Sight to Insight

Fast forward ten years to July 2007, and it looks like "irrational exuberance" is here once again. The prices of properties in Singapore are escalating. Unheard of prices of S$4000 per square feet (psf) have been breached. Prices in prime areas are over S$2000 psf. It means that if you want an appartment of just 1,000 sf, you have to pay S$2 million. This is no small sum, for many. Reverse back ten over years in 1996, property prices peaked then, and then the crashed in 1998. In the good days, buyers were paying people to queue up to buy a unit. Such queuing could be a few days and nights! Many were making a killing by buying and selling almost immediately. Fine dining restaurants were having a great time, pantering to all these new found wealth. Life was so great then. Today, the stock market indices are at their all time high, and again another source of revenue. Money seems so easy to come by. The banks pay you an interest of less than 0.3% per annum. It means that if you ...

June 18 was a new experience for me to see how creative children can be, even under stress. There were about 80 of them, from Primary One (7 years old) to Secondary Four (16 years old). They were given a story (The Pancake, by Asbjornsen and Moe) and then to creatively act it out, either using that story line or changed the setting. Incredibly, the Secondary One (above picture) was able to create a scientific fiction from a story as mundane as "The Pancake"! I was helping out as part of the volunteer effort with the Singapore Writers Society (see Links I Like, in this blog) which did this joint effort with the National University of Singapore (NUS) Alumni. In short, only when you go on the "road less travelled" will one get surprises, be they pleasant or not. This path was certainly a pleasant and a wonderful experience.

June 16, 2007 (Saturday) was the TARC (Tunku Abdul Rahman College) reunion dinner. It is the meeting of old friends. The people in the photo are Chow Yee Fee, Tan Jor Lan, myself (standing). Mr and Mrs Lee Sin Meng, Tracy Tee and Alan Tan. We graduated in 1976. That calculates to be 31 years ago. It is difficult to imagine the passing of time, while we build our careers and our families. In the blink of an eye, more than three decades have passed. The great news is that we remain as friends to bring back those memories that only we can appreciate. Many names were brought back to remind us of the good days. What can such a reunion bring insight to our lives? One, friendship lives on, but we have to make an effort to meet up. This time, I took up the challenge to drive down from Singapore to Subang Jaya, with a stop in Melaka. Sin Meng was so kind to pick me up to take me to TARC which I have not been in all these years. Two, as age catches up, the things we deemed so important in my you...

I am a late comer to investing in the stock market. I am not a big risk taker when it comes to growing my cash. Especially now that I am near retirement age, to err on the site of caution is better than having sleepness nights on your potential losses in the unforgiving equity market. In the decade that I was involved in managing my own fund, my investment in the Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX) has been very positive. I have good return on investment. There is no necessity to reveal number. What is a good return to me? I use the bank interest rate (fixed deposit) as the risk free return. The banks in the best of times have only given me 3.2% interest per annum. This is under the condition you deposit about $50k - $100k of cash. There are not that many people who have that kind of spare cash. When I first started thinking about investing, I have to do the investigating! I have scan knowledge of it. I was a novice, and I was already in my forties! Yes, before that I had put money in the M...