More Claude Coding adventures - Shaping a Portfolio Tracker to track my investments and teach folks Data Analytics

 

It does not take very long after attending multiple courses on Claude Code for me to have the courage to start building some seriously useful apps. But I had to deal with some issues, like the ridiculously high rate at which I'm burning AI tokens, so I turned on OpenAI's ChatGPT to advise on how I can reduce the tokens I'm burning on Claude, and it recommended installing a few skills to lower my usage. In the process, I somehow learnt what a linter is, and I was marvelling at how I could be so far behind in software engineering yet still churning out new Windows programmes at such a rate.

So, armed with a somewhat lower burn rate, I proceeded to create a portfolio tracker that consolidates all my investments in one place (sans the portfolio picks my students make, which I track more religiously) and provides a helicopter view of my investments. So I wrote something that lets me import a CSV file from Yahoo Finance and display all my portfolio positions on one page. 

Immediately, I have to confront the fact that, thanks to the semiconductor rebound, I have too much UMS across all my portfolios. (Believe me, it's a happy problem if you know how UMS has been doing lately)

Then I realised that I'm actually teaching a data analytics class at the Poly, and the same metrics I track are the ones I use, so I started adding a simple dashboard to the programme.

I can't really describe my class's excitement in words when I showed them my programme and explained that they could create it in 2-3 days. I have never taught a subject like this before.

People want to understand the consequences of what they learn in school and why a simple grounding in numbers can make a big difference in their lives.

Even more interesting is the potential for me to now react to my own Poly training materials to create richer and richer interfaces for my programme, so that students can understand how the analytical frameworks work in real life and relate them to making real money.

This weekend, I'm going to stop working on my Portfolio Tracker and start thinking very deeply about a program that can perform an X-ray on any business contract that arrives in my hands or create notes for a new legal judgment. 

If you can dream it, it can happen.

Discover the meaning of your life before you press the "early retirement" button

 

One of the big questions that I'm dealing with is post-retirement issues after FIRE, because no one really has a proper grip on the early retirement beyond financial figures, as successfully completing the FIRE journey is quite rare, and if only a few MBTI archetypes complete it  ( INTJ, ENTJ, ISTJ) even getting advice from folks who completed the journey might not create a complete picture on how to retire early systemically. 

I have always harboured doubts that the answer can be found in books on personal finance, and I think I might even be better off looking at religious or philosophical texts. 

Problems with early retirement are existential issues - they need a deep level of philosophical understanding to decode them. FIRE can barely solve 60% of your issues, as it can probably give you a level of personal satisfaction. But the remaining 30% comes from living a meaningful existence that FIRE cannot bestow. The final 10% is even more elusive, as it relates to psychological richness.

So The Meaning of Your Life by Arthur Brooks is an important read for folks contemplating the completion of their FIRE journey. It contains actionable steps and mental models to help you figure out the meaning of your life.

Very briefly, it comes in three steps.

a) The first step is to connect the dots and figure out how you got here. 

This can be a deeply therapeutic step. For a certain attraction to the FIRE movement comes from my parents' background in retail, when I witnessed them fighting over insufficient sales to pay the rent on the pet shop. I wanted to have passive income even when I was in primary school, constantly asking my dad what the AUD fixed deposit rate was if I had $1M AUD. 

The other issue is that in secondary school, I was a troll, and the crappy humanities and language teachers marked me down because, well, they could, and marks can be awarded on a subjective basis. An English Literature teacher hated my guts so much that I won a Best Actor award and the overall best performance for my class, and he never even delivered a trophy because the top drama class for my cohort year did not study English Lit. ( Felt great delivering that dick slap to him after so many years. )

And I hated my language and humanities teachers, and found solace in mathematics and the sciences. Eventually, passive income became a way to reinforce my inner troll: if I have passive income, I can't be stopped because I have "fuck you" money, and no one can pick on me simply because they have authority over me. My passive income (and legal training, because dividends are not enough without serious legal firepower) makes it very hard to bully me into doing anything.

b) The second step is to figure out where you are going. What is your vector? 

This is hard for me to confront because my career post-FIRE is less well-coordinated or planned than my career pre-FIRE. Financially, I know that I still want more CPF money. But that excuse is wearing thin as I'm about 3xBRS and my SRS is 1xBRS. Why do I need 4xBRS with a five-figure dividend paycheck? I have no idea.

I enjoy teaching, and the subject combinations I have this year are "category-busting," with lessons on law, data analytics, and dividends investing. But do I enjoy teaching, or do I simply enjoy defying expectations?

It's hard to unpack this.

c) Which leads us to the third step: how would I like to impact the world?

The third step is what I think ultimately defines me.

While I play roles in my family, somehow, I do want to leave my students better off than when I started teaching them, so maybe at my funeral, some students will appear during my wake.

That's basically it. To teach, I have to do a baseline level of administrative work that I truly detest; some adult students are just downright mean and entitled, but I see suffering as the price I pay to positively impact students. 

I suspect the most positive impact of Arthur Brooks' book on me is to highlight the centrality of suffering across all religious movements. 

And it's dawned on me that if suffering disappears, as it often does when you complete your FIRE journey, so does the last shred of meaning in your life.

You can pick up a copy of this book here : 

https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Your-Life-Finding-Emptiness/dp/0593545427/ref=sr_1_1?crid=10FXR15I0G33P&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.XCzDKMjRsC8n4CrdvJkWRWnCYQtGhi7GkRW6oham6FwJwnrmJRfViPEZXtXhNzVkEhjCF0_HJu31XXonbsVYuRO2cQLjbnAvHb-0gzh5fLUdKZ6RM0anUsSeyMbM8_JItx2f0Td5rz3tG-GGQjoY9uwtx5NecutVpKiBxy-reztTlwQwXD-J9XYPHkmO4mqhA7AYhqRJRSJcQTM1rA6pT3_LfPJ78Er883qmarQUKk0.pmC_uz3Xu4xVn1FQshBGxmpYto-uOHLtZS3Y6gRHl2I&dib_tag=se&keywords=arthur+brooks&qid=1777127200&sprefix=arthur+brooks%2Caps%2C360&sr=8-1

I have too much time, so I built a productivity app with the help of AI

 

As I begin to clock in certifications from Anthropic on the Claude system, it dawned upon me that the value of knowledge is next to worthless these days, so to stay relevant, or at least to be able to relate to my Gen Z students, I have to go through what they will eventually go through when they hit the work force, which I think is 10x worse than looking for a job during my time. In the early 2000s, most engineers secured a job by their final year of schooling and could enjoy working on their final-year project, with a secure job waiting for them after graduation.

For this current batch of graduates, they need to contend with the uselessness of knowledge and possibly the deteriorating power of signalling conveyed by degree certificates. To remain relevant, they need skills, but to prove that these skills matter, they will need a portfolio of products that need to display to a potential employer. 

So I've decided to join in the fun.

My first practical product using Claude Code in VS Code is a simple To Do List, just to get some initial momentum and make me more efficient on a daily basis, but I want it to be more powerful than the usual To Do lists out there, so I decided to make the application a Bullet Journal. 

But there are three complications :

• I no longer know how to code Windows applications in Python. The last time I did that seriously was in C++ using Microsoft Foundation Classes.
• I don't even understand the Bullet Journaling approach, as the book is quite thick and I've not read it yet. I know it's popular, and some hipster executives love it. But I prefer to pick up new AI programming skills.
• I don't even have the technical skills to write software specifications because I was more of an IT Governance professional.

So here's my strategy: 

I explained the context to Claude and got Claude to create a first draft of a specification, mentioning bullet journal, Python as the only language I know, and the final product as a Windows executable.

It was able to generate a specification which I can read and amend slightly to my taste.

I got Claude Code to generate my program before I took my son to school, and when I came back, my application was ready to be compiled and run.

And it ran, so I suddenly have a private electronic bullet journaling app that tracks daily tasks and lets me strike them off as they get done. My application is actually chock-full of functionality, and I have no idea what it can do in totality, given how little I know about Bullet Journaling.

I've been using the application for a couple of days, and it has really supercharged my productivity. I can list my priorities early in the morning and slowly strike off each task as I go through the day, freeing up my evenings to contemplate how to improve the application. 

On day 2,  I suddenly felt that the program was kinda boring and monotonous, and I wanted every completed task to provide a dopamine rush, so I incorporated nice sounds and confetti into the app, and it made me even more productive as completing a task gave a satisfying "ping". Making this modification was a painless task.

Then I had a crazy idea. 

Why not make the application comply with the "Getting Things Done" philosophy as well, a kind of productivity system that is over 20 years old, which I tried to understand but never had the willpower to turn into a habit?

Fortunately, AI was able to summarise the GTD philosophy, allowing me to consciously get Claude to modify my software to delegate tasks or KIV them. 

And so my Frankenstein application now combines two systems: a Bullet Journal and the GTD philosophy.

You should now be able to see where I am going here. 

For every productivity philosophy or system I learn, I can use it to add features to my program. Over time, the more I use my program, the more bugs I encounter, and the more bugs I can get Claude to fix. 

I think this might be an entirely new way of consuming software. We just dream of what kind of software we want, and an AI builds it for us on the spot. They won't get it right 100% of the time, but you can recode and recompile the software. Over time, the application becomes seasoned and customised for the individual user.

Because I'm focused on personal efficiency, every new system can inspire slight improvements in my application.

My next objective is to incorporate an Eisenhower matrix into each task, labelling it as urgent or important. 

Trade like a Gen-Z ?

 

A powerful read for me in recent months is Generation Desperation by Alexander Hurt, who writes in detail about how he traded his way to over a million dollars and then lost it all within a few weeks. This is a very important book that gives us a glimpse of what Gen Z and younger millennials go through in the era of crypto, r/wallstreetbets and Gamestop.

To be fair, I'm not very sympathetic to the author. He did start out badly, given that his parents are extreme left-wing Americans who are vehemently against paying taxes, so he probably did not get the right kind of relationship with money right from the start. Secondly, he's still quite privileged, having graduated from a top liberal arts college in the US and working as a freelance journalist in France. 

If you have also read I deliver parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, you can clearly see that some people have first-world problems.

The books have a fairly useful way to look at Desperation Capitalism, which I will try to summarise on this blog.

Rule #1 - Make people hungry for more

In Singapore, many financial influencers do this. Flexing successful trades that are multi-baggers while keeping mum about trades that fail. The problem with Gen Z and younger millennials is that the moment they open social media, they are inundated with nothing but financial porn, which raises their risk appetite.  

Rule #2 - Open the gates and remove the guardrails

There are many ways to take on extraordinary amounts of risk in the financial markets. I actually teach one of them - financial leverage. But I teach my students how to moderate their leverage using mathematical skills. The actual amount of leverage allowed is many times the maximum I teach my students. Above and beyond leverage, there are financial options, which can multiply the amounts paid to take up a position if the stock moves in your favour.

Brokers like Robinhood are the gateway to this form of risk-taking. 

Rule #3 - Draw them in with dopamine hits

Apparently, brokers like Robinhood are designed to be more like Facebook and Instagram, which throw out encouraging emojis when a trade is made. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for my constituents, IBKR is intimidating, throwing all sorts of warning messages before a trade can be made. Even worse, it's not easy to generate reminders when dividends are incoming, so thankfully, I have Stocks Cafe to generate the dopamine hits instead.

The rest of the book is unputdownable. The author describes his feelings and inner thoughts as his account reached $1,000,000, and then turned negative once his capital gains taxes were accounted for.

Is the book a cautionary tale about trading for a new generation of investors? 

Should I start a campaign to promote dividends-maxxing, given that younger folks are starting to show up at the DBS AGM?

Here's what effect the book had on me. 

I actually got myself started on options trading after reading this.

With a steady stream of dividends and my homebrew Python code that easily identifies the strongest trends among S&P 500 stocks, I decided to enable options trading on my account to buy 3 out-of-the-money call options expiring in May on the most ferociously trending S&P 500 stocks. My capital was about $1,000.

Within days, I was losing money, currently down about $250 USD.

When learning a new technique, there's always a price to pay for tuition. 

This is definitely not an investment strategy to try first for young people.

Ok, short KL holiday has ended. Back to work!

 

After conducting my last course, I took a spontaneous trip to KL by hitching a ride with my cousin. We spent some time at a slow suburban town of Seremban, where I had wonderful seafood, and then I spent just two days eating like a king and shopping for stuff for my family.

It's been a long while since I was able to travel alone, so I made this a shopping trip for books, stationery, and art supplies. What was surprising was that I was able to spend a decent amount of money, which was kinda rare, so much so that I had to buy a suitcase to get everything back home.

Travelling alone can be a humbling experience. There were moments when I realised that we can't take Singapore for granted. In a thunderstorm two days ago, I had to take the monorail for a short distance between Bukit Bintan and Imbi stations, and the crowds and slow trains made it take me nearly 45 minutes to reach my destination. The top shopping district of Bukit Bintang was not adequately sheltered, and there's a small cottage industry of umbrella vendors selling $10 MYR umbrellas when it rained. 

But what is amazing is the humanity of the crowds. When people are stressed, and public services are down, it's interesting to observe the crowds. And Malaysians are unfazed by delays in their services. Many smiled and retained their sense of humour. I was telling my relatives that if this happened here, a Minister might be hanged by an angry mob. 

Another aspect of this trip was that my cousin had some mobility, and I was able to visit the PJ area, where I chilled at a place that was eerily reminiscent of some Swimming Club in SG, minus the exclusivity and snottiness. I was in a pub eating steak, and they were playing 80s-90s music.

Of course, any trip would not just involve fun and games. I was looking for a partner to take on some small gigs in KL, so that in the future I might be able to work a bit and conduct training, but revenue would be quite low, so this would have to be a hobby for me. 

Anyway, once I get back, work will start to ramp up. 

I have some media work with the TFC gang tomorrow, and I also have a FIRE seminar under SIAS in about 3 weeks. My AI work continues as I need to see whether I can get Claude's code to move my code to the cloud.  

With high gasoline prices, most of my trips will look more like this quick escape into KL. 

Letter to Batch 41 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 41,

It's been a great honour and privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you.

Batch 41 took place in a chaotic age, with the War in Iran heralding a period of flux that can see inflation rise in Singapore, where banks will once again do well, and REITs take a breather, enabling a period of bargain hunting for patient investors who want to build a REIT portfolio for dividend payouts in future years. By now, ERM has stabilised a starter portfolio that accounts for inflexion points in interest rates, balancing banks against REITs to create an oasis of calm for investors.

You can see a starter portfolio of four stocks, which can be optionally expanded to eight in the final portfolio list.  (ERM community members can make a guess as to which stocks belong to this new set.)

The other issue facing the programme is AI disruption. Over the past few weeks, we’ve witnessed major changes in the AI space with Claude and Openclaw potentially demonstrating the ability to massively improve the productivity of a white-collar knowledge worker, and we’ve responded with our own bespoke MD file that encapsulates the skills required to analyse and value a local stock. This file will become part of the community, and students are encouraged to tinker with it and improve it over time to sharpen the analysis of the ERM community as a whole.

An MD file is only the beginning. Over the next 3 months, expect more changes to the program as we invent new tools to make stock picks easier. I’ve already managed to have AI recode our in-house web app, and we should comfortably see it in production before June 2026.

Lastly, I hope Batch 41 will participate actively in the FB group.

Hope to see you then!

Christopher Ng Wai Chung 

Stopping my YouTube channel until further notice

 

For the next few weeks, I've decided I can't sustain my YouTube channel until I satisfy my craving for AI to assist me with my business initiatives. 

Across LinkedIn, people are fairly confused about how to pick up enough AI skills to remain relevant.

This is also a problem I'm struggling with, but it's really worth the struggle. Over the past 48 hours, AI also converted all my course materials into a textbook that may be published in the future.

There are simply too many questions on my mind.

a) What would happen if my industry woke up and started using AI aggressively? 

Will investment courses become more AI-driven or human in character? I think Dr Wealth's position is that investment training will become more narrative-driven and human, but I'm inclined to bet otherwise. But we can advance both agendas in one go, make the course more powerful and intuitive at the same time, while preserving the student's human judgment. I don't really value things like emotions and empathy because they don't make me much money in the markets, but I'm open-minded and willing to change.

b) How will content creation change?

Ideally, I should be so productive that I can work on my gigs and create more content on my channel, but I need to understand how professional content creators integrate the latest AI tools into their channels and whether there's a way to increase revenue at the same time (without generating AI slop). This means I need to watch a lot more YouTube videos to level up my skills in this area. 

c) How do we even start an aggressive campaign to up our AI skills?

Anyone who can crack this can make a lot of money. At the moment, I'm just clinging to Claude Anthropic's courses and trying to get as many certificates under my belt, but what I really crave is to develop several consequential personal projects to learn about agents and level up my course materials. I want to reshape my CV into something a 25-year-old might have, a portfolio of tangible projects and proven results. 

The culmination of all these changes means that I can, at best, focus on my business and gigs in the next quarter while I invest most of my time learning about AI to see how far I can push it. 

And since I barely do any conventional work, there are very few efficiency gains from AI unless I dream up and create new products like simple mobile apps, a personal productivity tool, and at least one D&D module for 4th-level PCs. I'm cognisant that in such a situation, FIRE can lead to complacency as the flow of dividends just provides so much incentive to let the world just pass by. At this point in time, I'm glad that I still have a few gigs to run and would actually be teaching IT to poly students next semester.

If you are a reader and wish to help me out, send me details about when Gen Z are meeting to discuss things like Open Claw or Claude. 

I'd like to join to learn, by osmosis, what these young engineers or computer scientists are thinking.

Using Claude Code to upgrade my business

Last week was busy, even though it was the school holidays, with one SIAS course followed up with a preview. At the same time, I've managed to sign up for classes for Athropic's Claude, which covers a mix of high-level philosophical lessons on incorporating AI into human work and just one technical introduction to Claude Code.

And what such a small difference would have made!

Within 30 minutes of barely understanding how Claude Code worked, I began using it to improve the Early Retirement Masterclass web app.

For reference, here is a screenshot of my old web app, which is still in production for my next course run.

After using about $1 worth of tokens, this is the latest version of my website.

And I've only just begun in website design, and UX is my greatest weakness. It's an area I'm not really interested in learning, and now I have a person who can adjust font sizes and change colours for about $0.30.

But it goes deeper: AI can collaborate with me to improve my website. I initially wanted to incorporate LLMs into my tool to pre-fill the forms my students use. It was the AI that suggested making direct API calls to Yahoo Finance instead.

So no more broken English when students mangle the main business of the stocks they are investigating in our final portfolio reports.

At this stage, every investing trainer needs to ask themselves the question:

What kind of investigation into a local stock can be enhanced by AI, and what kind of judgment call had best be done by human beings? Claude places this under Delegation in their 4Ds AI framework. 

My program has a fully fleshed-out Markdown file to automate stock valuation. Here's one of many paragraphs produced for YZJ Financial Holdings.

I've designed the analysis to rely solely on downloaded financial statements and avoid referencing human analyst reports until the last step. I find that such reports are superior because they are more willing to make sell calls and price a stock as brutally and realistically as possible.

The old web app will still be used in next week's Batch 41 program. The new web app will be deployed to the cloud after the course. 

Finally, putting such powerful tools to work for any business or solopreneur has implications for the economy. I prefer to wait for these social scientists to think through the implications of this. There are just too many applications I'm dreaming of to do any navel-gazing on jobs, governance, and policy implications.

I only know that dividends can be converted into AI tokens, which can lead to larger businesses and more passive income, enabling better AI tools and more tokens, provided you are ready to retool yourself as a dreamer.

The time has come to be a maker and not a taker.

Students can refer to Dr Wealth for a refresher.

Anyway, if you are wondering why I've not been creating new content. 

The above is the reason why.

Would you bet on CS salaries over the next 10 years ?

 

I recently turned down a bet, but I felt it was an interesting one worth sharing here.

In an age of AI disruption and the over-hiring of software engineers over the past few years, my friend offered me a bet that, after 10 years, the salaries of Computer Science graduates would not keep pace with Singapore's inflation rate.

That's a very nice bet that if we have some kind of Polymarket in Singapore, I think readers of this blog can give it a try to see whether they are right.

Initially, I felt that a 10-year horizon was too long, and I actually offered the same bet with a 3-year horizon, but my friends refused to pick it up. So we ended in a stalemate.

So here's the funny thing. If we kept the 3-year horizon, my friend has a good chance of winning the bet because the NUS CS grad salary actually fell from 2024 to 2025. Tech overhiring is real. But if we tried a 10-year horizon, my odds would increase tremendously, simply because wage growth here exceeds the inflation rate. ( In small part due to the MAS approach to manage the SGD )

And I can go on. Some economists believe that the demand for software engineering would actually shoot up over the next few years because of this theory known as Jevons Paradox. With IT agents and cheaper tokens, many people will come to believe they can spin off companies and develop new SaaS solutions using an army of coding agents. One possibility is that a huge industry of software engineers is required to pick up the mess. Another is the rise of an agent maestro, a totally new career that requires domain expertise and software engineering skills. I strongly believe in this thesis because even Sheng Siong is looking to hire SWEs.

So after some examination, I think this is a good bet for me, provided we can narrow this down to NUS salaries. If we expand this to the median CS salary, there will be a serious problem because that represents a CS degree over 10 years. If the Arts faculty launches a Bachelor of Arts in Artificial Intelligence (which I consider an inevitable move to keep humanities relevant), do I need to include the income of an Arts major?

But at the end of the day, 10 years is too long. 

A good bet does not need to be financially significant, but it should exact a psychological cost or an actual ego boost.

I suspect the bet was set up because there was some animus against CS grads on my friend's part, and I can't provide an ego boost by losing because I'm basically a freelance hobo, but I also cannot gain an edge if I win. My only mischief is that I actually like CS grads because they debugged my trading algorithms and upped my Sharpe ratio from 1.2 to 2.

I think a better bet would be to consider the future of CS grads against some kind of Compliance career, which I think lies at the root of this animus. But this is not something I care to take up because I actually benefited a lot transitioning from IT support to IT governance. Harsh truth: Society does reward the box-tickers in the corporate world. 

I had more pay and less work.

The worthlessness of box-tickers in the corporate world is amply discussed in cultural anthropologist David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, and believe me, there's no way their remuneration is going down in the age of AI; they will start gaining expertise in AI governance and find some way to become consultants in some ISO-676767 AI certification - if ever to keep being a pain the ass for hapless engineer.

But the rage could be philosophical. 

In Ayn Rand's philosophy, I suspect she loves CS grads as much as I do because they seem closer to the hero in her books, like John Galt or Hank Rearden. But in her novels, compliance professionals are the hyenas and parasites; what have they produced other than getting in the way of the people who do the real work? 

While I'm not betting on this, I have secured teaching stints in both the Law and IT departments at a Polytechnic, and I'm a parent, too. So I might want to see how starting salaries for lawyers and CS grads will evolve over the next few years.

So expect some tracking on this blog moving forward.

Happy Chap Goh Meh !

 

I had to miss out on a Valentine's Day post because of the intensity of my marking workload and grappling with changes in how investment courses are conducted in the age of Agentic AI. But since today is Chap Goh Meh, which is the Chinese equivalent of Valentine's Day, I shall dispense with dating wisdom on this blog today instead.

Clearly, the context in the dating space is grim, as Singapore faces an all-time-low TFR of 0.87. I'm not sure whether it's coincidental that markets are at an all-time high. But the dating market is already quite broken.

a) Maybe it's time to ditch dating apps

As I consume a lot of social media poison on Instagram, I sometimes get hilarious video snippets that explain what happened on their dates. And Gen Z guys on dating platforms these days are losers. Insisting on splitting the bill is fine, but more importantly, not being able to articulate career goals and bragging about commercial pursuits that mark you as a loser, drop-shipping or crypto trades.

I think there are many good guys out there, but maybe a dating app isn't the best place to find a guy. I still believe that to find guys with a high IQ and high conscientiousness, you need to search in institutions of higher education, then let assortative mating take care of itself. 

b) Singlehood is the biggest hurdle a guy needs to overcome

Middle-aged wives can be brutal. When I was talking about online dating and younger Gen Z norms, they brutally reminded me that men these days no longer compete with each other; they compete against singlehood - and singlehood is winning.

So basically, a lot of women realise that singlehood is better than getting attached to a guy with the same attractiveness score, so they stay single and have a good life dodging kids and domestic stress. 

I'm not sure that this argument applies just to women. While I know a lot of guys who can't apply themselves and have no sensible way to navigate their lives, I think single men have plenty of enjoyable options, too, with AI tools and entertainment. Fembots are a few years away, if not here already.

It was Boomer male who invented the phrase "Why buy the whole cow when all you want is just a glass of milk?"

c) There are a lot of beautiful women, but only a few successful men.

If I can advise Gen Z men, this is something I would say. Actually, if you are logical about it, this is a completely objective statement that is not misogynistic at all. 

First of all, we have to accept that women are pickier, so their subjective standards of success will always lead to a smaller population of men, whereas men's flexible standards of female beauty can be quite wide, so the population of beautiful women will always be men who meet women's standards of success.

What does it mean? Everything that I've been talking about. Guys need to work on themselves and climb the ladder of success. 

Many beautiful women are waiting for them once they reach the top.

Just ask the PropertyLim people.

Happy Chap Goh Meh!

Why no new content since the new year?

 

Ok, I've been unexpectedly busy for the Chinese New Year. But I'm cautiously optimistic that things will pay off over the next few months.

So, the biggest item on my plate is the upcoming talk I'll be giving for SIAS on small and mid-cap companies. In hindsight, creating slides for this one-hour lecture is harder than I thought because I have to distil all my ideas on small-cap investing into a set of slides. And this goes beyond what I ordinarily do for my investment courses. 

I'm not even sure whether doing this might be the beginning of a new course with Dr Wealth, but there's plenty of new material to incorporate into my greater course slides.

You can access the link here to register for it: https://portal.sias.org.sg/Event/EventDetails?Id=f4c2b063-390d-f111-8406-000d3aa337f8&EventName=Unlocking_Opportunities_in_Small-Mid_Cap_SGX_Stocks

The second item on my plate is that, thanks to a blog reader, I have been introduced to the IT faculty at the Polytechnic where I teach, which might see me conduct some technical courses in addition to the law courses I currently teach in the evenings. For one thing, I'm not going to turn away CPF money, which I still want to accumulate after 13 years out of conventional employment, but the idea of someone teaching hardcore analytics and data science courses alongside law modules is not something I want to miss out on in my resume. 

The price of being selected is also high, as I have to teach myself at least two software packages that I'm unfamiliar with. It seems that my days of avoiding Power BI in favour of hardcore coding in Python might be finally over. 

And of course, I have to prepare for Batch 41 of the Early Retirement Masterclass, in end-March, which will launch a Markdown skills file for students to analyse local stocks. 

As I'm still working on slides and prepping for workshops, I haven't had time to digest geopolitics, so I don't have any insight into what will happen in the markets tomorrow. But I do know that my All-Weather Portfolio Masterclass students should be happy since we've been into defence stocks and commodities for the past 6 months or so. 

Maybe if I can complete my slides for SIAS, I might go that new Spa in Perrenial Business City....

Happy Chinese New Year ! The time of the Fire Horse is here !

 

The year of the Horse has finally arrived with all its fiery glory, and already I've been experiencing the forces of tumultuous change occurring in my life.

The first change is that I've already completed 10 music lessons, and my singing has improved a little bit. But there have been many new initiatives and changes to my course materials, so I have to stop singing lessons for a while and instead hunt for a voice-confidence course that's more applicable to a trainer. My goal of competing at Golden Age Talentime is still there, but I want to explore this field more randomly and don't really want to pursue it the same way as my other initiatives. I think I've earned the right to be a little frivolous with this.

The second change is that financial markets have already exceeded my expectations for the entire year of 2026. One of the things I've promised myself during the pandemic crash of 2020 is that I will begin treating a market melt-up like a market melt-down, and I will make seriously drastic changes to the portfolios I have with the same urgency as during a market crash. Expect these moves to occur when STI hits PE x16 or 5,200, whichever comes first. I will likely close all my ERM portfolios and re-establish positions in extremely low-volatility large caps. I will also increase the allocation to my All-Weather Portfolio, which is designed to have an extremely low standard deviation in trying times. 

You heard it here first: At 5,200 or x16 PE, my Early Retirement Masterclass may come to an end.

I will take some profit off the table. Take an extended break, and go do some travelling. And I will return with a different kind of program for a different market regime that emphasizes bottom up investigation of local stocks and concentrated stock holdings. I assure my community that the FB group will undergo slight changes, a new course will be born, and the current alumni privileges will not be affected.

The third change is simply that AI is happening too fast for me or anyone to catch on, so further changes are already transforming my program into something that is different even from previous runs. I'm already studying how to compile all my investing wisdom into a Markdown file so my student can analyse stocks with just one prompt instead of many. In a matter of months, I might even have to build a Clawbot to do fundamental backtesting for me on Quants Cafe. If the authorities can build an AI proficiency ladder, I might have to stop everything to climb it later this year. 

Maybe there is a silver lining to all this Chaos in the Year of the Fire Horse.

The silver lining is that as changes accelerate, no one can claim to be an AI expert; there is no competitive advantage. The video I have put up using Grok is already yesterday's news, as folks become enamoured with Seedance 2.0. 

If FIRE is a trap, then why am I so happy with my life?

This weekend, the Business Times launched a new column entitled Switching Lanes. This column is after the hearts of many folks who read this blog because it focuses on the realities of life after a full-time career. I encourage blog readers to support this column, as I expect my own blog to issue rebuttals and support for such articles in the future.

And this is why I enjoyed Kenneth Goh's article, titled "The best investment in your 20s isn't your portfolio." This article, in my opinion, is rife with logical fallacies, and even though the author has disclaimed that his opinions are his own, I can't help but feel that the views expressed also coincidentally align with those of financial institutions.

First of all, the article proposes that the best investment in your 20s isn't your portfolio. That's hard to disagree with even for the stanchest FIRE advocate. Health is probably a much better investment of your time. Even some relationships are worth investing in. 

But the author does not mention health and relationships at all.

Instead, the authors begin by discussing the FIRE movement, and credit goes to him for referring to Jacob Lund Fisker, whom I consider a real father of the FIRE movement, rather than to Vicki Robins, who is very much a free spirit and an inheritor of wealth.

At this point in the article, the logical flaws begin to surface as the author constructs a strawman of the FIRE movement. A strawman is an exaggerated illustration that can be easily toppled by a simple argument. This strawman is a troglodyte, a caricature that saves so much money that he forgets to network with other people and build up his human capital, which the author deftly channels by invoking Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker. 

I've been into FIRE for 25+ years, and if you follow my blog and observe my LinkedIn, I suspect I've been building my human capital way longer than the author. I've also had personal correspondence with Jacob Lund Fisker, who is a very friendly guy and a brilliant Renaissance man, a Physics PhD and a handyman. In our private conversation, I remember admiring Jacob for his handyman skills, but told him that in Singapore, these skills can be outsourced for a low fee, and I can afford to build other competencies. 

Therefore, I don't think you can position people in the FIRE movement as antisocial troglodytes who sacrifice career networking for their investment portfolios.

This is a false dichotomy. There is no tradeoff. 

I can be frugal and also have coffee sessions with businessmen I admire (many as frugal as me!) . 

However, this article does have the benefit of prompting us to reflect on why people think financial capital comes at the expense of human capital.

A majority of the FIRE movement are INTJs; they are naturally introverted. So I can argue that even if they do not engage in portfolio building, INTJs can do many other things to keep themselves intellectually satisfied, like watch anime endlessly and argue with people on Reddit, learn Klingon, build AI bots, play Dungeons and Dragons, or anything but build their human capital through relentless networking.

Finally, the author and the financial institutions need to really do some soul searching on the people in their 50s today who CAN NOT RETIRE.

There are plenty of Singaporeans who spend their 20s building networks, playing office politics, and getting ahead. Not all of them succeed; some gain minor advantages and become addicted to a high-status lifestyle, but all of us eventually get older, and at 45, many Singaporeans see their salaries plateau. Soon enough, how can the author explain the many pre-sales consultant types retrenched in their 50s and forced to draw down on their assets?

At this stage, someone who read Gary Becker can argue that a significant amount of human capital has already been transformed into financial capital. 

So does it make sense to continue the endless circle jerk of professional networking and looking for a Patron in the office?

Beyond a particular point, you need real skills to manage your financial capital. 

It starts with a small VWRA or IWDA position with a custodian broker limiting your expense ratio to less than 0.5% a year. Then it evolves into a full-fledged portfolio spanning real estate, dividend stocks, and, yes, algorithmic advisors in Python to get sky-high Sharpe ratios. The human capital required to code, invest and reap your rewards is, in fact, quite immense.

But we need to ask ourselves this: Why do financial institutions genuinely hate the FIRE movement?

It is because we are so good that we prefer to invest our money ourselves. Wrap fees and expensive commissions are something for other people. 

So, why park my funds with you when I can buy shares in your bank? 

 ( Apologies, I gave a nice title to this article, but actually did not answer the question. LOL ! )

Levelling up before the Year of the Fire Horse

 

While the YouTube channel has not seen much new content, I've been quietly levelling up some of my skills. The most obvious is that I'm learning how to chain together Nano Banana, Grok, and the Capcuts to create video sequences so that future videos on my channel are not just PowerPoint presentations with financial content. You can click on the link above to see what I have in store for you in the future.

But of course, using AI tools and shaping better prompts hardly counts as levelling out in this modern context. 

In fact, for the first time in my life, I managed to write some Python code to trade directly from my IBKR account. I've been postponing this for a long time, as I've always preferred to use my programming skills to build advisors and keep an execution manual, but given that I've picked up some modern books on investing for programmers, I've managed to get access to some rudimentary ( and very buggy) code to get started on some advanced trading algorithms. 

For those who are interested, for now, all I can say is that you need Trader Workstation (TWS) for IBKR, a Jupyter notebook on your local machine, and a way to enable the required APIs in TWS. My first program purchased double the number of stocks I wanted because the original script demoed a market and a limit order, so I had the happy problem of buying double the number of shares, which has since gone up. The opposite tragedy could have happened to someone else. 

Sadly, as the setup is unauthorised for Singapore users and requires some technical proficiency, it will be some time before I can create a course out of this. I might work with Dr Wealth to have personalised 1-1 coaching on such complex technical setups, but this probably cannot come cheap.

There are some things I really like to get better at. I can build Python scripts that send prompts to ChatGPT and use responses to analyse local companies. I'm still struggling to use RAG to process downloaded analyst reports. There's also a desperate need to catch up on agentic AI, which remains a dynamic field, and to independently research and make investment recommendations on it, so there will definitely be a few Udemy courses I will need to start before CNY.

Hopefully, my YouTube channel will be back with new content as early as next week. 

Malaysia will not be cheap forever, you know...

 

I just returned from a short trip to JB with my mum to clear some paperwork with Tenaga National. This was a 2-day, 1-night trip to accommodate my mum, who might not be able to handle the heavy traffic across the Causeway. And this trip is a little special because I made some financial mistakes that I can share with the readers.

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!

In which I present a useful framework to understand one's personality?

 

I've always believed that, in career and financial planning, a person needs a deeper understanding of their personality to succeed, but many frameworks exist, and adherents to one often pour scorn on others. For example, folks who subscribe to the Big5 OCEAN personality models pooh-pooh the folks who follow the MBTI framework. Of late, having exposed myself to the idea that personality can be determined by neurotransmitters, as in my last article, I am beginning to see the usefulness of treating all personality frameworks as a stack, like the OSI model in networking engineering.

If we can arrange theories of personality as a stack, we can start at low levels, examining biochemistry, and move up to models based on actual brain structure, like the OCEAN model. Above OCEAN are the more HR-oriented models, like MBTI. We can then go even further and incorporate ancient techniques, such as the Enneagram, above the MBTI. Above the more prosaic models are astrological and metaphysical models. In this way, we respect the models validated by science, but we also do not discard models that facilitate communication in pop culture or company culture (like MBTI) or models derived from our own cultures and ancestry (like Bazi).

As we build our personality stack, we can gain a deeper understanding of ourselves so as to effect consequential change in our lives. That's the application layer, where I tend to use personality models to explain why some people achieve FIRE earlier than others, and HR professionals explain why some people are suited to particular jobs. Couples can also spend countless hours examining their significant others' personalities.

So, with this insight, I reveal parts of my own personality stack.

a) Neurotransmitter - The Molecule of More by Lieberman and Long

Reading the book explained a lot about my behaviours in recent times, when I constantly feel I can never enjoy the present moment like other people do. These days, I stare into a blank space to think about the future of not just financial markets, my impending doom and whether my kids can make it as adults. And I'm always acting to remove future obstacles in my life. I have a dopaminergic personality, and I respond weakly to the "here and now" neurotransmitters such as serotonin and oxytocin.

b) OCEAN - Just Google a personality test online

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.

Dividends and Dopamine, that other D&D I play

 

I made the right choice to read The Molecule of More by Lieberman and Long last month, and the core idea is that almost all of our motivation comes from the neurotransmitter Dopamine. The book's idea is also useful, as I take some time to understand myself slightly better.

After 5 decades, I've been noticing some of my own personality traits that are very different from those of others and from almost all my friends. I plan so far ahead and create so many contingencies that I don't really have the capability to enjoy the present. Otherwise, I can enjoy anticipating a nice soak at the Onsen at Kallang Wave, but often get impatient once I'm actually there, taking the dip in the hot pools. I can't seem to find an MBTI or Big5 explanation for this until I read this volume. The closest character I can find is a Warhammer 40,000 entity known as Kairos the Fateweaver, a Greater Daemon of Tzeentch (shown above).

According to the book, I have a dopaminergic personality, which makes me more susceptible to a dopamine rush and less affected by other neurotransmitters like serotonin and endorphins that help me enjoy the moment.

Of course, the next thing I had to do was to understand my obsession with building a dividend portfolio that would allow me to live on my dividends, way before more people would even consider retirement planning a bad idea, so here is a powerful table of neurotransmitters that activate when a dividend hits your bank account.

As it turns out, dividends trigger different neurotransmitters, so psychological benefits accrue to people beyond the dopaminergic personality, but it is the anticipatory dopamine that drives the behaviour: self-denial, delayed gratification, and the obsessive frugality that enables FIRE to succeed.

Of course, the rabbit hole goes deeper. Do dividends produce different neurotransmitters than capital gains? ChatGPT has the following answer :

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.

I will leave some disturbing ideas for readers.

Once we know which neurotransmitter needs to be active to generate a financial behaviour, some crazy technocrat can find a way to stimulate a population into consuming recklessly. Technically, the approved technique is via a marketing campaign, but cocaine can throw a person's dopamine into overdrive. 

What if we're becoming unsure as to whether someone is really pulling the strings on our financial behaviour? 

I survived a nightmare scenario for CDP investors

 

Today's article is relevant to old-school investors who hold their stocks in CDP. I'm sharing my personal story for two reasons: first, to help CDP investors who haven't encountered this issue before; and second, to seek comments from other investors who have found better ways to deal with the situation.

So let's start with the investment that led to the fracas. I have an ETF called IS Asia HYG (Ticker: QL3). This is a good investment for me because it yields decently and is not correlated with banks and REITs on SGX, as it invests in high-yield Asian Bonds. It pays every 3 months at the end of March, June, September and December. Because payment is in USD, it is often delayed by a day or over the weekend, so it pays in the dividend dry months of January, April, July, and October in SGD directly into the bank account.

I was tracking the dividend, and on the 2nd of January 2026, not only did the dividend not arrive, but the Direct Credit Scheme, some sort of dividends pipeline that connects to a joint-account CDP of mine with a DBS joint account, was found to be suspended.

There was obviously some cause for panic, since this had never happened to me before, so I did the worst thing an investor can do: I consulted ChatGPT to find out why.

ChatGPT took me on a wild goose chase. It informed me that joint account connections are no longer valid and that banks will, based on events affecting the account, suspend these links in the future without grounds for appeal. 

As you can imagine, I panicked even further. 

I went online and tried to re-establish the link. On Monday, I went to the CDP office itself.

As it turns out, CDP no longer has counters. If you are physically present, there is a phone to dial in, and you wait like everyone else who calls a call centre. Eventually, I managed to get someone to explain to me that re-establishing the link was the right thing to do, and that the joint-account status just means the banks will take longer to activate the link. The call-centre staff explained that the breakage was a processing error caused on their side.

It took about 4 business days from link activation to re-establish the link, and the dividend came a day after that.

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.