Updating our understanding of what capital is

With my new video release schedule, I can gradually consider ways to integrate this blog into my content creation mix. One approach is to update everyone on what's been happening with my wife; another is to discuss deeper insights into what I've read, as the material would be too abstract or boring for a YouTube video.

For this article, I have chosen to discuss different forms of capital as presented in the book "A Wealth of Well-Being" by Meir Statman. This book is not primarily about finance, but rather the broader issues that surround it.

On social media, someone commented that I am too cynical about women being attracted to economically resourceful men. He reasoned that most pairings occur in tertiary education when men have not yet started earning money, so there are some considerations for romantic love in modern society.

I rebutted the point fiercely. Why are ACS guys a hot property in the dating market? My reasoning is that women are not fools; human capital is the present value of income as yet unearned, so they are selective about the guys they date, strategicaly weighing the potential of mates they meet on Tinder or the latest dating app - this is a consideration of human capital rather than financial capital, even successful female executives want men who can at least eqaulise her earnings. I don't say this to mock any gender; Good research is seldom politically correct, but I think men need to up their game because making money via regular employment is getting harder by the day, thanks to AI adoption.

Social science research backs my point - in societies like the US, marriage rates within ethnic groups are low when the ratio of female to male incomes is high and approaches 1. When females earn as much as men, marriages become unnecessary. So, the marriage rates of Whites and Asians are high in the US. In contrast, the marriage rates are low among Hispanics and Blacks.

As such, it might be helpful to update ourselves on he latest four forms of capital we can consider from the book by Meir Statman.

Here are he four forms of capital :

a) Financial Capital

This refers to a person's wealth and income. This is easily quantified and is the most important. Having financial capital can improve well-being and might even be convertible into other forms of capital. It is the most critical form of capital.

b) Social Capital

Social capital is a measure of the power of personal networks. Even among lower-income groups, people can pool resources to assist in child rearing or engage in bulk purchases. For the elite, having the right doctor, lawyer, or accountant in your personal network can solve many problems of daily living. 

c) Cultural Capital

I don't trust cultural capital because it is fickle. Your taste is a marker of your social class. I recall an ACS colleague reviewing my CV. He remarked that the paper I used was too flimsy; it should be printed on 80 gsm paper. It is the most irrelevant comment I have ever heard in my life - but on hindsight, he is so correct!

My cultural capital is not particularly high, as I'm basically an engineer who was admitted to the Bar. Cultural capital consists of behaviours and attitudes that make a person a part of an in-group. Sometimes, a person is simply not a cultural fit in a corporate environment because they don't dress the part. Two people, dressed in a shirt, pants, and a tie, yet one has the bearing of a commissioned financial advisor, and the other resembles a private banker. 

d) Personal Capital

The idea of Personal Capital is new to me, as it has not been mentioned in the sociological texts I read in the past. Some aspects of capital are clearly personal - tall people tend to earn more money and are perceived as more convincing. Beautiful women enjoy privileges. Jade Rasif discussed being consistently chosen to play the role of the butterfly in school plays. This is also extended to ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. 

Some forms of capital are simply innate.

So, there you have it; there are many forms of capital. You need to recognise that some groups, such as IT professionals, have financial capital but low cultural capital, while some cool, hipster poets are the opposite. If anything, there is really no such thing as a broad middle class if we break capital into four different parts. 

My channel content for the upcoming week.

 As we gather data on our performance, I will adjust my approach to content creation.

The mini-course on FIRE was successful, with a single video generating over 300 hours of viewing time. I was disappointed that the average time viewers spent on the video was 12 minutes out of an hour, which demonstrates how short attention spans can be these days. I'm better off producing shorter videos, about 10 minutes in length. However, that also means creating hour-long mini-courses, perhaps once every few months, as I combine slides from previous videos.

This week, I'm changing my approach - I will generate three videos in one go, then focus on other priorities, such as my AI data package, which is scheduled for release on July 10. I need to crunch a dataset to qualify for an apprenticeship program.

Tonight, we will have a light segment on CSE Global. 

On Thursday, I will launch a Beginner's Guide to the Supplementary Retirement Scheme.

And I saved the most entertaining video on Saturday, where I try to decode the statement "Dividends Investing is Dangerous" made popular by the good folks of the 1M65 chat group.

I hope that you guys will support my YouTube Channel. We've come a long way from 400 legacy subscribers to close to 1,200 at the moment. 

Please share this with folks who might benefit from my financial content.

Come for my free Mini-Course on FIRE

 

The primary assertion made by the protagonist in the Squid Game is that we are not horses but humans.

But so what, even if we are, we can still lose the game and die a horrible death, while the VIPs get evacuated to safety. So it comes as no surprise that my longest video attempted to date on my YouTube Channel will channel the leitmotif of the Squid Game, which shook me to the core after Season 3. 

Initially, the YouTube gurus suggested that I could simply chain my videos together to rapidly scale up viewership numbers. However, I wanted to add more value, so I re-narrated over the slides after adding more material to the content that had appeared in my videos at an earlier date.

There are initially five videos on FIRE, then I added a section on the future of FIRE and alternatives competing with it. 

The motivation behind this is to create a one-stop video for individuals to understand what the FIRE movement is all about before they start engaging with an FA who has been making claims that they can assist with someone's FIRE journey. The only investment required is slightly over an hour of your time.

The video will premiere at 9:00 p.m. tonight, July 5, 2025.

Personal Update - Health and June Fiction month

 

[ I'm linking my latest video here, but it's unrelated to the content of this article. ]

I'd like to share a personal update, as my last post focused on the various initiatives I'm working on in my professional life. I'd just like to talk about my life.

For a start, the most significant change in my life is that I started on insulin injections to remove half of the diabetes drugs in my regimen. My logic is that it's better to start getting into insulin instead of having it thrust upon me after getting hospitalised. My specialist, who has been treating me for the past decades, also thinks it's time. 

So I have a very light dose for noobs. 12 units for the long-acting insulin. 6 units before breakfast and lunch for the short-acting insulin. I got used to the pain from the injection within a day, but struggled with some withdrawal symptoms from the stoppage of my regular meds. I seem to be hungry most of the time, but when I eat normally, I feel lethargic - sort of like a food coma times 10. 

Fortunately, I got myself a continuous glucose monitor. I realised that two major things (1) my hunger pangs are not a sign of low blood sugar, and I can manage to eat high-fibre biscuits until I recover. (2) My tiredness was primarily due to losing control over my blood sugar; I need to reduce my intake of fast carbs.  

So now I'm just experimenting with what eating pleasures I can get away with, and with the numbers, I'll cut down on the stuff that's slowly killing me. I'm also experimenting with swimming after a large meal to see how my numbers react to exercise. It's actually fun that I'm engaging in some amount of bio-hacking.

Another area in my life is that I concluded my June fiction month with only two reads: The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell and The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei. Both reads are fairly ambitious for some who are too used to non-fiction and "serious" books. 

You can go and buy The Original Daughter from a local indie bookseller here: https://www.bookbar.sg/store/p/the-original-daughter. 

The book captures the essence of living in Singapore in the 1990s and early 2000s. I even rushed down to get the book autographed with my daughter's name to encourage her to develop a perspective on our education system and the politics of secondary school life, which the book does very well. 

All in all, I did not enjoy my June fiction month as much as last year in December, when I could read the Stormlight Archives and the Warhammer 40,000 Eisenhorn series. My book picks this year were very thought-provoking, and The Singapore Grip felt slow and heavy; however, to create a sense of history, we should also read some Singaporean literature to understand what it's like to live in the past.

• 1940s - The Singapore Grip by JG Farrell
• 1960s - If we dream too long by Goh Poh Seng
• 1980s - Teenage Textbook by Adrian Tan
• 1990s - The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei

To make up for this, I've lined up a few books on Psychology and money for July, so that this blog can discuss deeper issues in money management that might be too abstract to cover on my video channel. 

It should be pretty evident by now that I'm trying to find the right balance of content between my blog and video content, but emphasis is on my YouTube as I'm still quite far from successful monetisation. 

 

Hope I'm not biting more than I can chew in 2H2025

Before I begin, my video on the 6 new SDRs on SGX has just dropped. If you haven't watched it, go do so now.

It's time to list my initiatives in a single blog article so that you can track what I do. I no longer work less than someone with a full-time job, and may have unwittingly bitten off more than I could chew.

a) Investment training

My business has rebounded nicely, and I look forward to a bigger class in September. The main reason is that lower interest rates have made dividend investing attractive again. But more importantly, more interest in the markets means that my other All-Weather Portfolio Masterclass can have one run in August 2025, where I use Python notebooks to share four low-volatility strategies with interested learners.

More information can be found in my upcoming preview in mid-July : 

https://drwealth.com/awp/

b) Adjunct Lecturer gigs with Temasek Polytechnic

As it stands, I suspect TP will engage me again next semester, but probably in a much lighter capacity. I'm grateful for any gig that will allow me to maintain my legal knowledge.

Beyond this is where stuff gets interesting.

c) Renewing my lawyer practising certificate 

I'm furious and disappointed with myself that my hyperactive thyroid came back as I was trying to get started on my legal career. Since then, I've been cautious with my own health, but I don't feel like a lawyer without a PC and doing some work. I'm exploring with a fellow trainee who has started a new firm and will activate my license when I can find a file. I will only be doing corporate work this time, so if you have a startup or company needing legal services, let me know. 

d) Removing the ACLP pebble in my shoe.

ACLP has been a big pebble in my shoe because I need it to conduct SkillsFuture courses. So, I finally signed up for a course starting in July. I'm doing this with great unwillingness, but I have to treat this as a compliance requirement. 

It's also hard to get a slot for this course as demand far exceeds supply, which shows how bad the employment situation is.  

e) AIAP Industry programme

After completing my AIAP Foundation course, I embarked on creating an AI course for primary school kids that could earn some coffee money. However, now I have to bring the course to a tuition centre and find a way to attract a larger number of students.

But that's not all. My relevance to the industry will depend on how deep I can go in AI, so I've applied to join a six-month training program to become an AI Engineer. 

I have no idea how, if I get selected, I would be able to take on the AIAP and ACLP simultaneously and continue to make money on all my other initiatives, but I would be surprised if, given my age, I would be chosen to do all of them simultaneously. 

f) My YouTube Channel

Finally, my work on my YouTube channel has resulted in 1,000+ subscribers after just 32 videos—I do this without a paid subscription to any video editing software, and I am currently functioning as a one-man army. 

The estimation is that by my 70+ video, I should be fully monetised. YouTube is one of these mediums that I should have started on when I started as an investment trainer, because moving forward, it will all be about your reputation and personal brand building. Sadly, I'm catching up to the younger VLoggers and trailing in this space. 

Anyway, this is a snapshot of my professional life as it stands.

 

Letter to Batch 38 of the Early Retirement Masterclass

Dear Students of Batch 38,

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

We might be riding into a storm, as macroeconomic figures might see Singapore enter a technical recession after a quarter of negative GDP growth. Conflict between Iran and Israel may also escalate over the next few days. As such, you have chosen to estimate that Singapore’s economy is entering a contraction phase, which favours stocks, bonds and possibly REITs over the next few months.

The impact of AI is also felt in class, as I’ve pioneered the process of using ChatGPT to fill out entries in the ERM Data Entry Tool to assist in decision-making. The result is better write-ups in our PDFs, but projected yields may not be as accurate as extracting them from analyst reports. We also completed the portfolio generation in record time, creating a 19-stock portfolio that yields 7.13% before lunch break.

However, AI also leaves much to be desired compared to human analysis. When AI assessed the advantages of investing in LHN Limited, it made a fatal mistake by not considering that the key driver of the business is the co-working space Coliwoo. In many other cases, AI gave very templated answers with terms like “Stable growth” and “above-market dividends”, which ERM strives to shortlist anyway.

But what is the conclusion from this test run? We can do better with AI.

Prompts can be refined and improved. The future of the ERM program is for every student to use a paid LLM model and generate investment insights by just analysing financial statements that the AI pulls from official sources. I believe that we can get there in six months.

Lastly, I hope Batch 38 will participate actively in the FB group.

Hope to see you then!

Christopher Ng Wai Chung

FIRE Webinar with Tiger Trade

 

[ Apologies, the webinar is actually on June 24 2025. I guess both Tiger Brokers and I are stumped.  ]

I will conduct a webinar on FIRE with the folks of Tiger Trade on 24 June 2025 at 7:30 p.m. 

This webinar will review the basics of the FIRE movement, why it is so vital in our current context, and how to invest in FIRE. To make it more interesting, I'm inviting readers of this blog to suggest topics for the webinar so that I can make them more relevant to the audience. 

You can comment on the YouTube video comments section.

The link to the webinar is as follows : 

https://ttm.financial/RN?name=RNLive&rndata=%7B%22liveId%22:%221834980576866345%22,%22type%22:2%7D

A painful month of reading Singapore fiction in June

 

I'm in the process of trying to read fiction for two months a year, so I've chosen the June holidays to read my fiction backlog, and I could not have chosen a worse read. The writing is dense, and the author goes into long prose that describes the thought processes of the characters in the novel. I endured all the way to the end only to encounter a very unsatisfying ending where the nasty characters seem to get away with it and the earnest heroes get rewarded with years of internment. 

That being said, The Singapore Grip may be one of the best historical fiction novels ever written with Singapore as a backdrop. Readers are treated to references to the companies and geographical locations in WWII, which is why my copy has an old stamp that says Singapore Tourism Board on it. It makes an excellent reading text for secondary school social studies, covering history, English Literature, and some geography. 

I'm done punishing myself long enough. I've moved on to something more contemporary. 

This is a much better read and a more intimate book about living in Singapore, right down to details about cheap, discounted shops that always claim to be closing down.

Within the first few chapters, the protagonist's mum decided to bring her to McDonald's to give her a treat. The emotions are so raw, I got hungry and brought my son to buy 9 pieces of Chicken McNuggets for both of us just now.  

Will we see international audiences warming up to Singapore Literature?

I like The Original Daughter so far, but we need to warm up to our own writings first.

IYKYK

Remember this: Financial Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of responsible financial management are happening constantly throughout the country. Some PMETS, tribes and subcultures do not know they have enlisted in the cause.

Remember that the frontier of the FIRE movement is everywhere. Even the smallest act of saving for passive income pushes our lines forward.

And remember this: your company HR's need for control is desperate because it is unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Your golden handcuffs are brittle. Oppression from your bosses and the toxic work are the masks of fear.

Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these attempts to skimp and save, these moments of getting investment income, will have flooded the banks of your employer’s authority, and then there will be one too many. One single cent getting into your bank account outside your employment will break the siege.

Go watch A Gilded Game starring Andy Lau

 

[[ The attached video is my latest video on my YouTube channel and not related to the content of this article ]]

One of the things I did this weekend was to watch movies with my mum, as the rest of my family is on holiday in Malaysia.

Review-wise, A Gilded Game starring Andy Lau did not deliver the goods, but as a movie of folks who love investing, it deserves 5 stars along with the greats like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street. 

Here are some of the points of why I liked the movie:

• It's rare to even consider a senior equities analyst as the good guy in this tale. Probably won't fly in Hollywood.
• Some of the questions check out; there was one fairly accurate use of Weighted Average Cost of Capital, and the protagonist even interacted with it, telling the senior manager to adjust the tax term due to regulatory changes. When asked how he knew this was a tech firm, he replied that PE is high at 148, which is quite brilliant to me and showed that the script-writer knows something about investing. 
• There was a scene where a cleaner asked Andy Lau's character whether a stock was a good buy due to its recent performance. His reply was spot on; the cleaner would take on too much risk if he bought it. 
• There were many opportunities to discuss high finance. A great scene involved a dividend cheque and a co-located server rack used for High-Frequency Trading. Andy Lau even walked through a stock chart and showed a pump-and-dump operation.  

The movie must be engaging to maintain dramatic tension, so there might be a suspension of disbelief. It's hard to believe that a seasoned business would get into a bet to give up its shares if its price drops to a certain level. Everyone in the movie suffered too much because they did not diversify their holdings and made leveraged bets on their margin accounts.

Finally, there is something admirable in Andy Lau's fictional character, Todd Zhang, who makes a good point. If companies rush to list IPOs and bid prices to please their clients, where is the profit to be made for the shareholder?

I won't share my favourite scene on this blog because it involves dog food, so watch it yourself!

The dark side of FIRE

 

There have been interesting learnings this week. My channel gets the most subscribers on Sunday nights, so I have to queue the most interesting video to show over the weekends. This means the meaningful stuff for beginners on CPF, FIRE, and investing lessons must be prepared before Friday.

In other news, I have successfully run an AI class for two primary school kids, which means that we have succeeded in getting our foot in the door for enrichment events. In hindsight, my marketing channels are weak, so my priorities are to refine the product and organise through the larger tuition centres in the future to get a bigger primary school class. Like in any new business venture, I will spend most of the time learning new things, but most importantly, I have not spent any money.

Finally, I started on insulin injections. My regimen is quite harsh with one jab of slow-acting insulin in the morning and then a jab before breakfast and dinner. The pain of the injections is negligible as pinching my flab is worse, but I'm struggling with hunger pangs the whole day, and it'll be a miracle not to gain weight over the next few months. I'm introducing a fibre biscuits and apricots diet to staff to remove hunger, but it feels like eating cardboard the whole day. 

My only consolation is that it might lengthen my life so that I can witness a CPF-LIFE payout before I leave this world.  

Enjoy this video on the Dark side of FIRE. I think I published the most concrete and real critique of early retirement so far because I lived through it. 

 

In SIngapore, its monetise or be monetised.

With my latest video on how to invest to attain FIRE, my subscriber base hit 850. No small feat considering that the primary approach is for personal branding, and I've avoided overly incendiary content and focused primarily on how useful it will be for the viewers.

Today I'm going to talk about monetisation. 

After reading this article entitled All Hail the Landlord by a left-winged troll called Zat Astha on The Peak magazine, which hit a nerve some time ago, which demonised landlords to a certain extent. My reaction was to clear one of my rooms in double time and get my real estate friend to find me a tenant. If you are looking for a one-room in the North, you can respond to this ad: 

https://www.propertyguru.com.sg/listing/hdb-for-rent-350-woodlands-avenue-3-25641833

If I read about something left-wing academic types complain about, my personal rule is to embody the problem because it has always done me good from Thomas Piketty's (r>g) doctrine, David Graeber's concept of bullshit jobs and Marxist dialectic materialism - I think my version of FIRE I embody beenefitted largely from sociologists, political scientists and economist who actually hate capitalism.

As an owner of multiple REITs, I don't think landlords are evil. The only way to get higher rentals is to find a tenant willing to pay for them, and we've just emerged from a time when mortgage interest rates were sky high. Accusing landlords of trying to keep their shops empty is irrational, as landlords lose money every month to keep their property unoccupied. Businessmen must become more competitive or move into a zone with lower rents and footfall.

But what do we do at the personal level? 

In this current economic environment, even when I am in a state of comfort, I should always find something to monetise, whether a personal brand or a spare room. For many years, my kids were not ready for us to get rid of their toys, and we had a spare room full of clutter. Now, it's actually advantageous to have a tenant to keep a lookout for my mum and maybe flip the master switch during a power trip. Having some rent is just icing on the cake - it's not always about greed.  

If a person fails to monetise, they will be monetised—they will have to take up employment for most of their waking hours. I think readers are better off giving up the concept of loyalty and just treating work as selling time for money - this will eliminate many sources of stress in their lives. 

Anyway, at the personal level, I'm not having a good time right now as I've just started on insulin injections daily. I was initially glad about lower medical expenses, but then I learnt that now I have to buy a box of needles every month with alcohol swabs. I hope the elimination of my drug regimen and its side effects will make this change worthwhile. The last thing I want is to switch to insulin from the hospital bed. 

 

Why institutions do not want you to pursue FIRE.

 

Ok, back to the regular YouTube videos. 

I will slow down the more technical investing videos in favour of videos that hopefully trigger more discussion. I will also follow some of the suggestions from the YouTube Inspiration pages. 

The algorithm should have a better idea of what people want to see in future videos.

 

Personal Update - Part 2 - Hobbies and Leisure

 

I want to dedicate a blog post to my hobbies, which have undergone many changes. The process started with the subtle rearrangement of my social life last year, and I found that this has been widely beneficial as I began to feel better about myself. I went further and even suggested that some people do the same- They are constantly being hectored by cranky old men who have issues with their own lives. I tell them there's no point in exposing oneself to so much negativity in middle age - we are not too far from becoming cranky. The outcome is consistent regardless of who does this: there will be a lull in your social life, but things pick up once you fill your time with better people and things. One day, I'll blog about this or even talk about it in a video, but as I rearranged my social life, some friends even got more dividends and money coming into their lives as I took addressing my critics into my own hands. 

So I pressed on and attacked my hobbies. I cut away Disney+ after watching the very terrible and woke Acolyte series. Then, I reduced binge-watching to focus on generating my own content. Then I went after RPGs, but I don't do much RPGs these days, as I just enjoy reading the rules and following the industry. 

On the RPG front, there is a lot of bad news: PI will be closing the gameshop in the Somerset area and possibly moving out of the area. This is a sad day because in my youth, there was always a shop selling D&D books and even hex and counter wargames called Leisure Craft, all the way to PI in its current form. As PI shuts down and moves out, the line of hobby shops in the Orchard area is forever broken. Shops have fled the rental high regions and moved out with new gaming enclaves in MacPherson and Parklane. 

However, the nature of RPG gaming has changed. With social media, we can find our tribe. We do not tolerate folks who share our D&D hobby. I can easily ask a blog reader out for a meal; there's no need to accept a psychologically abusive killer DM or some blue-haired land whale who insists on greeting their NPC elves and using the right they/them pronouns. 

But strangely, I'm gaming more because my son is now 9 years old and has recently learnt Magic: The Gathering, and we have games almost every week. The last time I played MTG was during The Ice Age, so I had to pick it up again. Fortunately, there are cheap ways to play two starter boosters just for my son to learn the basic rules. (E.g., What is a stack? ).

I'm also playing Warhammer 40,000 with my son, but only on a small scale, painting some Space Marines and throwing them against Tyranids. Warhammer 40,000 remains a game rich in flavour but actually very expensive even for adults. The cheapest thing you can buy from Games Workshop is the Games Workshop stock on the London Stock Exchange, which was recommended by The Edge last year as a value stock. 

Recently, some things have happened in the hobby world. A few old-school wargames, all wonderful people, have achieved so much traction that there are now regular wargaming events in local libraries. Remarkably, this can happen without a source for wargaming retail in Singapore. It's totally powered by passion and not capitalism. 

So there is some change, out with the old and in with the new. 

I've also been attending a small Japanese karaoke outlet for several months. It started when someone was part-timing in a bar, and I was asked to tag along, and I ended up singing for 6 hours while spending $6 on soda water. So now, I have found a regular place to sing for at least 3 hours on a budget of $44, as I don't drink alcohol. It's cheaper than Cash Studio for a dedicated Japanese karaoke platform, which can be expensive and hard to find. The hack is quite simple. If a karaoke lounge has no business other than your gang, it becomes a budget karaoke room. Along the way, I made new friends and learnt a bit about the struggles of a small business owner. 

One day, I may pursue singing more seriously for competition purposes, but I probably have one of the weirdest ways to add a new song to my repertoire.

Just a few days ago, I learnt of an old song by Anita Mui called the Song of Sunset ( I know I'm very late, but it's a lovely song. ). I wanted to sing it, but it was hard as it was in Cantonese, and most karaoke songs use traditional Chinese scripts, which I can't read. So I researched using the hunch that 90s Cantopop is seldom original and found a singer called Masahiko Kondo, the song's originator. As I read Hiragana competently, I can belt out the Japanese variant within 20 minutes of practice. 

In hindsight, this was actually shameful given that I'm Cantonese.

I should be back producing new content on YouTube this weekend.

Personal Update

 

Some readers miss my long-form blog articles, where I update my life. As I try to ramp up my YouTube presence to create an alternative marketing funnel, most of my effort has been put into creating video content three times a week. The material is designed to drive more traffic to my previews, so I'm not doing personal updates for a while. So let's do a detailed update this week and skip the videos for one round.

To start with, folks might wonder why I'm becoming a YouTube influencer. The main reason is that my gig at Temasek Poly has been paused for one semester, and there's no guarantee that I will be given more gigs moving forward. AI deployment will make in-house lecturers more efficient, so it will be harder to get gigs moving forward. Still, I might be wrong, so I may embark on a new journey that would not pay off immediately, but it may be helpful to promote my other business lines in the future. 

How do I manage my tempo for new videos? My position is to create 2-3 times a week, spending only 1-2 hours doing up a video, only making incremental improvements along the way. So the sound quality was terrible for many videos, and troubleshooting was slow. The upside is that such an aggressive rate raised my subscribers from 400+ to almost 800 today, and more fans watch my material for the content, and I am slowly improving. 

My logic is that if my pals can spend hours playing computer games, I can do the same for my videos and get better scores while I improve my video and audio editing skills. Of course, my videos can't match other influencers because I only use free software to get everything out. 

So that is one major project that will take up 25% of my time. 

On top of YouTube, as AI is disrupting revenue, the only response is to adopt more AI in my life, which explains why there is a sudden engagement with AIAP for their foundational certificate. I learn about AI in this course, but I also use AI to code the program I submit for marking. On top of it, I developed an AI course for kids, which I marketed pretty "badly" last week as I had to self-teach Eventbrite to get a ticketing and payment system out over an afternoon on a Saturday. This is an example of eustress, stress that is good an rewarding even though it's pretty uncomfortable to suck at something in your 50s. My AI training will pay dividends much later. I'm still digesting the regression and classification algorithms and thinking of ways to fit them into the time series data I employ in ERM classes.

So that is another project that takes up 25% of my time.

So that's not all. To understand the ENTJ personality, we won't do very well if we're put on the defensive, so I gotta charge along if there is a gap in my schedule. I can still optimise my cash flows if I have no classes to teach.

Enter my attempt to reprice my mortgage. It has been pushed down from $2,700 to $2,300. The problem is the annoying request to pay 2% of my remaining mortgage out of "goodwill," which I intend to do once my Bank of China dividends come in today. But my next big project is to clear one room in my mum's place to rent out for a nice sum. We are almost done, but the rental income is secondary as I need another eyeball to look over my mum, so I can be contacted if she falls. Getting a tenant kills two birds with one stone. 

So, imagine that I can finally make some adjustments to my life by reducing monthly expenses and expanding my income.

So, without further delay, I will spend some real money to switch my footwear to Skechers. There was a sale in JB, so I swapped out my old worn-out sandals as they might cause me to slip in the future. I fully intend to sum up my working shoes by the end of this month, for those black trekking shoes that look so much like work shoes, I know some lawyers even wear them to court. 

And it won't stop with shoes, as I spend 8 hours on my bed, I'm looking at getting some memory foam to improve the quality of my sleep. 

To understand what I'm doing, Google "Vime's Boots Theory". I'm repurposing this to apply to more comfort rather than durability. With money, just pay for more comfortable brands - enjoy your life.

Finally, I've made the plunge to get into an insulin injection regimen for my diabetic treatment. Lifestyle changes and medication have finally reached diminishing returns, and I've been having discussions for months. Next week, I will receive training on how I can manage my injections and moving forward, I have to inject myself three times a day, but it's actually cheaper. I get to take out some drugs which have been devastating me with side effects for many years. 

So, what's in store for me in the future? With a basic AI cert, I need to train my gaze on the ACLP. Getting a slot is as hard as getting Lady Gaga concert tickets. Once I do that, I will start experimenting with launching cheap online courses on the web, just to challenge myself on whether I can do so.

Updates on my personal AI Journey

 

I started aggressively taking up AI training the hard way, signing up for the AIAP Foundations Course, a six-month program providing datasets for a series of machine learning steps such as regression and classification. My task is to clean the data, add some features, and then use the data to predict student outperformance, hotel no-shows and loan defaults. This course is not taught by human beings and is largely objective-driven and marked by algorithms. The program's efficiency allowed me to complete the certificate in just 2 months, and I'm ready to take on more AI training from other course providers.

In September, I should be confident enough to get into the Apprenticeship program, given that I have self-taught software engineering basics like pushing stuff to GitHub and using ChatGPT to refactor code and improve my coding skills. 

Wisdom and skills come with a price, and I'm intimidated by the rate at which AI progresses. The course I attended is 2 years behind what folks are using right now, and I've not even started in NLP, let alone LLM coding technologies. Most professionals are light years behind the latest RAG or Agentic AI materials. 

Simultaneously, I'm reading The Generalist Advantage to understand how people plan careers today. This strange book initially looks like a snake oil sales text for folks peddling humanities degrees, which I enjoy reading for pleasure. But as it turns out, it's a great career guide for engineers and scientists who may fall into the specialisation trap and advises on the valuable soft skills required to climb he corporate ladder. Of course, if the book is right, I might also be managing my career wrongly, as I spent almost my first 10 years of my IT career getting IT certifications - I should have started on my CFA in my final year of University.

The book has awakened my greater ambition as I incorporate some serious AI skillsets with my finance and legal skills. Employment is secondary for me; I really want to gain access to a real-world data set and slice my way toward actionable business policies out of my findings. The Yahoo Finance data I use is now child's play compared to what I have worked on. 

Finally, as I pick up new skills, I'm monetising others. 

The link to my AI Explorer's Masterclass is now up here, and we are getting sales : 

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ai-explorers-masterclass-tickets-1378432170729?aff=oddtdtcreator

How to think about Thai SDRs

 

The section on Singapore Depository Receipts is quite large, so I will do one part on Thailand SDRs and, in a future episode, Hong Kong SDRs, which will probably be more enjoyable.

Hopefully, this will round up the discussion on how to think about various parts of the stock market, and I will be free to develop a series on individual stocks and how to think about them. 

The final objective is to come up with free mini-courses for retail investors. 

How to think about Business Trusts

This is my 18th video, and this series has been immensely popular compared to my other videos. I intend to create more videos in this series on SDRs and then drill down into different REIT subsectors. 

This episode also marks a serious overhaul of the free software I have used to bootstrap this YouTube channel. I just can't get OBS and Da Vinci Resolve working without paying expensive subscription fees, so I switched over to Capcuts on the advice of my 9-year-old son, who has been a YouTube creator longer than I have. While some audio issues have been resolved, this video still has faint siren sounds. 

While I must reset my learning curve, I suspect things will improve soon.

Enjoy !

 

New Project - AI Explorer's Masterclass

I can finally reveal details on what I have been working on for the past few weeks. 

As part of my work to "retrain" myself as an AI-integrated freelancer, I've not just been trying to learn AI coding techniques under the AIAP Foundations Course. Like a professional software engineer, I've been actively using ChatGPT to answer tutorial questions, refactor my code, and push code to GitHub. However, I don't have a firm foundation in software engineering skills and find going to GitHub challenging. And it's just amazing that because I have some domain expertise and common sense, AI becomes a powerful partner in solving deep technical questions in data science. 

In the process, I've become a lot more sensitive to possible disruptions in the workplace. It's no longer replacing one senior employee with three cheaper and younger junior employees, as I was in my 30s. Nowadays, it's more like replacing four to five senior employees with one junior employee armed with an AI subscription and strong generalist skills.

So what does this mean for tomorrow's workers?

This is exactly what my cousin-in-law and I wanted to address when we started work on the AI Explorer's Masterclass, a two-day enrichment program for 9-13-year-olds. We intend to pilot this during the June Holidays.

The poster for the program is up, and I intend to use my channels to drive sign-ups.

If you have a kid aged 9-13 and you want to find some interesting activities for them, do refer to this graphic, scan the QR code below, or just email me at waichung.ng@gmail.com.

 

Beginner's Guide to Financial Independence

 

With some numbers, I now have a better idea of what folks want to see in a YouTube video. 

Now, it is time to create longer-form videos that, viewed collectively, would be a free 1-hour course on financial independence and the FIRE movement. 

My first drop just came out during lunch, which explains what financial independence stands for. Over the next week or so, I wil discuss different variants of FIRE, how to specifically invest to become financially independent, as well as special issues that are relevant to folks in the FIRE movement.

Enjoy !

Financial Markets Trend Analysis

I'm in the process of showcasing some of the features of the All-Weather Portfolio Masterclass in videos that show how students can understand key trends in the financial markets by running Python Jupyter notebooks that are demonstrated and taught in the program.

This first video, which will be featured regularly at the beginning of every month, shows me using my trend-follower roboadvisor to examine which broad asset ETFs are trending upwards and attempt to match our findings with geopolitical events. 

The All-Weather Portfolio Masterclass is a course that will be run as and when we receive a critical mass of confirmed students. It covers four types of roboadvisors that students can deploy to make investment choices for themselves. 

For pricing information and available dates, please contact Dr. Wealth by following this link: 

https://drwealth.com/awp/

Fictional works that shed financial wisdom

This video may not do as well on YouTube as the others. Still, I have to do it because I feel strongly about recent revelations about how MP Ng Chee Meng treated trainee teachers, which came to light during his stint as Education Minister.

As I did not have a robust humanities education in the 1980s, being turned off by how humanities like History and English Literature were taught by teachers of that era, a large part of my personal development came from playing RPGS and reading fictional works, with many books from the fantasy genre. I would say that even today, when most of my reads are "serious" in nature, I continue to appreciate comics, manga and even cosy Korean literature.    

I suspect that this continuous exposure to fiction kept my mind open and sharp to survive my SMU JD program, which is still dominated by humanities and the artsy types. It's also consequential when I was building my public speaking skills as an undergraduate. 

As such, I'm upset at the hectoring trainee teachers received from the ex-General. 

Why is there a dichotomy between fictional works and serious works? 

Why should people be shamed for the literature they consume in their spare time? 

One way to position this is that Ng Chee Meng is an electrical engineering major like me, which is true ( but this makes me boil too). I've attended a sociology class in NUS with my fellow electrical engineers, and my peers were reductionist as hell, not to mention endlessly entertaining.  But based on my experience, I've never met an engineer or IT professional who gets shamed for the fiction they read - it's a blessing that some people even read. Still, I've witnessed many senior legal associates disrespected for the "low-class" books they read or the K-pop concerts they attended. An old, grizzled veteran lawyer in his 60s even admitted that he would judge an associate on whether they attended anything made by Andrew Lloyd Weber. 

The fact is that if we understand what sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu have been saying, culture is a tool to distinguish people of different social classes. So even if fiction does not seem practical in finance policy making, it can be a great source of cultural capital, something members of the government need to understand. In this case, Singaporeans have suffered as Jack Neo seems to be our only cultural export, whereas China is levelling up to Nezha 2. 

As a finance guy, I must defend the reading of fiction. Three pieces of fiction say important things about money and finance.

I remain a diehard PAP supporter, but I think it's up to us to clean house to keep our government viable. 

Enjoy!

Is buying Bitcoin gambling?

I'm slowly mining for insights drawn from the general elections, and I should have enough content for two videos.

The first video addresses PAP MP Goh Sze Kee's allegations that investing in Bitcoin is like gambling. I take apart this argument with some nifty quantitative work. It should be enjoyable for both PAP and opposition supporters.

Please enjoy!

My channel is gradually slowing down when it comes to new subcribers, so if the content resonates with you, please share it around so that I can monetise it one day.

 

Election is over ! Back to finance content

 

It's shocking how many new subscriptions disappeared during the run-up to the elections. Once the winners were announced, the numbers started to trend again, so I expect this video on REITS to be quite hot. You can tell from the scammers talking to themselves in the comments section.

Ok, what about this election?

I'm happy with most of the results, but PPP losing the deposits for the entire team warms the cockles of my heart the most. Even as a PAP die-hard in Holland Bukit Timah and enjoying the ridiculous landslide of over 80%, I'm hoping that Jalan Kayu would swing the other way. Something about SAF Command and Control makes me uncomfortable when they make money or business decisions. I choose to be sceptical unless someone can prove themselves otherwise, as Chan Chun Sing has done. Also, rumours of someone talking down to trainee teachers will only push them towards the FIRE movement and get them to reinvent themselves as private tutors.

My support for the PAP will always be conditional. Singapore needs to remain a good business place. It should never fall into the trap like the EU, where the rich get soaked to pay lazy people to do nothing at home. 

The test for me has not yet come up. If I choose between WP and PAP, which party will earn my support? WP needs to disentangle itself from Jamus Lim's socialist policies, which will push the rich away and create a net loss of jobs. 

My ultimate allegiance is to continue collecting dividends without taxation and later enrol in a full-time AI course to collect some welfare-for-school payouts if things go further south.  

In the meantime, expect more content from me moving forward.

 

A simple story of my home mortgage

 

Because of the politically charged atmosphere, I've decided to take a break from the YouTube videos to focus on this blog instead, where I will write about my home mortgage.

As it stands, I have a home mortgage of about $520,000 over the EC I bought a decade ago, the mortgage is paid using my CPF contributions and dividends I receive from my portfolio. It has always been a pleasure paying for my mortgage as I watch my home equity grow. Also, not using my equity portfolio to repay the home loan feels like leveraging my dividend portfolio. 

During COVID-19, the bank offered me a six-month break from mortgage payments, but fearing other events in the future, I stopped paying for the principal but kept paying the loan interest. When SIBOR became SORA, I took the chance to switch to a fixed-rate loan at a promotional price and managed to free up some cash flow for myself as my business turned terrible. It was still tough to feed about $3,000+ into a mortgage as interest rates have increased, so a reduction to $2,700 was a lifesaver. 

So this year was a year of a lot of inconveniences. Last time on my blog, I wrote about fiscal marksmanship as I replenished my CPF-MA after my mum's hospitalisation, thinking that it was the right thing to do.

So recently, I had a new but less unpleasant surprise. 

My mortgage came up for repricing, and the bank is offering an even lower rate from 3.65% to 2.45% for the next two years, followed by SORA+0.7%.

But there's a catch—I need to contribute 2% of the remaining loan quantum, which is about $15,200. 

The loan was attractive as it could reduce my monthly burden, so I took a hit by paying this sum from my cash reserves. If you think about it, it's just another event like a medical emergency, so I have to rely on my dividends this quarter to recover from another drawdown. I'm okay with it because I can catch up with the loan moratorium I took years ago. My only regret is that I can't buy more stocks over the next 3 months as I refill my cash reserves.

This is my first repricing experience, so I'm unaware that banks customarily seek a small repayment before they are willing to process one. I hope readers will consider keeping about 2% of their loan quantum as part of their emergency funds if they get an offer from their bank that they can't refuse.

There's another interesting point in this story. The bank asked me to apply for a credit card to waive a $200 repricing fee. I went through the application process but was rejected by the bank. I earned enough during the past two years, and the bank clarified that the reasons for the failed application would never be shared with me. 

Is it my age?

Or could I always pay my credit card expenses on the dot every month, so I'm not a good customer?

This will remain a mystery to me forever. 

YouTube videos will return next week.  

 

Don't talk cock, just tell me what stocks to buy

One group of the population that investment course providers cannot win are folks who think that there is a magical list of stocks that, when bought, would make people millionaires, so there is no need to pick up some fundamental skills in finance.

This video shows how I deal with folks who corner me in social situations to ask for stock tips. 

You will find that this is worth your time.