey Yap is my favourite astrologer because he sounds more like a management consultant than a Bazi expert. His advice is also good, even if you do not believe in astrology - it's probably the same thing that a business mentor will say.
The preview for me is that Rats need to experience some kind of change and pivot in 2026, while Tigers have strong academic luck. So I expect to find more creative ways to spend my SkillsFutures in 2026. I should also be attending a talk on PhD programmes in SMU.
Anyway, here's to a fantastic 2026, and I will catch up with you for more updates over the weekend.
Wednesday, December 31, 2025
End of one month of not reading tech or business titles
As I spent the greater part of the year immersed in technology and finance books, I would now go through December intensely, reading things I would not usually read for my work. And the experience is actually more negative than I expected, even though I would enjoy a few fantasy novels. Still, then I would veer into the unknown, and last year I found this book, The Singapore Grip, by J. G. Farrell, really dull.
So this year, I will detail three books I did not enjoy, but I suspect some readers of my blog might find them worth reading.
1) I'm not lazy, I'm in energy-saving mode by Dancing Snail
This book's success is probably based on a single idea. Introverts read, but introverts are not as valued in the real world as extroverts. So let's make introverts feel good about themselves.
I finished this book in one day because it's mostly pictures and someone sharing inane thoughts. South Koreans are so stressed that a particular genre of cosy self-help is emerging to save some stressed workers from the toxic cultures they are stuck in.
Authors in Korea can make a lot of money by simply telling everyone it's okay to be like that.
Maybe the working title of my next book should be My PSLE grades are shit, but I also want to eat Chwee Kueh.
2) To the Moon by Jang Ryu Jin
When I read a fictional story about cryptocurrency, I expect it to have a pretty shitty ending, with the crypto crashing and dreams and friendships getting dashed. It would be a moral lesson for the reader.
So imagine my shock that the book actually has a good ending with a plausible reason to exit ETH at its peak, and everyone lives happily ever after that.
I was initially afraid this would be used as marketing collateral for the next wave of shitcoin crypto schemes, but I realise that crypto bros and incels might be too dumb to read a work of fiction to understand its value.
Still, if you happen to be a deluded crypto bro who loves talking up shitcoins in your Tinder dates, this book is for you.
3) The Passengers on the Hankyu Line by Hiro Arikawa
It's not wise to judge a book by its cover.
But I can judge a book by the hefty advance, and the author gets to write a work of fiction.
My favourite local book this year is The Original Daughter by Jemima Wei.
Just buy and read this for 2026. If you are very giam then wait for the Culture Pass to be enabled for local books.
See you tomorrow night for my article on 2026!
Thursday, December 25, 2025
Personal update as I hit my 51st birthday
But as of late, whatever I have planned for 2026 is already in progress. I'm definitely winding down all my initiatives as I'm already around the 2/3rd mark of my life. I currently see three medical specialists - one for my diabetes, which I forcefully transitioned into insulin jabs to reduce my dependence on my drug cocktail, one for thyroid eye disease and now I have physio sessions to deal with my frozen shoulder.
a) Financial Markets
This is a rare year where folks who invested locally won big. I could not see it coming at all. Even though MAS had that EQDP planned, no one foresaw that Liberation Day would eventually push funds out of US bond markets to the rest of the world, with Singapore a favoured haven for its stability and strong currency. Valuations are still reasonable, and next year would not be as solid as 2025, so there's some more upside to go, especially for REITs.
I'm one of the few folks who actually agree with DBS's forecast that the STI will reach 10,000 by 2040. I've been a believer even during the years when dividend investing on the Super Terrible Index was considered a "dangerous" thing to do. Now my family has reached a million per capita, thanks to this stubbornness, without a single person holding a "real job".
I tell people that dividend investing in Singapore is a broken clock, but a broken clock can still be right twice a day, and you only need to be right once to get rich.
At around 5,160, I will take some steps to consolidate my assets.
b) Work initiatives
Other than lucking out in financial markets, work has not been great, with lecturing gigs being sporadic and unreliable. Business is also bad in the training field. I expect 2026 to be the worst year ever. Still, I see myself updating course materials to sharpen my proficiency as an investor, incorporating LLMs into them and refining prompts to improve investment results.
In this area, I'm glad I actually did what I wanted to last Christmas: get the ACLP with my Skillsfutures credits.
The big deal in 2025 is that, as my gigs start to dwindle, I was able to create a fully monetised YouTube channel, opening another career possibility as a YouTuber. I'm cautious about advancing this area as I want to work on a more measured pace and build helpful videos once a week, but I can capture 1,000 views in a week. I doubt the investment of time would pay off without sponsors, but I am not willing to work with financial institutions that can give me a unique voice in this space.
c) Learning Goals
I'm not going to make big moves until I get the metaphysical readings right for the Year of the Fire Horse, which augurs a fairly terrible year for me. Right now, I'm enjoying singing lessons and taking them quite seriously. My school is fun, and students will be performing in April 2026, so I want to participate in my first-ever singing concert.
If gigs dry up in 2026, I may pursue a serious course and see whether I can get mid-career support from the government, but this is limited to 2 years for all Singaporeans, and I might want to save it for a rainy day.
d) Hobbies
With singing and content creation, readers of the blog will notice that I've been contemplating quitting D&D for a while. You need to empty the cup before you can fill it with something else. But I don't think that it's time to make such a decision yet - it would be made if my kids have no interest in my hobbies.
In fact, I spent $400 getting the deluxe versions of all three rulebooks and planned to game this holiday season. If the year of the Fire Horse is going to be that bad for me, I need more avenues to destress.
I would talk more about the year ahead next week.
Wednesday, December 24, 2025
Useful instagram channels for you to enjoy this holiday season
As we head towards Christmas, I wanted to share a few Instagram channels I follow that can sharpen our investment savvy over time. I do not zoom into financial channels because I prefer to read to further develop my expertise.
Hence, the channels I love focus on geographical regions I'm interested in.
a) Tim Tiah for insights on Malaysia
Timtiah gives a more accurate view of the Malaysian economy than reading newspapers like The Star or The New Straits Times, which spend too much time on politics. Tim's reporting is very even-handed and paints a relatively optimistic picture of Malaysia. Over time, I suspect Tim's strength lies in his focus on the economy rather than on politics, so Singaporean fans won't be frightened off by UMNO's racial politics.
You can follow Tim here.
https://www.instagram.com/timtiah/
b) Yuan Pu Huang for insights on China
This space is actually getting crowded. Yuan is an interesting channel as he is a scholar who has made it his personal mission to help the Western world understand China a little more. China is too big to analyse as a whole, with Chengdu being a chill place and Shenzhen being way faster than cities like New York, so Yuan is a valuable guide to help us better understand China.
Like all media from Greater China, we have to absorb both the negative press from the West, such as The Economist magazine, and, while I found Yuan quite balanced six months ago, he has recently become more critical of the West and more defensive about China.
Nevertheless, it's not easy to find balanced reporting, and we need to read books by Dan Wang and Hu Anyan to better understand China. This is a lifelong educational process.
Whether you like it or not, China will become more critical to the next generation.
https://www.instagram.com/yuanunpackschina/
c) Nicholas Wu for insights on Indonesia
This channel is a guilty pleasure for me because Nicholas Wu is a seasoned businessman who has experienced a lot in Indonesia, and it's where he voices his frustrations about what it's like to be a Singaporean there.
Singaporeans who want to build their credentials but prefer to do it in Hard or Inferno mode may want to try Indonesia instead of the unusual places like China or the US. It's videos like this that make me grateful for being Singaporean.
https://www.instagram.com/paknicaman/
Why do I like channels like this?
I suspect it's probably a realisation that I've spent most of my career in Singapore and feel like a frog in the well. In hindsight, the most successful Gen X careers involve a long stint overseas.
Would I have been able to generate the same amount of wealth and cruise after age 39 if I had built an engineering career elsewhere? I can speculate. Fortunately for me, I no longer have a need to explore that.
But I want this option for my kids in the future.
Thursday, December 18, 2025
Made a rookie mistake contributing into Medisave this year.
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Letter to Batch 40 of the Early Retirement Masterclass
Dear Students of Batch 40,
It's been a great honour and privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.
We begin Batch 40 with substantial changes to the way we conduct this course – 40% of the course has been overhauled.
The most significant change is the introduction of the Starter Portfolio, a simple 3-stock portfolio designed for beginners and stable. It can provide a reasonable 5% dividend right off the bat while being more robust to interest rate changes. This makes investing a whole lot easier and less intimidating than portfolios built for previous batches.
We also stopped segregating our blue-chip equities exercises from the REIT exercises, combining the STI and SG Next 50 stocks into one category for three levels of factor back-testing. In this exercise, we saw the importance of free cash flow yields and dividend growth in assessing how good a stock counter is.
Also, we experimented with ditching analyst reports in favour of a series of LLM prompts to deep-dive into a particular stock counter. We first have the LLM assess the stock price purely from financial statements, then compare it with analyst reports available online. We concluded that analysts' reports are overly optimistic compared to analyses based solely on reported business results.
Our outcome is a 16-stock portfolio designed to yield about 6.2%, which I am proud to put my money where my mouth is.
As AI developments further disrupt investment training, expect changes to how we conduct our course.
Lastly, Batch 40 will participate actively in the FB group.
Hope
to see you then!
Christopher Ng Wai Chung
Tuesday, December 09, 2025
On rage quitting and understanding when to let go.
Saturday, December 06, 2025
Financial Nihilism is the evil we have to name
As we reach December, I will be slowing down to conduct my course next week and to do some reading this holiday month.
December is now becoming a nice break because my reading hobby is intense for the rest of the year, focusing on serious finance topics. Giving myself a month to catch up on fiction is more utilitarian than practical.
I'm currently two-thirds of the way to Eisenhorn Omnibus. The gateway novel to the Warhammer 40,000 universe. You can access the link here.
Immediately after this, I will start Han Bo Reum's Every Day I Read. I buy some fiction from bookstores every now and then, since someone needs to sustain these cultural spaces in Singapore, right?
As for videos, I only created one video before the holiday began.
I've recently learnt of this term "financial nihilism". In societies like the UK, young people who are locked out of the housing market have given up on financially responsible behaviour and taken on ridiculous risks, like buying altcoins. In Singapore, we don't have a real estate problem because HDB keeps housing affordable. Still, the financial nihilists are usually folks who didn't get the right paper qualifications to do well here, so they get into things like altcoins, NFTs, drop-shipping and even day trading for a living.
The video that discusses this phenomenon will be out tomorrow afternoon:
With no new videos out for the next two weeks, I will be updating this blog more often. In a week, I will be sharing some pretty dramatic changes to my work in investment training if the STI continues to rise.
Sunday, November 30, 2025
What have I been up to lately?
This week, my wife and kids are touring China with the in-laws, so I'm living with my mum while fulfilling my usual training obligations.
Initially, I was busy this week attending talks on AI and fireside chats with the CEOs of three Capitaland REITs/Business Trusts. Still, by the end of the week, I found myself lagging behind on content creation, so I spent most of the weekend creating next week's videos today.
My usual pals are also out of the country, so whatever I wanted to do, I had to do it alone, at least for just this weekend.
Starting tomorrow, I will launch my video on A Little Red Hen, a gem of a tale that can be told to kids as young as 3 years old about the importance of effort in reaping rewards.
Thereafter, on Wednesday, I will post a video on the concept of Core vs. Satellite portfolios.
Finally, my video on the Next 50 Capitaland REITs will be published next Friday.
I hope next week is more interesting for me.
Tuesday, November 25, 2025
Developing a Beginner's Mind
Last week, I started singing lessons with Yuan Meng Asia. I hope this will herald a new beginning, as I will be able to gain some momentum on some initiatives that are different from the various financially related pursuits I have been obsessed with all my life.
But as it turns out, singing is a practical skill for an investment trainer, and I was practising diaphragmatic breathing techniques to reduce stress on my neck muscles during my lessons.
It is also very different to focus on non-cognitive skills for a change. I was pleasantly surprised to find that minor modifications in exhaling can improve singing quality, though I had to endure the discomfort of knowing that my singing is nowhere near the level to compete in a TV competition. Following instructions to the letter is also very challenging, as it depends more on "feel" than on thought, and I'm a long way from developing muscle memory.
For my first lesson, I might have over-stretched myself by selecting Fei Yu Qings Yi1 Jian3 Mei2 as my go-to practice song. In hindsight, I might have chosen something easier, like Radiohead's Creep or Ed Sheeran's Photograph.
Anyway, I have 9 more lessons to go. For those interested in singing lessons, I'm helping my ACLP classmate promote her business.
You can find my school website here: https://www.yuanmeng.asia/
Back to my YouTube Channel, I have one new video up on dividend fund strategies that I dislike :
On Thursday, my video that summarises the final touches to MAS's Equity Markets Review will be out:
Catch you guys over the weekend.
Sunday, November 16, 2025
Videos for the upcoming week
I don't have a lot to talk about this week, but I did manage to create videos for the entire week.
Firstly, I will discuss the latest attempts by Dr Koh Poh Koon to compare CPF-Life with rental income from a piece of property this weekend. I think Dr Koh means well, but there's a better way to present this piece of information:
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Personal Update
It's time for another personal update.
Last month ended bitterly as a classmate from my secondary school just passed away suddenly from pneumonia. I come to the realisation that I've probably expended two-thirds of my life by now, and if I do not make some changes to the way I lead my life, a lot of the effort I've put in so far would come to waste.
It is with these thoughts on my mortality that I slowly enter into my birthday month in December.
At the work level, I suspect things are stagnant and in long-term decline. I have three very small priorities: continuing my training with Dr Wealth, teaching law at Temasek Polytechnic, and a new role with SIAS, which I hope will launch in January 2026. I will do everything possible to maintain this level of work engagement, but I expect 2026 to generate negligible revenues. It is very tempting to pursue a mid-career skills diploma to earn some extra income, but I'm not pursuing it as I believe that in my 50s, my life priorities have shifted.
Of course, this pivot cannot happen without the solid market performance of 2025. Beyond the millionaire per capita status of the family, I've probably had enough capital gains to send my kids to university by now; however, our expenses remain relatively low. I've also used the polytechnic break well to recycle tenants to my family property and even start a monetised YouTube channel.
This peak financial stability opens up new avenues to redesign my life.
My most significant personal breakthrough may be what I suspect is my most foolish personal move of 2025. To exhaust my Skills Future credits, I signed up for the ACLP, a trainer's certification. It was initially defensive as I feared someone might create a WSQ Dividends Investing programme and render my courses unmarketable at its price point. But weeks into the program, ACLP holders had their rug pulled as the government now wishes to tie employment outcomes to SkillsFuture funding. Although my risks disappeared overnight, along with my prospects of monetising the certificate later on.
I really did not enjoy studying the ACLP. The materials do not reflect the current high-tech disruption from AI, and I disagree with most of the material taught, feeling that I was merely parroting instructions to pass my modules.
However, what ultimately won the day was not the certificate, but my classmates. As the environment is not curve-driven, everyone just wanted everyone to make it through, and I've made good friends.
One of my classmates owned a music school, so I made it a point to support her course previews. It was an eye-opener on how tricky the business is once you leave the investing domain. I signed up for 10 private singing lessons, making this the most phenomenal change I've made in my life, targeting Golden Age Talentime as my personal goal in my 50s.
At age 51, my social life has been completely overhauled - I'm now too old to tolerate negativity in my life, and I've tuned out a lot of the noise on my Facebook feed as well. And my hobbies got overturned as well, with my YouTube channel overtaking my gaming and singing, to constantly bring change into my life.
The remaining time I have is to focus on my mum, who had a stroke early this year, and find more avenues to travel with my wife and kids once the opportunity arises.
More updates will arrive in December.
For my YouTube channel, my latest video is on Sabana REIT :
Wednesday, November 05, 2025
This is what privilege looks like
Saturday, November 01, 2025
What did I miss out when I refused to enroll into ACS
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!
Sunday, October 26, 2025
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!