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...

This article is for readers who are invested in the equity market, or who are thinking of making some money out of it. Money is the mean to an end not an end in itself. This ought to be the guiding principle in investing. I have seen a few cycles of bull and bear market. In the early 90s, there was a super-bull run, whereby the joke was to paste the stock market page on a wall, and then you throw a dart at it. Then you go to the stock market and buy that stock. You will make money. Wasn't that easy? Indeed, few people were seriously working. Most were punting and some did make a killing by getting out early, before it crashed. Many people were hurt, and some swore never to buy into equity again. The equity market can be indeed a casino during a bull run, where you buy in the morning and sell the next day or so. You do not even have to fork out any money. This is because the brokerage provides a transaction plus a number of days, usually three (T+3) before you settle your purchase. ...

Last week I attended two "talks" at the Arts House in Singapore. The first one was by the author, Satish Kumar ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satish_Kumar ) and the other by a young man, Yi-sheng Ng. The environment of the two sessions were so very different. Satish in his 60s seriously talked about his adventure of walking for world peace, without a penny in his pocket, as he walked into hostile Pakistan from India. That hostility seemed only in politics, as he was immediately invited for food and lodging by a stranger, who heard about his objective. Soon, he alongside with a friend has gone round the world, ending in the USA. During this trip, he was entrusted four packets of tea by a lady in Russia, to be given one each to the President of Russia, France, the USA, and the Prime Minister of England. When the president of France refused to see them, they protested in front of the Elysee Palace. For that they were imprisoned for a few days. He finally got his packet delive...

One needs to plot well to blog well. This insight came to me, after the fact. I attended two literary sessions at "The Arts House" in Singapore this week. If I wanted to portray the dynamics of people in both the sessions, I need photos and video. As it is harder to integrate video into blog, the next best thing is photos. Yet, I missed taking photos that brings to life the interactions, even though images would have been still static in nature. This plotting of a blog is akin to travel photo-journalism. One has to bring out the adventure with both words and photos. Words alone to me would be too boring. Photos alone will not express that emotion behind the image. The lesson is to plot ahead to blog better. I will be changing my Blog title to "Sight to Insight", after a good comment from a friend who has since immigrated to Australia for a change in life-style. For me, it is also a change in life pattern, as I bring insight (learning) from sight (observations in lif...