Don't hide behind your degree !

 

Sometimes this blog can still get a longer article if I succeed in connecting the dots between what I hear and what I do, and hopefully, it can result in some insights about what it's like to survive in Singapore today.

A few weeks ago, my buddy was saying on The Financial Coconuts that folks should not hide behind their degrees. I did not listen to the video, but this is a potentially memeable proclamation for all the wrong reasons. If this were said by a non-degree holder to a degree holder, it would invite more scorn than self-reflection, as it does sound like a challenge. I can just say "Sour grapes", then move on in my life. 

But if I do that, it's also mean-spirited on my part.

But I suspect in this AI-obsessed economy, this statement is not a challenge, but just a reflection that, actually, no one can hide behind a degree these days, as the depreciation of knowledge is now very steep. GPT-5 already assists me greatly in my shallow dive videos on local company stocks. 

And now there is actually a book on how learning can take place in the future. Lean Learning by Pat Flynn is not particularly revolutionary, but it offers an alternative to academic learning. In Lean Learning, learning becomes "just-in-time". People engage in small projects and learn enough just to reach the next critical milestone. So if I'm trying to build a business and I'm writing a copy, I check out a short article on how to write copy, write a bare bones copy, get ChatGPT to refine it, then launch it to observe results and prepare my next copy. 

I'm not convinced that Pat Flynn is totally correct, as we may need a degree to cover multiple domains at a high strategic level, so that we will know how to intelligently engage with AI in the future to solve actual problems. I also do not believe that capitalist living is all about information products and building up marketing funnels.  

Future degrees will also reform similarly to the AIAP or the 42 program from SUTD, which is asynchronous, problem-based, with a ridiculously high drop-out rate to maintain its value. 

Finally, I have to address some of the things I am learning as part of my ACLP program. In this program, our job is to facilitate learning among working adults, in fact, non-PMET adults. If we play by the rules, we can teach based on frameworks like Gagne's Nine Events. In such a case, training slides become very inefficient, and it takes three hours to cover 4 slides of materials because we're trying to engage students with stories, fun and games. Engagement guarantees that students will fall asleep, but learning in Singapore needs to result in employment, which is a higher bar that facilitation can never address. 

So I'm going to make a prediction.

ACLP is like a Grab license. You get enough to give you a basic employment teaching non-PMET skills that may or may not result in employment, so the ACLP credential holder is, in essence, the welfare recipient. 

The serious qualifications will be taught asynchronously, so only the most focused and conscientious students will be able to complete the assignments for marking. The fewer humans who lead these courses, the more valuable it will be because of how mind-numbing it is to write code, put it on GitHub, and have an AI review it. 

In the end, the human is just there to interview candidates for job roles.

 

Happy National Day ! Upcoming videos for the week.

 

For this National Day, I launched a video that goes over the same slides I showed in SGX Auditorium two weeks ago on "How I lived off dividends for a decade". And as usual, the video did not need a boost on social media as it hit 400+ views within two hours. So you guys can follow this link and enjoy the National Day special. 

On Tuesday, I will talk about why REITs are still a compelling asset class that you can consider and detail three strategies on how this theme can be played for investors will different risk appetites.

On Thursday, I will perform a shallow dive on the first growth stock in the series, UMS Integration Limited.

That leaves a video for the weekend, which I'm still working on. I've agreed to work with Havend to talk about their latest e-book on CPF, but I've yet to come up with an angle on how to do this. I'll be reading the e-book in the meantime so that I can put my own spin on it. CPF videos tend to attract the greatest number of views, so expect a no-holds-barred discussion on CPF that authorities may not necessarily like by next Saturday.

Let's enjoy the holidays, and I will have a more decent article for you tomorrow.

Upcoming videos and personal update

What a crazy week it has been for me. On 30th July, the Artificial Intelligence Apprenticeship Program launched a skills assessment package. And immediately upon examination of the contents, I realised that it is one magnitude harder than the technical problems I have been taught under the foundation program. For the next 3 days, I still had ACLP classes to attend, but I was just focused intensely on data analysis and coding. 

Just yesterday, I managed to submit my two programs that I wrote, and I decided that maybe it takes a younger professional to thoroughly meet the requirements of the full assessment package. The funny thing is that if the whole problem can be solved thoroughly, you don't need to be an AI apprentice. You are already a journeyman. 

Maybe this is the grim reality in tomorrow's employment landscape. To even qualify for a job or a training stint, you need to master the material before you even land an interview. 

No one can hide behind degrees. 

No one can hide behind their incompetence. 

But, since I do my videos in batches, we have not lost momentum on the YouTube channel, so expect the following in the upcoming week. 

On Tuesday, I will launch a video on primary considerations before someone pulls the trigger on Early Retirement. Most of us focus on Financial Independence and Early Retirement, which usually does not attract a lot of consideration. 

On coming Thursday, we will do a shallow dive on Mapletree Industrial Trust. This complements the video on AIMS APAC REIT earlier this week. You can really feel how biased local retailers are. Videos on the obscure small-cap dividend counters get poor views, but REITs actually do magnitudes better.

Finally, I revoiced the slides I used on my SGX talk on Wednesday. The topic is how I have lived on my dividends for the past decade.  

Enjoy the rest of the week, and I'll update you again next Saturday !

Upcoming videos and personal update

Last Friday, I just started my ACLP training with the Institute of Adult Learning, so it's technically my first qualification held under the auspices of SUSS. I suspect there are quite a number of ACLPs reading this blog, so yes, I am still going through many "WTF!" moments in my head, but let's be fair to the authorities. This is a qualification that can unlock taxpayer dollars, so expect numerous checks and balances before certification can be attained. 

I will provide more profound thoughts in a later blog article after completing my program. 

For my YouTube channel, I just launched a commentary on a Julius Baer report.

Next Tuesday, I will be reviewing Budget Babe's latest book, Take Back Control of Your Money. I suppose some people might want to know my thoughts on the Tokenise exchange issue regarding Budget Babe. Still, unfortunately, I don't have enough information about the situation beyond acknowledging that some comments exist on the Telegram group. I guess I'm lucky that I have yet to collect money from sponsors on my own channel.  

Next, we will take a brief look at AIMS APAC REIT on Thursday. This series is not popular, but it sharpens my own skills as an investor, so I wonder if a video on a REIT would gather more eyeballs. 

Finally, for next weekend, I will talk about the gurus and goondus. We will also review various scenarios in which the STI can be reached and the actions I will take in such cases. 

As I'm on course, I may have to slow down content creation. Also, please note that the quality of the material may drop slightly in the meantime. My programme stretches until November 2025.

Why guys without a passive income of $500 had better not start dating.

 

There is a wealth of research emerging from the US on dating, family, and money that can be an enlightening read for individuals who typically only read books on investing. 

In Myra Strober and Abby Davisson's book, Money and Love, one of the most counterintuitive findings is that women who earn more than their husbands actually do an even larger share of housework than women who earn less than their husbands. The researcher named this the "economy of gratitude".

The more economically dependent men are on their wives, the less housework they do. 

It gets worse; you may think that modern society would shift this balance of workload, but the research papers are pretty recent, so this is not something arising from the 1990s. This also applies to women whose husbands are unemployed, as it can be particularly stressful to renegotiate household responsibilities. 

As a guy, even though I spent my NS doing more area cleaning than even NS guys today, I do negligible housework at home. However, to be fair to myself, I'm the only person working in my household and I'm hardworking, investing the family funds. But as a father to a daughter, I would not like her to have a deadbeat husband who does nothing at home when she brings home the bacon.

Which sort of brings me to one of the more controversial ideas in my talks. 

In an earlier presentation with Tiger Brokers, I mentioned that I had never seriously dated until my passive income reached about $500. I also had a fragile male ego in my 20s, and the $500 gave me the confidence to date, allowing me to graciously pay for all the dates using my dividend income with plenty of leftover money to buy even more dividend stocks. Over time, the dividends can grow to the point where the individual can become a two-income family on their own efforts, giving their wife the option to leave the workforce. 

Yes, this is a very old-fashioned way of looking at relationships, but clearly we're still living in an age of fragile male egos and toxic masculinity. 

One of the essential lessons you can learn from the book is that modern couples need to establish household responsibilities during the dating phase. Therefore, I think that if guys have a big ego, they should develop a substantial income or net worth to match. 

Be fair to the ladies, work on yourself so that you can contribute fairly to your future household. 

Super Terrible Index makes everyone in my household a millionaire !

 

In case you're not aware, the Straits Times Index is currently at an all-time high of 4,189.5 points. 

Not too long ago, if you were an investor in the STI, you'd be the butt of jokes. However, thanks to chronic indifference from Singapore's own investors, who prefer US stocks and dividends, older investors who enjoyed dividend investing were able to stubbornly accumulate companies that generate decent free cash flow over the past decade. A few, like myself, who primarily invest locally, currently hold US stocks just to demonstrate the power of my Python Jupyter notebooks. 

I never anticipated that the STI would exceed 4,000 so soon; in fact, I did not even think MAS's moves to stimulate the money could get us there, but my intuition tells me that if Donald Trump wins, I would easily make a 6 figure sum from something, be it my crypto holdings or real estate holdings. AS it turns out, his tariffs caused a movement of capital out of the US markets and into the world, where Singapore primarily benefited from a stable currency, a sane government, and a low inflicted-upon tariff rate.

I always said that if you are a local investor, you are, in essence, investing in a broken clock. However, a broken clock is still correct twice a day, and you only need to be right once in your life. The first time I was right was when I invested all my take-home pay in SGX stocks during the Great Financial Crisis. That made my first million, but it also laid the foundation for me to FIRE early in my life and return to my career as an investment trainer. 

But I kept at it because I was bothered that only the folks talking big on blogs and social media about FIRE are all singles pontificating about life, while families continued to require financial support. And whoever makes a million dollars or has left the workforce would get slammed by salty Sinkies. So I carried on thinking about earning money because I have family members, like my kids, who have not achieved FIRE yet.

However, thanks to recent events, as I tallied the valuation of my real estate holdings, CPF, and investment funds from all sources and countries, converted into SGD, I can say that everyone in my household for this weekend is a millionaire.  

Unfortunately, I won't be able to enjoy my weekend. 

I came down with the flu, despite being thoroughly vaccinated. I was diagnosed with a frozen shoulder, and now I'm deciding whether to turn to TCM or Western medicine. The government system will only grant me a specialist appointment in September. I have slides for a week of videos, but I can't record the voiceover until my throat feels better.

Maybe markets will retrace this week and we will lose our millionaire per pax status next week. There is no functional change in the way I manage my household.

But this surely makes an exciting blog article title. 

Rest assured that a video will follow once this financial position is further secured. I want to review the effects of my earnings and dividends in Q3 before I can really consider this a big win. 

Insights from the demented genius of Nanjing Red Uncle

 

The most interesting piece of news that has gone viral around the world is that of Nanjing Red Uncle, a 38-year-old who managed to convince 1,691 men, many of whom were heterosexual, to have sex with him. As I have fewer subscribers on my YouTube channel than Red Uncle has men, it was pretty fun to read up on the commentary regarding his behaviour.

Over the weekend, I've been hanging out with really smart Millennials, and one snippet of our conversation was about ladies from an elite school in Singapore who are having problems dating men because they are just so good at cutting them down. Of course, it took me a while to put two and two together, which was only after I read some commentary from Taiwanese gossip channels about Red Uncle's genius that my mind was blown by this insight.

Red Uncle's genius lies in being the inverse or opposite of these elite ladies.

In some perverse way, Red Uncle, being a man, has a firm grasp (yes, pun intended) on the problems that men in China, and possibly most Gen Z men, face. Men in China have serious demographic disadvantages, as the unbalanced sex ratio condemns many men to a life of singleness. Even if they do find a way to get hitched, Chinese women call the shots on dowries and bride price, making it hard for a family to establish itself for men in rural regions or low-earning men. 

So there's really no reason for Chinese women to pander to men because of the bargaining advantages they have. So over time, I suspect what's missing in a guy's life is emotional safety. A place to be vulnerable, but also to feel like a man. You find this in many gag videos where American Gen Z dudes pay women to say nice things about them. 

Which explains Red Uncle's demented genius. He looks like Shrek, but all he wants is for the men to hook up with him to bring some fruits and, occasionally, some milk or cooking oil. Red Uncle also makes it a point to occasionally find ways to make his hookups look heroic, like asking for help gently to dispatch a cockroach. If you put everything together, this is the exact opposite of how Chinese women, and possibly our elite ladies, would treat the average non-PMET guy in Singapore - how else can you explain the high margins of "hang flower" places?

With all this analysis, the question we have to confront is whether a homegrown Red Uncle exists, perhaps in the underbelly of the Yishun area.

I don't think Singaporean men are so hard-up that they can settle for some anal with Shrek. Our currency is strong, and there are bridal agencies specialising in brides from other parts of Asia.

But what makes me ultimately uncomfortable comes back to the notion of emotional safety. Not every guy has that in their relationships. 

Maybe Red Uncle is, indeed, the girlfriend of a better age.

Upcoming videos on my channel next week

If only I could create a video that can latch onto the popularity of the Red Uncle meme, my channel would monetise immediately. Still, I was unable to come up with an angle as I made all these videos over two days.

My first video, scheduled for Tuesday, is on how to think about the differences between insurance and investment. If you understand the difference, you will be able to save on commissions and put thousands of dollars back into your pocket.

On Thursday, we will be reviewing a deep value play that has numerous issues, not unlike an encounter with Red Uncle. We will be examining China Everbright Water, a textbook dividend stock with negative free cash flow. 

Finally, over the weekend, I continued to leverage memes arising from the 1M65 telegram groups by diving deeper into the "Super Terrible Index". 1M65's genius is in turning abstract finance ideas into something that other investors care about.

I continue to seek support from readers to forward any material you like to your friends, as even Red Uncle has more sexual encounters than the number of subscribers on my YouTube channel.

Catch you in the middle of the week for deeper articles on this blog. 

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.