Category: Uncategorized

This was the week that cryptocurrencies continue to be volatile while trending lower. Too many Elon tweets have burst the bubble as BTC (Bitcoin) dropped from its 65k high to as low as 30K in a matter of days.

It was like Jan 2018 for me again when my crypto portfolio suddenly went up 6x after having just entered this market 4 months earlier. I just bought into the top 10 cryptos by market cap and XRP was the preferred choice for a heavier weightage. XRP went from $0.21 to more than $4. BTC briefly touched 20K before collapsing back to 4K again. I was too greedy and did not want to take some money off the table and hence went back to square one subsequently.

Since then, I have been trying to selectively buy just the major ones and sell a portion of them when I think the prices are high enough. High volatility provides attractive trading ranges for one to profit from it. With the assumption that they will trend up against fiat currencies in the long run because of continued central banks money printing, I continue to have a mainly long crypto position for BTC, ETH (Etherum) and XRP. I have also recently dabbled in Dogecoin as a punt and for fun, having been influenced by the Elon hype.

The growth of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) was a direct result of recent crypto price appreciation. The newly minted rich nerds do not trust physical asset classes anymore and hence this new virtual asset class was created for them to “spend” their newfound wealth. The logic of NFT investments are still not clear to me and it still looks like a fad for now. Just like the ESG (Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance) investment thought process, I think it is an ideal objective but it absolutely misses the point of investment for profit. If your goal is to profit from the rise in share price, then it should be the profitability of the company using whatever means to achieve it. ESG concerns should NOT be your focus.

As of now, I have just been concentrating on the accumulation of BTC as it slides lower. I have been putting bids from 50K all the way to 37K and all are now filled. My exposure is not very big and I am kind of like the HODL (Hold On for Dear Life) crowd and not use any leverage for my positions to ensure that I have better holding power. It is sort of like a wait-and-see situation. I also have sufficient unrealised profits to fall back on.

We are now into the second week of stricter Covid restrictions/lockdown and getting used to it. While tension remains high due to the discovery of new unlinked cases, there seems to be a better handle of things now than a few weeks ago. Seeing other Asian countries battling the same situation might have helped convince citizens that S’pore is not an isolated incident. Malaysia seems to be spiking higher and will have a new full lockdown soon.

There is an ongoing debate now about whether if countries closing their borders completely (eg. Australia and NZ) to aim for zero cases is a sustainable long term strategy. A country is interconnected globally and cannot be forever shut off from the outside indefinitely, else the economy will perish. Then what is a sweet spot if the fear of just one new variant entering the country will screw up all the best-planned efforts of protecting the population? I really don’t have an answer at the moment. So many tough choices to consider and decisions to be made by each and every government where a wrong call can have severe consequences.

The only hope now seems to be to achieve herd immunity via vaccinations. The downside of this hit home on a personal front for me this week. I had received a call on Thurs morning that my niece had suddenly passed away the day before. She’s 52 years old and we were undergraduates in the same faculty in university many years ago. We had not really kept up for many years but this was still a shock for me.

I attended the wake that evening and spoke to her dad to try to understand what happened. She had her second vaccine shot on Tues and felt unwell after that. At 4 pm on Wed, she was still ok and went to rest in her room. When she did not take her dinner by 8 pm, her family discovered that she was unconscious in her bed. The ambulance came for her and she passed away upon reaching the hospital.

An autopsy was done and the results indicated a heart blockage. Her distraught family are not convinced and wants a second opinion. They were not aware that she had any heart problems as she had been doing regular checkups. Her dad expressed some regret to wonder if they had discovered her earlier, would the outcome be different? She was a bit overweight since young though and did exercise regularly according to her dad. My condolences to her family and may she rest in peace now.

This reminded me of another close friend who recently had a stroke in the middle of the night. He apparently had his first vaccine shot just before that fateful night and woke up at 3 am feeling that things were not right. Thankfully, his quick-acting family brought him to the hospital A&E in time for a full recovery. My friend has had heart issues and has been taking a lot of medication on a daily basis. Did the vaccine trigger an adverse reaction because of the meds?

I make it a point now to share the above info selectively with friends whom I know may have been on a lot of medication due to various reasons. I want them to be aware of possible vaccine side effects. I suggest that some family members should be around them for at least the next few days after they had their shots, to be on the safe side.

While I think that everyone should eventually be vaccinated, there is still not enough data to understand the risks of the vaccines and its possible effects when combined with other medications. It has been a strange and unsettling week for me.

The week started with a call from an Indian minister to ask the people to be aware of the new S’pore virus variant mutation that affects children and to ban flights from that country.

Funnily, the S’pore strain does not exist as it is had been already scientifically tagged and identified as originating from Indian (B.1.167). S’poreans naturally went up in arms to condemn the misinformation and memes were furiously produced. The country that gave it to us and now resulted in us having a mini-lockdown now wants to ban our flights. The irony was so rich and tragic, considering that India is now fighting the worst pandemic of modern times.

It was probably a political move to distract citizens from the shitstorm that is happening onshore where everyone is rushing for oxygen tanks. The Indian mutant virus has swallowed up the whole country and causing panic. Whole families have died and all medicine was in short supply. The daily tragic human toll and news update were getting worse. Modi seems to have given up.

Meanwhile, more unlinked and community cases were recorded in S’pore. New emergency measures had to be announced and effected on Sunday. It seems to be very contagious and spreading to the younger population via tuition centres and schools. Because of the TraceTogether app, tracking of positive cases were highly automated via the Bluetooth function of the tracker.

There was a mad scrambling of issuing quarantine orders to multiple suspect cases but the hotels could not keep up with the sudden surge in demand. Two of our close friends had received call notifications or SMS to inform them that they were affected and to be on standby for further instructions. Schools were told to test all students. Even a public housing block was identified and all residents there were told to get tested after 3 positive cases were found there.

We are told to stay home as much as possible to try to break the virus cycle. While the restrictions were not as severe as the Circuit Breaker a year ago, there was a sense of unease for everyone towards this new danger. Though the vaccination rollout had already started in Jan and more than 30% of the population had been vaccinated, much is still unknown so far.

Reports said that the fully vaccinated positive cases seem to not require hospitalization. The vaccination program still has not been rolled out for those 45 years and younger. That may account for why the younger population are getting the new strain now. The worry is that we are suddenly seeing it in a lot of kids below 10 years old. Things are starting to unfold and the next few days will be critical to understanding if the restrictions could arrest the spread or if we need to go into more serious lockdowns.

Surprisingly, the Western world is going in the opposite direction. The UK and US are starting to open up their businesses to try to return back to normal. America’s CDC announced that masks are no longer needed for the fully vaccinated.

It is disturbing to note that Asian countries like S’pore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan and India are now battling new Covid waves while the West is blissfully unaware that the strain could travel to their shores soon. This is like a horror movie where you know how the story will play out next. The UK and South Africa strains had created new waves previously. What makes us so sure that the Indian one will not do the same around the world soon? It is like a slow-moving train wreck that is unravelling in front of our eyes. I hope I am wrong about this.

Given that we are unable to eat out and told to stay home as much as possible, this week has been a quick reversal to old lockdown schedules of getting used to staying in our rooms the whole day and eating in. I try my best to go for a run every morning to stay sane. My online classes and e-Learning program on Data Science keeps me occupied. 3 more weeks to go till this mini-lockdown is done.

In the Clubhouse app, chat room moderators have been using the term “room reset” periodically.

What does it mean? When the discussion veers off the main topic or whenever there is some unwelcomed distraction, the moderator will call time out and ask for a room reset, to bring everyone back to the same page again, to re-emphasize proper chat etiquette.

And just like that, S’pore and US had done a room reset this week. But both were on opposite sides and spectrum of Covid expectations. The rest of the world had also gone through a certain form of room reset in the last few weeks too and we move to the next phase of this virus journey.

Biden just announced that CDC had issued new guidelines that there is no need to wear masks outside anymore for those that are fully vaccinated. This is perhaps a smart strategy to push the remaining population to get the shots to achieve herd immunity before the July Independence day deadline. The anti-mask 1st amendment rights Covidiots now technically have a way out. Get the vaccine, stupid! For the Anti-Vaxers, well you can continue to wear your masks and be ostracized by the rest of society, Dumbo! If facts cannot convince you, then social moral suasion and making you a pariah might do the trick.

Kids from 12 years old upwards can now also take the vaccine and capacity has been ramped up to accommodate more people in the coming months as demand had been steadily dropping. The US and the UK have been at the forefront of the vaccination strategy to get its citizen out of the Covid cycle, even as newer variants (6k and counting) have been popping up all over the world.

The situation in India is still not looking good and the case count remains dangerously high. 44 other countries including S’pore have begun to record this strain in their countries. The Modi government has retreated into its own shell of denial with no plans of trying to get out of this quagmire.

S’pore had seen a relentless surge in cases over the last 2 weeks with many new clusters and unlinked cases popping up everywhere, especially on the east side (now henceforth named the new East Coast Plan…). After many days of investigation, it has decided to do a room reset and start a mini lockdown of sorts for the next month.

From tomorrow, group gatherings will be restricted to 2 persons from 5 and all dine-in activities will stop. Unlike the stricter Circuit Breaker (CB) last year, this will be more of fine-tuning of activities to try to break the virus cycle and arrest the spread. All gyms will be closed and group activities minimized and households can only have 2 unique visitors per day.

There were some panic supermarket groceries buying as usual last night after the announcements were made. Guess most have not tried out online shopping of groceries yet. Live will still go on as we have mostly conditioned ourselves over the last year to survive in the new normal.

The rest of the world is now moving at different speeds and strategies against the virus and the disparities are getting wider. While all of us are in a better place now than a year ago with more knowledge of the virus and a vaccine solution, new problems seem to creep up as we move to the next phase of trying to achieve normalization.

I had 2 calls with our Myanmar overseas lenders this week. Things do not look good there. With Covid and now the coup, it is death by a thousand cuts. The military is not moving an inch towards negotiation after the failed ASEAN attempt, encouraged by the 7 years old Thailand military coup which happened in 2014 and still showing no signs of free elections. As long as China supports Myanmar, they really do not need the blessings of outsiders.

The protesting young population looks to the 2019 Hong Kong riots as a template to escalate the confrontations. They have started to join the rebels up north to take up arms and training to fight back. Killings continue and the outlook looks bleak for an outsider like me looking in. I am resigned to the fact that my engagement with the country might come to a halt soon as things go beyond anyone’s control and that I cannot provide any value add to the company anymore.

One of my 2021 resolutions is to read 15 books this year. I have been into books about the chef and food porn show star Anthony Bourdain recently. We will be reaching the 3rd anniversary of his suicide soon and there is a new book out on his travel shows (World Travel – An Irrelevant Guide) that summarize his visits to interesting places around the world. I am also reading this book about his various interviews (The Last Interview and Other Conversations) at the same time. A documentary (Roadrunner) about his life will also be coming out soon, I heard.

On a more positive note, I started the new Data Science module of my IBM AI course this week. We were blessed with a highly talented young man as our trainer and were taught so much just in our one and only day of Zoom online class on Tues. I am excitedly looking forward to this module as it reminds me of a similar course I took in 2018 for my specialist diploma in Business Analytics. This is more in-depth now and much has changed in the last few years with technological advancements. The trainer also strongly encourages us to learn about Python programming to better appreciate data analysis concepts.

Even the recently completed Cloud Computing module had gotten me very excited about the huge possibilities of Cloud as I got to know more about it. It is much more secure than I had imagined and with the start of 5G services, this will be a paradigm shift to greater things. Amazon’s AWS is the leader in this field and I will revisit this again as a 2021 goal when my course finishes in Aug.

There are still so many uncertainties brought about by the Covid situation as we adapt to it month by month. Human adaptability is a strength that all of us have. We continue to count our blessings in this brave new world.

The Clubhouse app has been around for more than a year and a kind friend gave me an invite a few months back. I just wanted to share my experience of the app in this blog.

Imagine if you can invite yourself into a unique room full of strangers from anywhere in the world anytime you want to listen and discuss a specific topic. You choose only the chat rooms which are live at that moment which interest you, listen for a while and then can leave quietly anytime you want.

At your first app sign in stage, it will ask you to list your interests in order to show you ongoing chats that you might like. But as you start to use the app more often, you can begin to follow people or groups that appeal to you. When they host new chats, you will be informed or they will show up in your feeds.

At the start, it was to tune into my friend’s chat as he was trying to pivot from his many passive LinkedIn followers into this newer and more interactive medium. Then I saw pop-ups of famous people participating in live chats and immediately jumped into those rooms to have a look-see.

I went into one where Marc Andreessen was talking. He is one of the original investors in Clubhouse and a famed technopreneur whom most would want to listen to his experiences and views. The other one I happened to chance upon was the actor Jared Leto. It was amazing that I could listen to live discussions by well-known people and surrounded by like-minded audience from every corner of the world. The limit for participants in each room is 5k and you can jump in when you see it filling up fast.

As I was interested in technology and AI in particular, I started to follow certain groups and joined the chats. There were fantastic and knowledgeable people with PhDs or professors who speak from a level of authority on the topics which were so enlightening for me. Anyone can put up their hand to ask a question and the moderator can “upgrade/invite” you to the panel where you can ask your question. The panellist of experts will try to attempt to answer your query.

There were so many groups of special interest to join and learn from. It was especially useful for me to tune into one during my long morning jogging sessions as they were intellectually stimulating. One can chance upon a chat that will blow your mind once in a while. The fact that you have participants from all over the world even though it is now only an iPhone only app gives one a wider appreciation of cultural differences and thinking.

The hype has since died down and usual chat group sizes are now smaller, anywhere from 100 to 1k in size. Many other firms like Twitter have also jumped onto the bandwagon with similar functions. Discord had also been doing the same for a while now via a gaming angle. Given the year of Covid, the need for human interaction had certainly played a part in encouraging these apps to blossom. It feels so nice and personal to listen to a private conversation of like-minded people discussing a favourite subject in a warm fireside chat setting.

The latest one I enjoyed was a few days back in a comedy chat group. Jeff Foxworthy was the special guest featured. I didn’t even know who he was before the call. He is a 30-years stand up comedy veteran whose speciality was clean redneck jokes. I couldn’t stop laughing for more than an hour. So many joined in, some comparing the similarities of redneck and black jokes, all agreeing that comedy is a great unifier of different people across all cultures. Something new I learnt that day.

We had a family gathering last Sat to celebrate my dad’s 92nd birthday. Thankfully, it was a week before the lockdown that will start today because of the new clusters that were discovered recently. While we still had to limit household visitors to a maximum of 8, we organized it in 2 separate locations to accommodate everyone. The older adults went to my dad’s place while the younger generation came to my place and we did FaceTime to connect both sides via live streaming. We ordered some food delivery and did some potluck plus birthday cakes to celebrate.

Dad is not a very chatty person and usually looks stern and quiet. But he did something different that night which surprised all of us. After the cake cutting, he told all of us that he wanted to speak and address all of us as a group. It seems that he wanted to get something off his chest.

He started to tell us the reason why he has always had an altar in the house for my grandfather. I never got to see my grandfather before and always assumed that he had left my grandmother for another wife a long time ago while dad was still very young.

My dad related that when he was a 14-year-old boy something happened. As he was born in 1929, that would be 1943 then. During that time during WWII, my grandfather apparently had been preparing for a journey to Indonesia via ship to do some trading and exchanging money for goods to sell back in S’pore. He never returned and dad heard absolutely no news from him thereafter. He consulted a temple for help and they advised him to place an altar at home to pray for his safe return. That was how it all started.

Forward to 78 years later, dad was still doing this. He still periodically burn joss sticks offerings to the altar in the hope that his father will return home safely. That was the legacy of his practice all these years and he wanted all of us to know. I am touched by the story that he was sharing this with us now, given that he has always been a very private person. He told us that this would continue with him while he is still around and that we need not continue this practice after he passes along if we do not want to.

I guess that at a certain age, he has the right to want to share certain things with his children rather than to keep them bottled inside. My full respect for him. As we age, we will look back to our life and legacy to decide what we want to be remembered for, rather than depend on using material stuff to serve as a rememberance.

We finally had a family holiday this week in these new normal Covid times. Beggars can’t be choosers and the choices were a cruise or more staycations. We chose a 3 nights cruise to nowhere on the World Dream ship by Genting. There were a 2 hours check-in process that included a Covid test, multiple briefings and tokens issued for tracking purposes of your whereabouts on the boat at all times. Due to social distancing rules, the ship can only be 50% full. They had a capacity for 3,400 passengers and hence there were only 1,700 of us in this 19 stories high ship structure.

It was an eat, drink, sleep and repeat leisurely vacation. There were sufficient activities to keep us occupied, gym and pool sessions included. All activities and speciality meals had to be pre-booked in advance. Alcoholic drinks buffet packages were tempting and we managed to consume 4 bottles of wine and cocktails during the stay. Food was alright and was part of the cruise package except if you want to dine at the speciality restaurants where you had to pay extra. The casino was one of the highlights but it did not interest us.

For 2021, S’pore had become one of the top countries with the most cruise passengers in the world. The government had started a trial cruise experiment with 2 cruise liners a few months ago and it seemed to have gone on well with so much penned up demand to travel boiling over.

These are interesting times as the new normal continues to evolve. The virus has taught us to not take things for granted and that we should count our blessings all the time.

Quite an eventful week for me after a long period of non-event days on a personal front while covid again reared its ugly head.

Just when we thought that Covid recovery is rounding the corner for everyone, the sudden and vicious flare-ups around developing countries like India and Brazil took the world by surprise. Multiple videos of people scrambling to get their loved ones into hospitals and depleting oxygen supplies was a wake-up call that all is not over. In fact, all is not well at all when we see pictures of numerous impromptu funeral pyres being set up as crematoriums were overwhelmed. It really looked like a scene from a Hollywood apocalypse movie.

The fact that a simple commodity like oxygen was lacking should scare anyone. It is not even a medicine but a basic necessity to survive. India is one of the biggest manufacturers of the Covid vaccines but yet this had happened. What went terribly wrong? Wrong moves by Modi and commercial greed? The Bloomberg article below tries to figure this out:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-29/how-india-s-vaccine-drive-crumbled-and-left-a-country-in-chaos?sref=TCJIUe33

The other acute fault line that the virus had exposed: countries scrambling to protect their citizens rather than assisting others. That became apparent with the orange one’s America First strategy over the last 4 years. Unfortunately, Biden had to continue it as a virus strategy to keep the raw materials for the vaccine production for itself until all its citizens have access to the vaccines first.

India’s vaccine production capabilities were severely crippled once it could not obtain the supplies needed to continue producing the billions of doses required. Biden has now decided to release 60 million of the Astra Zeneca vaccine to India. The irony of it was that it had not been approved for use in the US yet, as America started stockpiling and hoarding all the vaccines for its citizens. Hence the stockpile had been languishing in warehouses at the moment. Biden has also now agreed to allow vaccine raw materials to be exported to the manufacturers in India. But the damage has been done as the ramp-up in production now means that new vaccines can only be ready for use in July.

It was mentioned earlier in the year that India intends to keep 50% of the vaccine production for its citizens. By the political will seemed to have been lost very quickly. The overconfidence of being able to battle the first wave had caused them to let down their guards with disastrous effect now. It had hit new world records of more than 300k cases daily for many days now.

The widening divide between the have and have-not countries, the developed and developing ones, are getting bigger by the day. Countries that planned in advance to stock up for the vaccines like S’pore and stronger ones like the US that can exercise their might to channel resources seems to be winning at the moment.

But yet for S’pore, a recent flare-up of cases has been a worrying concern in the last 48 hours. We are discovering a few new clusters in a hospital and other locations. In the last 2 weeks, there were about 45 new confirmed positives. Some can be attributed to people with old infections who are still shedding the virus. Others who were already vaccinated with the 2 shots of Pfizer or Moderna were also in this group.

While we were told that those who had the vaccine were less likely to have life-threatening issues if they contracted Covid, we are not sure if they do have the ability to pass it on to others and become contagious. The authorities are frantically widening the net to quarantine as many of the people who have come in contact with the positives cases. More countries are being put into the banned from travelling or having a stopover in S’pore.

This is a dynamic evolving situation and authorities will need to nail down the spread and identify who is patient number one. I worry that if it is someone who has had the vaccine and yet can spread the virus, then it will be a game-changer, back to square one again. New mutant variants are also a big worry. Let’s hope that it will not result in a lockdown again.

On the personal front this week, the positives first. I finally had my second Pfizer vaccine shot on Thurs. It went better than the first one with some soreness and tiredness that lasted for a shorter period of time.

I finally met my IBM AI classmates after 2 months of virtual online Zoom classes at our first in-person exam. I went for lunch with a number of them after that. Meeting people face to face is so different from looking at the screen. Our perceptions and assumptions can be so wrong when we meet the actual person in real life.

From tomorrow, my family will be going on a 3 nights cruise to nowhere. It will be a vacation of sorts in these Covid times. It has become so popular here that S’pore now accounts for almost one-third of all cruise travellers in the world! A friend liked it so much that he has already done 3 such trips. Prices are low and reasonable with social distancing protocols being strictly observed – only 50% of capacity allowed. It will be an interesting family bonding session for us in a controlled environment.

I finally completed my excruciating traffic accident court case. It has been dragging on since Jul and I can finally settle it and stop driving for a while. While I still feel that the penalty is a bit too severe, I will just take it and move on.

My biggest negative news of the week was on Myanmar. The CEO of the microfinance firm I was providing consultancy to for the last 3 years had suddenly decided to quit. I guess the pressure of Covid and then the coup 3 months ago, plus working overseas from Yangon and being a new father had overwhelmed him.

To see a country going down the tubes so fast is really a heartbreaking emotional rollercoaster for me. There seems to be no end in sight even after the recent Asean overture to try to bring all parties to the negotiating table. It is sad that after 11 years of opening up and slowly lifting the poverty line for many to get a better life could be reversed so abruptly.

I feel so helpless as an outsider looking in. I cannot imagine how it would feel like for my fellow local colleagues there. So many things have become beyond their control. The banking system has shut down, day to day activities and supply chains have collapsed. Even the simple act of trying to draw money from an ATM machine is limited now. Internet services and broadband are also restricted every night.

Things seem to be going back to Myanmar’s previous 50 years of isolationistic darkness again. I fear for the country and what it will become. My heart bleeds for the citizens whose destiny is being controlled by the few in power who are crushing the will of the citizens.

This week was one of those times where we experience once in a while. It was hard to figure out where the various asset classes were heading as prices were all over the place.

It seems like there were multiple diverging views as investors try to grapple with the “what’s next?” million-dollar question. The stock markets were jumping up and down the whole week trying to figure out if the pandemic was over yet. Vaccinations in the developed countries are going well in the US and UK while Europe fumbles. China and Japan are also not really near their herd immunity targets at all. Developing countries are seeing vicious 2nd waves hitting them. India just hit a new world daily cases record and news coming out there about hospitals running out of oxygen while body bags are piling up.

Coinbase started trading the week before with a bang which led cryptocurrencies to a rally. Bitcoin hit a new high of just under 65k before correcting a spectacular 25% to 48.5k by the end of the week. ETH also hit new highs and seems to be maintaining its levels. XRP prices exploded briefly before dropping like a brick again. I sold the rest of my XRP too soon before it broke above $1 though. Have started to slowly accumulate BTC again at current levels. Just trying to trade the range in these volatile swings.

Gold was a missed opportunity as it suddenly gained in these chaotic times while all asset classes whipped sawed the whole week. It seems that the whole market was trying to come to an agreement on what will be happening going forward and has not reached an equilibrium yet. Very confusing now to figure out the macro theme being played out as various news seems to contradict each other too.

A third of 2021 has already passed us by. Biden’s first 100 days is approaching and he has provided a lot of strong leadership to correct the 4 years of mistakes created by the orange one. More has to be done on the pandemic front as the issue continues to play out. Normal overseas travel seems to be a thing of the past which we cannot foresee to return any time soon with many countries still experiencing the worst of subsequent waves.

A quiet week for me as I prepare for my Cloud Computing exam next week, having completed a third of my 6 months full-time IBM AI course to date. While I learnt a lot of new things about this topic, there is so much more to absorb if one wants to dive deeper into this evolving technology. It would be a good new to-do item for me after my course ends in Aug. Amazon AWS, Google and Microsoft Azure are the ones I should learn more about, besides picking up Python.

The Myanmar situation doesn’t look to improve soon and the economy is going through death by a thousand cuts after the military coup on 01 Feb. Without a functioning banking system for almost 3 months, financial institutions are going into survival mode now. Lenders’ covenant breaches are happening everywhere and tough calls have to be made to stop or defer loan repayments now as cashflows are severely impacted. I worry for the company that I had been providing Treasury consultancy for the last 3+ years and now seeing the whole country crumbling before my eyes every day.

An interesting week ahead for me after 2 subdued weeks of not much happening and staying at home studying. We are all becoming domesticated homebodies thanks to the pandemic. Perfectly happy to just be in our little comfort zones and forgetting what the old norm is like where we used to have vacations that had overseas travel plus flights. Sad or the new norm?

US stock markets rose to historical highs this week. One will be hard-pressed to realize that we are still in the midst of a pandemic though. Markets are forecasting months ahead, where things could possibly go back to the good old times pre-Covid.

It was a broad-based rise in the overall American indices where many grasp the good news that vaccination is progressing well and that the US might go back to normal by the fourth of July, Independence Day. Biden continues to under-promise and then over-delivering to manage expectations. Things are starting to look rosy again as restaurants begin to open and people are travelling again.

The fact remains that central banks had been printing like there is no tomorrow for the last few years and the pandemic had really turbocharged the process further. With economies collapsing spectacularly last Mar when the virus began its global onslaught, governments had no choice but to take out the bazookas to save their fragile countries. Lockdowns and overstretched medical facilities were a disaster recipe for economic destruction.

No one knew at that time what would happen next during this 1 in 100 years event where every human being in the world is affected. Never in our lifetimes have we experience such a situation that every living soul on earth is faced with the same issue at the same time. All of us were like the rabbits facing an oncoming truck with its high beam shining into our eyes. We all muddled through the many months wondering what and when could the end game be in this evolving apocalypse.

Things began to look brighter in Dec when the vaccines breakthrough happened. 5 months into the global vaccination roll-out, one can still see the difficult road ahead as the disparities between the have and have-not countries become even more apparent. As the world adapts to the next phase of the virus fight, new challenges will arise.

Meanwhile, the flood of liquidity unleashed by the central banks continue to flush into all asset classes. Fiat money losses its value in an ever-accelerating momentum as investors chase assets as a means to preserve their personal store of value. All traditional asset classes like stocks and property surged to new historical highs with no pullback in sight.

As investors run out of places to sell fiat currencies for asset preservation reasons, newer asset classes are starting to emerge and go mainstream. Cryptocurrencies are beginning to hoard the limelight in recent months. While many still do not have a vague idea of what it is, various corporations have started to jump in. Tesla, Square and others have decided to accept them and make it legal tender.

The rise in Bitcoin, Etherum and XRP prices had made many early adopter geeks rich beyond their imagination. In turn, this has sparked a rise in a new asset class, which is a derivative of the cryptos. NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) that used to be an exotic concept just a few months ago is starting to develop into a new asset class for investors to park their wealth.

I still have a hard time trying to wrap my head onto this NFT phenomenon. As long as there is a demand for such products, buyers and sellers will complete transactions however unbelievable the end product is. It may be so intangible that it blows our mind on why there is value in a traditional sense. But as long as someone perceives a present and possible future value, then there is a meeting of minds.

Take for example the purchase of game tokens to play online games. The developer creates a virtual world for gamers to participate in and can issue unlimited game credits for exchange with fiat currencies. These “gold” token credits can be exchanged for virtual products to enhance the gamer’s play experience. This has already been happening for many years. Willing buyers and sellers gather to create demand and supply. Outsiders may not understand the economics and purpose of the tokens but the insiders really don’t care about non-gamers opinion anyway.

NFTs in a way is another version of the above. We now have a new class of people who have become super-rich thanks to the rise of crypto prices. They do not spend their wealth in a way like what normal people do. They prefer to push the boundaries and seek a newly created asset class to participate in. Metakovan buying an NFT from an unknown like Beeple for $69 million is one such example. Many are starting to jump onto the bandwagon to seek more NFTs to spend their newfound wealth in ways unimaginable just a year ago just to get bragging rights.

Asset bubbles are coming up everywhere and look like they are bursting soon. But yet they become even bigger over time. Newer ones are now being created as a pressure outlet from the continuous and tremendous flows of fiat currencies heading our way. It has been more than 13 years of asset inflation since the beginning of the 2008 GFC but we see no end in sight. I cannot think of any asset class that had not appreciated over this time at all.

As part of my life long journey, I had recently become a full-time student again. I enrolled on a full government-subsidized SGUnited 6 months course to learn about Artificial Intelligence (AI) via IBM. I am reaching my 2 months milestone next week and am happy to report that I have learnt new things like Enterprise Design Thinking and Cloud Computing. While they are more of a general overview of concepts and do not go too deep technically, it nevertheless was a refreshing new learning experience for me.

To date, our starting class of 21 students had bonded via the online Zoom classes and projects. 2 have dropped out so far due to family commitments and job opportunities. I expect more to drop off into the next 4 months as the job market is improving this year plus a tighter labour market for IT professionals due to the pandemic travel restrictions.

While I am not really attracted to wanting to get a full-time job at the end of the course, learning more about AI is my main motivation. With the Myanmar situation looking to worsen, my consultancy job which I had over the last 3 years seems to be over soon. I would have more time on my hands to look for things to occupy my time this year. I should never say no to what may fall on my lap by the time I complete this course in Aug and to keep an open mind. Life has a strange way to hand you new opportunities when you least expect them. When a door closes behind you, many more will open in front of you.

A good friend suddenly experienced a stroke earlier this week. Thankfully he had recovered fast and was discharged 2 days ago. We all should count our blessings and be thankful for what the Big Man above has given us. I continue to aim to stay happy and healthy into my 2nd half time.

I started the week on Sunday by having a Sunday family lunch to celebrate my Dad’s 92nd birthday. We had some Tim Sum and dishes at a familiar restaurant near his home. Both my parents have taken their first shots of the Pfizer vaccine a few weeks ago and took the 2nd one this week without much incident.

I have always been interested in cooking and the appreciation of good food since I was young. When I was little, I loved to hang out in the kitchen to watch my mum cook and to join her for her morning wet market shopping to see all the fresh produce that was displayed.

After I started my career and had better financial means, I was able to eat at the finer restaurants and to observe the skills of the chefs. My taste palate improved over time with the introduction of wines and travels to food capitals of the world like New York/San Francisco, London, Paris and places in Spain (Madrid, Barcelona and San Sebastian) and Italy (Rome, Venice, Positano and Sicily). I got to experience the many Michelin stars chefs that served their unique creations in many degustation meals.

During those times, we had to travel outside S’pore to experience fine dining as the country was mainly known for good and cheap hawker food plus some traditional cuisines. In the 1980s time, we were known as a dull place of hardworking people which no one would have spared a second thought to want to come here for a visit or a vacation. Things only started to change after 2000. This was one of the reasons why:

My friend reminded me last Sunday of a fine dining movie that just began airing on Netflix. It was of interest to us because of a group dinner we had there in 2010. This was the story of Andre Chiang and his rise to fame in S’pore over the 8 years where he obtained 2 Michelin stars. The movie is called “Andre and his olive tree” and it was more than 2 years in the making.

Andre is a passionate and compulsive chef who had honed his culinary skills via the school of hard knocks, starting from right at the bottom at a well known Paris restaurant peeling potatoes and living in a barn. He became a perfectionist chef that believes in doing the same thing 10,000 times to get it right all the time.

Over time, he had condensed his work into 8 elements or themes which he uses as the beginning point of creating a degustation menu for diners. The 8 elements are:

1. Pure

2. Salt

3. Artisan

4. South

5. Texture

6. Unique

7. Memory

8. Terroir

From these 8 elements, his team will create multiple individual dishes (almost 200). This serves as an internal catalogue for the new season every year. They also carefully track each diner’s past menu eaten at the restaurant to ensure that repeat customers will never eat the same thing while getting to enjoy new dishes every time they visit. This high standard of service and dedication earned them a well deserved 2 Michelin stars when the food guide started to rate S’pore restaurants in 2016.

I had eaten at Andre twice. The first time was when they just opened in late Oct 2010. I planned and booked the dinner months in advance for a 03 Nov date. I gathered a group of good friends I had known during my Citibank days and asked for the biggest table they had. They had one table on the 1st floor which could accommodate 8 persons. The movie mentioned that this particular table was made from a single piece of wood. It was so big that they had to slip it in through the ground floor windows before assembling it. We were told that we were the first group to eat at that table for dinner as the restaurant had just opened.

That was a most pleasant evening for us. We had a fantastic dinner with a few bottles of fine wines. Andre was there to introduce himself. He was so friendly and accommodating. He allowed us to visit his kitchen and then to tour his 3rd-floor office where he showed us his prized complete collection of the red Michelin guide books. It was a really memorable evening that we still speak about till today. He gamely took a group photo with us too at the end of the private tour 🙂 After that dinner, I had to go back again and I brought my wife for a celebratory meal the next time.

Thanks to Andre, S’pore’s profile as a fine food city was elevated over the almost 8 years they had operated. People now come to the island city knowing that they can dine at top-rated restaurants that are recognized on the world stage.

There was a very moving moment in the movie where Andre dropped the big bomb on the evening of the restaurant’s anniversary on 10 Oct 2017. It was also his wedding anniversary too. He announced that he would close Andre on 15 Feb 2018. The last service will be on Valentine’s day, 14 Feb. The shock and weight of the news were overpowering to all his staff, especially his wife.

He had explained that he had achieved all that he has wanted for this restaurant and that he will return the Michelin stars. The emotional tension was so great that I teared too. Reflecting on that moment, I now understand his motivation. To close at the high was the way to go. To force a retirement to recharge himself for the next adventure in his life journey. It is like a halftime reckoning and I really admire his bravery and conviction.

His strong-mindedness and single focus will power to channel all his efforts to his food and then to walk away at the peak of his success – that is so empowering and heroic. He knew that he wanted to move on to the next stage of his life and was brave enough to face the uncertain future ahead. I wished I could have been like him in 2012 and moved on from the peak of my career before I was retrenched.

I highly recommend this movie to everyone even if food is not your passion. It is the human side of the story that is so compelling to watch, just like a similar movie I highly recommend too – Alpha Go the Movie. You go in with low expectations and at the end, the movie overwhelms you and you get so much more out of the film than you ever expected. Lifelong learning lessons about how to navigate your journey of life.

On Thursday, my appointment to receive my first Pfizer vaccine shot finally arrived. The process was quite smooth at the community centre and I had to be observed for 30 minutes after the injection. During the night, my arm started to feel sore and it got worst the next day. I felt tired too, so I took a walk instead of doing my daily run. By the second day, most of the aches had disappeared.

I am glad to have received the vaccine now for peace of mind. The next one will be in 3 weeks time and I understand that most people will feel soreness and tiredness as well. We are slowly inching our way back to normalcy after more than a year of this pandemic. There is light at the end of the tunnel now.