It was a long few weeks of celebrations as the traditional CNY (Chinese New Year) festive period is traditionally practised. We will have a few reunion dinners before the actual day and then at least 3 more days of non-stop feasting and gathering of family members.
It is also a period to count our blessings and treasure the memories and quality family time we have had over the years as we enjoy this annual holiday. It is one of the most important periods on the calendar. A group photo of each gathering captures the smiles of everyone.
This year was a bit special. My older son managed to join us during this time after missing CNY for 2 years while studying overseas. He had started work in HK but managed to come back earlier as he could work in the local office.
The other thing of note was to see that my parents’ situation had stabilized. Mum’s dementia condition has worsened a lot over the last 9 months and Dad was trying very hard to cope, to manage her and himself. They had lived alone for years but now it was time to get permanent domestic live-in help to ease their burden of caring for the house and themselves. Their helper just arrived recently and the situation has improved, much to our relief as siblings.
I started the week on a Monday (05 Feb) with a CNY dinner with some very old friends from primary school days. One of them had recently reconnected again and perhaps it may be due to his health condition for his wish to want to meet up. I have known him for almost 50 years now since we were 8 years old. That is an incredible 85% of my life! The 4 of us reminisced on our innocent childhood days when we had zero worries and only cared about what we wanted to do next at the playground.
Wednesday was another CNY dinner with very good friends from my banking days. All of us have easily known each other for almost 25+ years now. We have had numerous long lunches over the last many years to build up a strong camaraderie of friendship which I treasure deeply.
Thursday was a reunion dinner at my sister-in-law’s place from my wife’s side of the family. A traditional steamboat dinner with a lot of wines and a bottle of sake. Too much food and alcohol as usual.
Friday was the actual day for reunion dinners as it is the night before the 1st day of CNY. I will usually cook for my family that evening and invite my parents and in-laws to celebrate with us. My whole family with our boys were also together to make this a memorable year.
Day 1 of CNY falls on a Sat. We had to do 4 visitations to pay our respects to our elders. First, it was to my parents’ place, then to my in-laws for a sumptuous lunch. Next was to my wife’s grandmother’s place. She has also recently been bedridden even though she is still very alert. Finally, it was my grand aunt’s place to pay her our respect as the next oldest at 90 years old. The grand finale highlight was a big gathering at our place for more than 20+ relatives from my wife’s side that night.
Day 2 of CNY is generally reserved for my side of the family as we spent the whole afternoon into the night at my parents’ place. We also visited my oldest sister’s newly renovated home as a sort of mini housewarming. The evening was another Loh Hei with potluck dishes from each family. The group photo is getting larger with new additions to the 4 generations gathered together.
Day 3 of CNY is another long lunch at an aunty’s home with more wines and food. Everyone chatted excitedly about planning for a big family group overseas vacation in the latter part of the year. Finally, it was dinner at our place for my older son’s last night with us where he invited a number of his good friends over for dinner.
This week’s blog will be my diary to record what happened and to remind me of the joyous moments we all shared once a year. As all of us get older, these occasions become more precious as we move towards our twilight years, especially for our ageing parents and grandparents. It is also for the special effort my son made to return from HK to join us.
We are indeed blessed with the fortune to see as many people as possible over the CNY festive period. It should not be seen as a chore but a celebration of what the Man upstairs had given all of us, We must count our blessings every day of the year and not just for this week alone.
ChatGPt was launched on 30 Nov 2022. It has been an explosive 14 months of non-stop AI growth since then. I have written about its progress every few months since then and it is time to do it again, to look into my crystal ball and see what lies ahead in 2024.
Firstly, let’s talk about Large Language Models (LLM), the engines behind the rapid acceleration of AI. They are working horses behind the output of ChatGPT, Bard and a host of generative AI image tools like Mid-Journey.
Basically, an LLM is a very large deep-learning model that is pre-trained on vast amounts of data. They are artificial neural networks that mimic the human brain in absorbing and digesting unlimited amounts of data as part of their training to be able to come out with amazing outputs based on any multi-modal inputs, be they words, voice or images. An LLM simply consists of a huge dataset that is controlled by a few hundred lines of code that feeds and trains the black box.
Just to give you an idea of how big the datasets have become within the last 3 years, I will share a personal experience. Back in 2021, I did a full-time IBM AI course and our project team wanted to create a simple Python program to detect deepfake photos. Our programmer could only find a free 15,000 images dataset to train our GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) model.
As of today, a mere 2+ years later, Meta has introduced its open-source LLM called LLama to the world at zero cost. It is a fine-tuned generative text model which has been pre-trained on 70,000,000,000 data points. That’s right, 70 Billion… It is one of the biggest and most advanced LLMs of its time now.
The sky is the limit and 100B+ LLMs are coming very soon. So much online data is being produced and recorded every day that it has become an unlimited resource for LLMs to tap. Elon and Tesla are a good example of what I mean, which I will expand on later.
We are starting to see multiple ways to commercialize and monetize AI daily. There can be so many new uses to be discovered and it is only limited by your imagination. OpenAI recently allowed its premium users API access to its ChatGPT 4.0 engine so that one can customize it with a smaller dataset to create personalized and narrowly trained chatbots. They call the newly created end products GPTs. They can be narrowly focused applications like being a coach companion chatbot on how to be a better writer/tennis player/gamer etc…
At the same time, they just launched an online store that is similar to Apple’s app store. All creators can now post their GPTs for others to purchase. This will eventually develop into a whole new industry of professionally made services to cater to any specific need that you may have. You can sell these GPTs apps for $0.99 and make decent money. The world is your oyster as your marketing reach for your virtual non-physical product is now global.
As I have described previously in my blog, I can create a mini-me chatbot that mimics me exactly. Using the LLM access I get, I can train my GPTs using the data from all my WhatsApp conversations. They easily contain at least 5 to 10 GB of my characteristics which I can train the model on to become a version of myself.
Boy, are we going to have a blast this year with all the political elections happening. There will be so many deepfakes going around that all of us will be hard-pressed to know what is real and not real anymore. Another massive online scam version 2.0 will be unravelling into 2024 LOL.
On a more serious note, I predict some things will be fast-tracked and become useful for the majority as AI evolves in the next 12 months. Below are a few examples that can easily come true within a matter of time as the LLMs can be refocused to attempt to solve specific problems.
The area related to my topic this week concerns Tesla and the self-driving solution that they were trying to resolve. The previous solution was to provide algorithm-style instructions to the car based on inputs of external stimuli (visual and radar). This was highly complicated as the algo may not be able to pre-empt all situations and react in the right human way when faced with a situation that the algo code did not cater for. For example, an accident in a particular environment like a petrol station.
Then Elon had a light bulb moment. Hang on, why are we still using algo for autonomous driving instructions? Tesla collects tons of real-time driving data from every car they sell. They record the information of every trip of each Tesla car all the time.
Hence they already have a treasure trove of data they can use to train an LLM model. They just need to remove the bad drivers and only use the rest of the data to train the new autonomous AI model. It will become a model driver that will be familiar with handling all possible situations from the years of data Tesla has stored. AI-trained self-driving cars can become Tesla’s new edge very soon as it pivots and morphs from an EV company into an AI tech powerhouse.
Using the same method as above, can you imagine what else we can do? On the medical front, we can train a model to detect cancer. Show it millions of healthy X-rays and then another batch of those that cancer has been diagnosed. Once the model is live, any patient’s X-ray can be scanned and the AI will provide a superior assessment of the probability of cancer and whether it will happen in a certain time frame. Some doctors have already started experimenting with this new approach to medical analysis.
Sounds too far fetch? Why not? the building blocks are the same, aren’t they? We can test brain scans for signs of dementia and other diseases that only doctors with many years of experience can detect. I foresee the biggest AI impact will be in the area of science and medicine. It has already helped scientists fast-track the COVID-19 vaccine development, allowing for comprehensive computer simulations instead of having to conduct long drawn-out human tests.
Joke of the week. EU AI Act was passed late last year but it is only to be implemented in 2 years. That is like a lifetime in AI time and it may even become sentient AGI by then. Copyrights infringements? How do you enforce that on a pre-trained LLM? How can an LLM neural network unlearn something it has picked up? Can a human brain do that???
Food for thought but 2024 will be another exciting year of AI given what we saw what ChatGPT can do in 14 months. AI revolutionized and upended whole industries within a short period of time. AI moves at light speed and humans will need to up their game to simply just to keep abreast of the new developments. We have to embrace AI or be left behind. My favourite quote from Thanos that speaks to AI – “It is inevitable.”
The new year started very quickly as we busied ourselves with new goals for the next 12 months after a relaxing holiday with a lot of quality family time. Chinese New Year (CNY) is coming soon in 2 weeks, starting in early Feb. It usually happens in late Jan to mid-Feb period according to the Chinese calendar.
I can sense s festive period of excitement building up for many people as we start to do spring cleaning and begin to stock up with CNY goodies, preparing for reunion dinners. We will eat a lot and have precious family gatherings where alcohol and pineapple tarts will flow freely.
For me, the excitement is the preparation of the reunion dinner, thinking about the dishes I want to prepare and stuff to buy. Just this morning, I rushed to the CNY seafood warehouse sales to check them out and buy some of the stuff I needed. They opened at 9 am and I wanted to avoid the weekend crowds where busloads of elderly people are there via community centers organized tours to shop too. I normally only cook for the family for Christmas Eve and CNY reunion dinner, bringing my family together with my parents and in-laws.
This main CNY reunion dinner will be held on the eve of CNY on 09 Feb. The day before, we will also have one at my sister-in-law’s place on 08 Feb. Tomorrow evening, there will also be another early reunion dinner with my sisters’ families and our parents, an almost 20+ group of close family members with the new additions, dad’s great-grandchildren.
We will also line up several visitations for the first 3 days of CNY. Generally, we pay our respects to our elders on day one, visiting the homes of our parents and in-laws plus the most senior ones in the clan. There will be a lot of food and many meals to enjoy, with special goodies and dishes only to be found during CNY. We usually end the first night with a big gathering that evening with my wife’s side of the family.
The 2nd day will be more visits and we normally spend much of the afternoon till night at my parents’ place with another big gathering of our extended family. Besides a lot of titbits, there is also the S’pore tradition of the Loh Hei, a tossing of vegetables with sweet sauce and making a lot of noise to welcome luck into the year of the wood dragon.
The Loh Hei was a 1960s local invention that charges a crazily expensive price for mostly julienned fresh vegetables masquerading as a healthy dish with too much unhealthy stuff hidden inside the salad LOL.
The whole CNY period (2 weeks before and after) will be a festive period of celebrations to usher in a new year. It is also the satisfaction of seeing well-fed family members spending quality time together, laughing together at wine-influenced jokes that makes it so memorable.
I normally set out to have around 6 KPIs to motivate myself every year so that I will have certain goals to target and achieve. This exercise helps me stay focused on the year ahead and keeps me on my toes. Else the 12 months will just simply slip by. Before you know it, Christmas would have happened and I don’t want to realise then that I did nothing meaningful for the whole year.
This year, it will be a bit different because I started a full-time job 4 months ago. As the leader of the team, I have set some milestones and targets I want to achieve. Given that this could be my last job before I reach my career finishing line, I want to give this my best shot.
Hence my 2024 KPIs will be kept short this year as my job will be the overwhelming factor that will occupy most of my energies and efforts for the rest of the year.
To read at least 15 books. This will be less than last year’s 20, in which I had only read 14.75 books. Hopefully, I can read faster while also working longer hours. I will try to add a few fiction books to help me relax and enjoy reading more.
To close at least 1 of the 2 funds we plan to launch officially in Mar. We will have an official opening ceremonial event in early Mar. The funds’ documentation should be ready for us to sound out to the interested Accredited Investors list that we are now developing as we introduce to the world our company’s existence and what we plan to do.
To keep my mind active with short online courses or even a physical class (Target to do 5). I need to keep challenging myself with new interests that I want to know more about and do a deeper dive into these topics. It could be more AI-related or even sustainability investment-related ones that are relevant to my job.
To stay happy and healthy always. I will not be having long runs and exercise sessions during the weekdays due to my full-time job. I plan to squeeze in some short evening runs and occasionally go to the gym in the evening.
Here is to a more determined me as we roll into 2024! I plan to achieve the above KPIs with lots of hardwork and meticulous planning in order to ensure the successful implementation and execution of my targeted goals.
For the last 5 years since 2019, I have been diligently planning my New Year resolution / KPI (Key Performance Indicators) list at the start of the year and then assessing/grading myself when the year ends before writing another list.
This annual exercise helps to keep me focused via a 12 months big picture macro overview of what I want to set out to achieve. I will keep a softcopy on my iPhone Notes app and review/add details to it throughout the year as I work towards the targets like the number of books read by adding a short book summary when I finished reading a book.
I used to do the same annual KPI exercise for my team during my Treasury sales career. It was to get buy-in from the team heads first. Then we will eventually communicate to the whole team when we have our first team meeting in Jan. Every member will be aware of each teams’ KPIs. It will also foster team work as each person will strive to help others achieve the overall group revenue target.
My 2023 KPIs were as follows:
Read at least 20 books (B+)
Complete at least 10 online courses (D)
Edit videos (F)
Develop my consultancy pivot (A+)
To create a personal GitHub page (F)
To stay healthy and happy always (B)
Read at least 20 books. I managed to complete 14.7 books last year, a slight improvement from the previous year. A short summary of each book read is listed below. I am a slow reader and I should try to read faster and also add some fiction books to the mix this year. There should be one hour set aside before bedtime every night just to read, instead of watching TikTok and Twitter…. I give myself a B+ grade here
Complete at least 10 online courses. I did 2 full day classroom classes -ACI one-day sake course and ACI one day whisky course, Complete only one online course: “Google Introduction to Generative AI”. Generally lazy to do more as I was disappointed that a full time 3 months course I signed up for did not materialize and I did not want to do the part time one offered as it would burn week nights and every weekend. I grade myself a D here.
Edit videos. I had a backlog of more than 2 years after the autoedit video software company I was using for the last 20 years went belly up and ceased to exist. I tried to buy a few newer ones but they were so complicated and not idiot proof enough for me to pick it up fast. I was stuck in a limbo. Hence I did zero editing eventually. I get a F for Fail here.
Develop my consultancy pivot. I am happy to say that this was my best achievement for 2023. The Oct 2022 consultancy project turned into a fulltime job in Sep 2023. I have been at the job for 4 months now and loving the new challenges I have to face every day. It is going to be my last career move to the finishing line of retirement. I plan to get this my best shot and hope that this venture will succeed. It is a golden opportunity that I will cherish and not waste it. I give myself an A+ here.
To create a personal GitHub page. This was an ambitious tech KPI which I thought I could pull off. Then with the launch of ChatGPT, I had to serious consider that no-code could become a reality and programmers will be out of a job soon. AI can easily help to spot coding bugs, translate code from one language to another or even provide one with the codes based on a sketch/drawing of an end result website. Why do we ever need to code any more? It makes no sense for me, a non-IT person, to try to learn to code this late into my life journey, no? I give myself another F here.
To stay happy and healthy always. 2023 was filled with many happy moments of quality family times but also a realization that our parents are aging and moving to the next phase of human limitations and medical deterioration. I give this KPI a B grade.
I did a HK trip to follow my wife for her business trip in Mar. Then we joined younger son in Seoul in Jun. This was followed by a Osaka/Kobe trip with older son when he was back from his overseas study. Finally at year end, we did a family trip with my in-laws joining us in Macau and HK.
We came to realise that dementia had started to progress quite rapidly for my mum and mum-in-law in 2023. This next phase of aging requires all of us siblings to force ourselves to face some tough choices and to make decisions on their behalf, to see what is best for them. I had to be the bad guy to talk to my dad to give him some hard facts to wear down his resistance to having a full time maid. Both of them cannot continue to live on their own any more without external help.
A new year ahead, a new 2024 KPI list soon. I will aim to pen it down next week. It will be my proclamation to the world of my annual intentions and goals for this year, whether anyone reads it or not LOL.
Appendix:
To read at least 20 books
1 – Too Big To Jail by Chris Blackhurst – All about HSBC and the money laundering of drug money from Chapo in Mexico in pursuit of growth and profits to turn a blind eye to compliance. Governments are too fearful to give out criminal charges for fear of financial meltdowns but rely on big fines which don’t work as the bank can afford to continue to pay them. It is an ongoing problem.
2 – Seeing the Unseen by Guoli Chen – A review of Chinese tech firms. Interesting read and new info. How the dog-eat-dog competition onshore May not have prepared them well to adapt to their overseas push. A lot of names and examples are mentioned. Talked about the evolving small overseas successes while the preference to keep resources for onshore China is still strong.
3 – Alibaba – The House that Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark – good intro to the Alibaba story from the start till 2015. A better understanding of the man and how he built the company in his image and beliefs, what he had to do and also learning from his past mistakes.
4 – The Big Short – Michael Lewis re-read the book again because of the recent SVB banking crisis and watched the movie again. Had a better insight into the book now how the synthetic CDO works and what went wrong. Some similarities but generally the leverage was much crazier in the 2008 GFC.
5 – Adrift (America in 100 charts) by Scott Galloway – a first audiobook I borrowed since I listen to podcasts all the time. 3 hours. Lotsa charts for factual explanations of the state of America and its problems, especially of white men falling behind, which is his favourite topic. Most of his observations align with what I see too, like USD printing, military push, education issues etc. He suggested a few big-picture solutions at the end of the book.
6 – Ikigai- The Japanese secret to a long and happy life – Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles – Find passion and meaning, stay healthy, connect with others, and lifelong learning. The authors summarize 1. Stay active, 2. Take it slow, 3. Don’t overeat, 4. Be with good friends, 5. Get in shape, 6. Smile, 7. Connect with nature, 8. Give thanks, 9. Live the moment, 10. Follow your Ikigai with passion and meaning.
7 – The Most Important Thing – uncommon sense for the thoughtful investor – Howard Marks – A few things highlighted to watch while investing. Manage and understand the risk. Markets always move in cycles. Markets swing like pendulums. Avoid negative influences, contrarianism, and patient opportunism, know where we are now, invest defensively, avoid pitfalls, and add value.
8 – ChatBot – The New Future of Content Creations – Dwayne Anderson – Short 88-page book written in 2022 on how to use ChatGPT for various marketing and chatbot functions, training it and making the process more efficient for areas like blogging, education and learning tools creation.
9 – Chip War – The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology – Chris Miller – Better understanding of the rise of chips and countries like Japan, Korea and Taiwan. How strategic it has become to the global economy and the decentralization of the supply chain. The complicated manufacturing process between mass producers like TSMC versus the chip designers is mainly from the USA. Interesting new information read.
10 – Lee Kuan Yew, the grand master’s Insights on China, the US and the World by Graham Allison – interesting take on LKY views over the years as the book was written in 2013. Most of his views still ring true today after 10 years, about the US-China conflict and tension, plus many other observations of various nations. Worthy to reread in a few years to reflect on his wise words again.
11 – Small Actions – Leading your career to big success – Eric Sim. He was my ex-colleague in Citi and we worked together so I was able to read the book while cross-checking against what I know about him. He has successfully managed to pivot himself to this new coaching role which I am learning from. His idiosyncrasies aside, it was a well-thought-out guidebook to help the young navigate their careers in this ever-changing work landscape via 66 different teachings and observations in bite-size chapters.
12 – Scary Smart – Mo Gawdat – 2021 book on the inevitable advancement of AI and its impact on us, before ChapGPT changed the world in late 2022. He builds a picture of AI that can be bad or good for us and frames a possible solution that all of us can participate in and train AI by being happy and showing it on social media – his One Billion Happy goal ties back to making AI a positive impact. Show AI love and it will develop in the right direction.
13 – Going Infinite – Michael Lewis. His latest book on FTX. Effective altruism EA motives that shaped SBF behaviour. A real shit show waiting to explode that lasted so long due to Covid and people turning a blind eye to so many red flags, including professional investors… Interesting psychoanalysis of SBF and his thinking. Unexplained end on whether the money was missing or that it was always there. No idea until the court case unravels further.
14 – Number Go Up – inside crypto’s wild rise and staggering fall – Zeke Faux. A mishmash of stories around crypto and various characters like SBF, Tether and various scams. All over the place at times making it quite hard to read, like magazine articles being strung together to make this a 200+ page book. Some insights but generally a light read.
15 – Elon Musk – Walter Isaacson. 2/3 way through the 600+ page ebook. Great insights of the mind of Elon doing the crazy things he did and the reason behind the madness
2. Complete at least 10 online courses
1 – Did ACI one-day sake course 2 – Did ACI one day whisky course 3 – Google Introduction to Generative AI
3 – Edit videos – I have a backlog of 2 years+ of raw video footage data from 2020 till today which I need to edit and compile to create summarized finalized shortened versions
4 – Develop my consultancy pivot
Started consultancy with L-energy in Oct 2022 for MAS application of LFMC/CMS license in Dec. Eventually started fulltime in Sep 2023 when the In Principal Approval was obtained
5 – To create a personal GitHub page
6 – To constantly remind me of my life motto: to stay healthy and happy always
Since it was confirmed that my older son would start his first job in HK earlier last year, we decided to plan a year-end overseas trip to see him since he might not be able to take long leave.
The dates were from 22 Dec to 01 Jan so that he could join us for both long weekends as he had limited days of leave. We decided to bring my in-laws along and break up the trip to spend the Christmas period in Macau for 4 nights and the remaining 6 nights in HK from 26 Dec.
The trip went well and I am glad to report that we had a lot of quality family time together over many sumptuous meals, activities or just hanging out together in the room discussing the latest season 3 of Single’s Inferno K-Drama. We cherish the moments of laughter and bonding over special events like the escape room, the 4 hours three Michelin stars Robuchon lunch and walking the streets of HK.
Exactly a year ago between Christmas and New Year, we were also together in France travelling to Paris, Marseille and Lyon and cooking our meals while overwatching the great harbour view from our apartment balcony. That was just before my son graduated from Oxford a few months later.
It was our boys’ first time in Macau to discover the casino city. We rented an MPV car transport from the HK airport to the Sheraton Grand Macau hotel. There was only a limited number of sights to see as Covid had hit them hard and some attractions had closed permanently. Other than gambling, there is not too much to do. The Christmas Day 40-minute night lights bus ride around Cotai was a highlight for the final night we were there. The following morning, we took the direct HK ferry from the Cotai ferry terminal on 26 Dec.
There is so much great food to enjoy in HK too. A simple meal could be had as I experienced during my daily morning walks around the hotel in nice chilling temperatures. We went to the Peak in the tram car and even did some trekking at Aberdeen. My wife introduced us to some hip bars around town as we went for drinks after dinner. These will be useful for my older son as he just completed his 6th week of working in HK.
Very soon, it was time to say goodbye to my son as we returned home on the morning of New Year’s Day. We will see him again in about a month as he heads home for the Lunar Chinese New Year holiday for a short break.
I went back to work on 02 Jan energized as we moved into the next phase of our business planning. 2 new colleagues joined our small team and we had our first 2024 team meeting. We will be preparing for a social media viral marketing campaign next week as most people will be back in the office by then. We plan to use the professional LinkedIn platform to introduce our company to the world to tell them what we will be doing, purposeful sustainable investing. We will also spread the word via our social networks and Whatsapp chat groups.
It will be an exciting week ahead as we discover the possibility of viral marketing to help us get new Accredited Investor leads. We can then selectively sieve out the higher probability names to make introductory calls to an expanded network of interested Accredited Investors. This will help us build up a list of potential investors when we launch our funds in Q2 as well as gather market intel on funds pricing and gauge funding demand.
The sky is the limit and we will all give it our best shot to make it a success. This will be my final career push as I reach my work-life finishing line. Wish me luck!
It has been a wild ride for inflation forecasters over the last 12 months as predictions pivot from the left to the right. From the aggressive rate hikes that happened in 2022 that will most certainly bring the world to a recession to inflation being tamed and coming off, to new stock market highs, and then to this week’s forecast of possible rate cuts in 2024.
In my past blogs, I mentioned that the earliest expectation of cuts should be only in 2024. The 15 years of low to negative rates resulted, thanks to the 2008 GFC abnormality. Historically, long-term rates should be around 3 to 5%. We had seen an overshoot of rates as a result of the Fed’s more than 500 bps hikes as they wanted to pre-empt inflationary pressures caused by the ending of COVID-19.
The world had a 1 in 100 years epidemic event which caused the world to shut down for more than a year as demand collapsed. When the vaccines arrived, markets that were shut down started to function again. Supply chains were unable to handle the huge surge in demand and as a result, all prices started to rise. This resulted in massive inflation for all products and services.
We now see a trend of inflation moderating to slowing down. The Fed had successfully killed the inflation monster without having to disable the economy. Markets cheered and pushed stock prices to new highs. Dizzy advances in AI, since ChatGPT was introduced in Nov 2022 were one of the main factors. We are now in a new paradigm change of AI tools that can literally solve any potential problems and even strive for new medical breakthroughs.
Futures have now priced in 75 bps of rate cuts into 2024. I believe we can easily see at least 150 given that the Fed had hiked 500+. It depends now on how rapidly inflation will decline from here. The wild cards are Ukraine and Gaza which could escalate matters. But oil prices are behaving themselves as China has not seen a rev-up of its economy yet.
The bullish trend for stocks remains as long as AI can surprise with newer innovations that would astound us. Else it is steady as she goes until we reached a long term level of interest rates stability.
I will be taking a break now as we are going to HK for a Christmas and year end break to meet up with our older son who has started working there. It will give me more time to review my 2023 KPIs and formulate the new list for next year. Here’s wishing all of you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
The first week of Dec has already passed and we are fast approaching the festive highlight of the year – Christmas and New Year that is 6 days apart. Everyone in the office is clearing leave and not feeling like working so hard now.
The last 3 months passed by so fast for me since I started my new job in Sep. In the past years, not having worked full time since 2018, I had to find things to do to occupy my time. I would set targets and goals for myself to accomplish, like lifelong learning and completing full-time and online courses while I formulate my KPIs for the new year.
Since Sep, we had to rush to complete several milestones to meet our stated timelines. We had just gotten In-Principal Approval from MAS IN late Aug with a to-do list that we aimed and succeeded in completing by early Oct. MAS finally gave us the CMS license approval 3 weeks later.
Then I had to settle a major manpower issue when one of our critical staff suddenly decided to quit on us. Nov was also the discussions with our external legal on the formation of the VCC (Variable Capital Company) setup. With less than 10 people in the whole office, I also decided to kickstart and organize monthly TGIF drinks on the first Fri of the month for all of us to get to know each other better.
We also had multiple video calls with external vendors. We want to sign up for several services that are critical to support our lean team going forward. It was fortunate that we had decided to set up a systematic internal assessment process right at the beginning. Each of us would individually provide our scores on 10 key measurements of each vendor after we had met them. The scores were then consolidated by the COO who would tabulate the average score so that we can effectively rank all the vendors for each service.
We are into the last month of the year now and everyone is going on leave. As per our plan, we aim to do an intensive 3-month road show in 1Q’24 to introduce ourselves. It is also to gather feedback so that we can fine-tune the funds’ offerings. Given the short Feb month and Chinese New Year, it will be challenging to try to line up as many calls as possible but we will give it our best shot. In March, we plan to do an official ceremony to launch our FMC as our company sponsor wants to celebrate our MAS-approved license in a big way.
Next, we plan to launch our first Solar PPA fund in Jun and then another Green/Clean Tech fund in Aug. These Private Equity structured funds will target Accredited Investors and we hope to raise at least USD 50 M in committed funding.
There will be a lot of legal documentation we have to complete from Mar onwards. Concurrently, we need to build up the Solar project pipelines for investments while screening through companies and doing due diligence for investment possibilities for the 2nd fund. The Board of Directors and Investment Committee to approve each investment must also be set up. There will be a lot of balls to juggle for a small startup team like ours for the next 12 months.
Into the first week of Dec so far, we have been busy preparing the groundwork for 2024. We have drafted and reviewed the first cut of all the policies as required by an FMC under the purview of MAS. We have nailed down the top 2 external vendors we would want to engage for Compliance, Professional Insurance, Internal/External Audit, Fund Administration, Corporate Services and Tax Advisory.
Our 2024 timeline and milestones need to be more detailed to ensure that we do not miss out on crucial steps and encounter delays. An introductory deck is currently being developed to be used from Jan as we connect with investors to explain to them our mission and objectives as a Green fund.
We plan to use social media extensively to broadcast our name to the targeted audience for maximum impact. LinkedIn and an official company website will be our main tools plus a lot of personal industry contacts. I believe that there is a niche for us now, given the reality of climate change and more aggressive efforts by governments all over the world to arrest the trend of rising temperatures for the good of future generations.
Increasing costs of going from carbon-negative to zero goals will force companies to reassess new ways to reduce their Carbon Tax bill. Governments like S’pore have already announced that the tax per tonne of emission will rise from $5 now to $80 by 2030. There will be a huge demand for carbon credits and we can supply them via our Green funds.
Energy costs for industries are set to rise as electricity producers mainly use gas in S’pore and the price of gas is expected to increase next year. Renewable energy like Solar will become critical to the overall cost consideration.
Traditional Impact funds into the Social part of ESG only require a reasonable return eg. 2% above Libor. Our Green funds aim to provide an IRR of 10 to 20+%. We will show that it is possible to invest in funds that champion sustainability as its main goal yet produce high-quality returns. Investors can then claim that part of their portfolio is indeed placed in the ESG space for the greater good of planet Earth. Investors, after a disastrous year of Greenwashing, will demand greater transparency which our funds can provide. We can have our cake and eat it too.
There are still many more uncertainties and moving variables ahead of us. But we will try our darn best to push ahead into 2024 to develop and launch our funds. They are aligned with the bigger goal of helping the world slow down climate change, a win-win solution.
