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.
Perhaps 100 years ago, living up to 50 was considered a huge blessing as disease, accidents and hardship are everyday risks. In my home country, the average life expectancy in 2007 was about 77/78. 16 years later, it is now 83/84 today, an increase of 6 more years. I believe that when I hit 77 in 20 years, the average mortality rate could reach 90/100 as medical advancement accelerates.
Having good DNA helps too and my parents are currently 89/94 respectively. So barring any unfortunate circumstances, I would have a high probability of living longer. I am therefore just at my halftime mark and looking at the 2nd phase of my life now. There could be a long way ahead.
Financially, I would have to ensure that we will have enough to last that long. Hopefully, the kids can pitch in if they need to. But we have calculated that it should be alright and we will be the last sandwich generation to have to take care of both parents and kids.
Old age is inevitable. We have to make the best of a deteriorating situation where the body and mind weaken. Medical advancement is picking up and we should see some perennial diseases like cancer and dementia being resolved in the next 5-10 years.
My parents have always been my role models to age well. Mum was a housewife all her life and the pillar of the family, making tough decisions given the limited resources she had. Dad was the main breadwinner for our 5 siblings and grandmother. He was the stern no-nonsense one who had to put food on the table. He retired in the early 1990s right after I completed my uni, being the last in the family to finish my studies.
Over the last few years during Covid till now. I have seen changes in both of them which worries us. Mum is getting more forgetful and does not remember names as her short-term memory deteriorates. She is less sure of herself and not the confident person she once was. Her legs are getting weaker and she now needs a metal rod support to walk slowly.
Dad has always been a perfectionist and does everything meticulously. Yet he looks frail now and needs constant rest and stops frequently to power up during a regular walk to buy groceries. I sense his stress on having not only to take care of himself but also to keep an eye out for mum.
We are trying to get Mum to see a specialist to slow down her dementia and provide guidance for us to care for her daily needs. They have been living alone for a while and plans are now in place to try to hire a full-time helper to watch over them.
We are moving to another phase of life and will have to make some necessary choices on their behalf to ensure that they have a comfortable and safe environment with fewer worries. It will be our duty as their children to give back the love they have showered on us for all these years. My dinner with them this week was a reminder to me again that we need to do what is best for them now.
Just to date this blog, there were 2 events to highlight this week. The first relates to Elon Musk. He started the week by stirring up a shit storm with his supposedly anti-semitic comments on X. He also told the advertisers who withdrew from his X platform to go screw themselves LOL.
Then to walk back on his comments, he visited Israel to witness the atrocities of the 07 Oct massacre and condemned Hamas. He tried to explain that his tweet was aimed at Jews who supported Hamas and that made no sense to him. But the damage was already done.
He topped off the week by introducing his new Cybertruck which generally had great reviews even as the price was much higher than he previously promised. Such is the workings of the complicated mind of the richest man on earth. Reading Walter Isaacson’s book on Elon should give me a better psychoanalysis of the man. What a busy week for him!
Finally, we had the evolving Gaza situation. About 100+ hostages were returned to Israel in exchange for Palestinian prisoners over 1 week of ceasefire. Then talks broke down and it went back to the Israel mission to eradicate Hamas.
I find it ironic that an enemy can come to your village to rape and kill your family members and take hostages. Then when you try to save your people and exact revenge on them, they use the hostages as bargaining chips to survive while using their people as human shields.
Hamas had crossed the line to become the ultimate ISIS terrorist which does not leave room for more negotiation even as they hold the remaining hostages close to them. It is lunacy to think that Israel will let them go after they pretended to lean towards peace talks for 2 years before launching the horrific attacks on 07 Oct.
The last month of the year has started. December is traditionally a festive period to chill and go for holidays. I will try to enjoy it even as I have so many work-related things on my mind to prepare for the new year. Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year ahead!
What a week of non-stop action! It started with the OpenAI saga with a sudden announcement of the CEO being fired on Friday afternoon. It rolled over the whole weekend with so many twists and turns that it should be made into a TV drama like 24 with Sam as Jack Bauer/Kiefer Sutherland in the future.
Then CZ dropped the bomb mid-week by announcing a huge fine which Binance and himself personally will pay to the US authorities and step down as CEO. Before we could take a breath, Hamas agreed to a prisoner/hostage swap with negotiators that started with a first batch exchanged late Friday.
Of late, everything seems to be intertwined together. AI and crypto somehow seem to be connected at the waist and the term Effective Altruism (EA) pops up ever so often. Let me explain. I had just finished reading 2 books that talk about the excesses of crypto and its mad ride over the last few years before the whole Ponzi scheme collapsed, taking with it the biggest victim to date, FTX.
Coming back to today’s topic again, I will attempt to summarize them based on what I have read so far and where we will be going soon. OpenAI started as a non-profit and one of its co-founders was Elon who quit after a few years over disagreements on where AI was heading. The current board had a non-profit mandate to follow and that can be lofty aims like saving and protecting humanity from AI. They don’t necessarily need to be involved in the day-to-day and being profitable was the least of their goals.
There was a reported run-in between Sam and a board member (Toner) recently that may have also added to the fire. She had written an article that was critical of OpenAI and Sam was furious and confronted her. He argued that if there was an issue, she could, as a board member, raise it internally instead of doing it outside, harming the reputation of OpenAI.
After the huge success of the launch of ChatGPT last Nov, CEO Sam Altman decided to create a subsidiary of OpenAI that was a for-profit organization. It seems that his all-in push for AI commercialization goes against the board’s mandate at the Holdco level. There was also a strong rumour that the latest “invention” of OpenAI called Q* (Q-star) could really up the game by making AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) possible much earlier than we thought.
The board probably felt that there are not enough guard rails to slow OpenAI down if it is fully profit-motivated. Hence they had to chop off the serpent’s head and fire the CEO. That started the mad ding-dong of negotiations where Microsoft had to step in to protect its $10 Billion investment. Employee revolt added to the toxic mix and Sam was reinstated again after a few days, with certain measures to be made plus a change of the board.
Every father, mother and son AI company is now charging ahead to beat their competitors to be at the forefront of the brave new world. OpenAI is openly telling everyone that it wants to hold on to its crown with even newer and more powerful tools in the pipeline. They just launched GPTs a week ago LOL… The mad race to be the best in AI will intensify further. There is no stopping it. As I like to quote Thanos, it is “inevitable”…
For Binance, the only positive I saw was that a S’porean was named as the new CEO. It’s like TikTok again. Get a squeaky clean and upright, no-nonsense citizen of the little red dot to steer the mother ship back to compliance again. There seem to have been many months of negotiations and lawyer letters going around. CZ had probably caved in now as the whole might of the American authority was after his ass big time.
America had to prove to the world that it could clean up the crypto beast and show who is the boss, no matter what it takes. This was the bigger prize after the takedown of FTX where the regulators were caught asleep at the wheel. CZ figured out that he did not have the muscle and resources to fight a long battle with them. It is better to cut losses and move on to save his company in the longer term. Time will tell if this was a smart and strategic move for Binance.
And finally, the hostage situation in Gaza saw some positive results with the release of a small number of them for a prisoner swap. Note that there are currently about 200+ hostages still being held in Gaza after the 07 Oct raid by Hamas. It is just the beginning of trying to bring them home safely.
Israel has stated that the battle is not over even as they received and welcomed home the released hostages. They have very long memories and will certainly avenge the 1,200 killed on 07 Oct as history has shown. The terrorist Munich massacre during the 1972 Summer Olympics is one example. Eventually, Mossad managed to assassinate those who were responsible.
Yahya Sinwar, head of the militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip had deceived Israel for months. He was showing signals of wanting peace talks while planning the attack. As far as Mossad is concerned, he is a dead man walking. He is one of the most hunted individuals in Gaza now.
We will likely see the Gaza conflict becoming a long drawn-out affair as Hamas release the hostages in drips. It wants to survive and sway the world to support Palestine and its causes. It knows that once they do not have any hostages left to trade, Israel will exercise its full force to eradicate them once and for all. A Catch-22 situation.
Notice that no Muslim countries are willing to allow Palestine refugees into their countries, especially Egypt which shares their border with Gaza. Why is that so? Countries like Lebanon and Jordan had done so in the past but the radical groups within them had literally destroyed Lebanon’s economy and assassinated Jordan’s top minister. The argument that if they leave Gaza, they will not be allowed back is just a cover for “No thanks, we don’t want you causing trouble in our country!”.
Can Iran, Hamas’ main supporter, remain on the sidelines? Will the Middle East erupt into a hot political potato? Note that no one is talking much about the Ukraine/Russia war now, which is going into its 2nd year soon. It is old news and not as exciting for the news agencies to maintain viewership anymore.
And we are just a month away from Christmas and starting the new year soon. 2024 looks like it is going to start with a bang. Let’s hang on tight for the wild ride ahead of us.
Since then, the world has seen the meticulous steps undertaken to seek out Hamas and to try to rescue the 200+ hostages still trapped in Gaza City. More than 2 million Palestinian citizens were told to relocate to the south of Gaza for the Israeli military to move in.
There have been many stories of civilians being killed as collateral damage in the precision strikes on supposedly Hamas hideouts. To date, a figure of 11,000+ were estimated to be innocent victims of the crossfire. It is especially disheartening to hear of casualties at or near the hospitals which are treating the sick and injured.
Israel claims that Hamas is using the hospitals as cover to hide and prevent its citizens from getting out of the city as an effective human shield for them. They tried to show some evidence of weapons hidden within the hospitals, the underground tunnels running below and mobile communications of the terrorists using ambulances as a means of transport between locations.
There is so much misinformation on both sides that it is tough for us outsiders to know what is real and what is not. Meanwhile, there have been mass protests all over the world in support of the people of Gaza to force Israel to stop their military operations there.
But the Israeli refused to stop until Hamas is rooted out and the hostages are all accounted for. They insist that it is a defensive move to prevent another 07 Oct from ever happening again, now termed the 2nd Holocast event.
One of the retired generals had mentioned that Hamas, via the extensive underground tunnels, had already evacuated themselves to the south of Gaza. Israel’s current sweeping of north Gaza therefore may not be enough to eradicate Hamas. They might force another mass exodus of Gaza citizens now stationed in the South to once again move to the North when they have neutralized that area.
Mass global condemnation of the Israeli ambush in Gaza will not deter them from completing their mission and they are likely to continue operations for a few more months. Hopefully, there would be a concurrent plan to discuss a future 2 state solution for the Palestinians to eventually reset and start all over again, to have fresh elections. To have a government that cares for the welfare of its people first, rather than just calling for the death and destruction of Israel, which will be a non-starter for peace talks.
On the personal front, I had a wonderful meetup with ex-colleagues on Sat. It was also a new housewarming occasion for one of our team members. He took the opportunity to invite the old team together. We were working together during the 2005-2012 period in the American bank.
I cannot believe that it has been more than 15 years ago already. We were much younger then. Working hard and playing hard was our motto during that period. We were reminiscing the good old times we shared in common and the various offsites we had taken as a group every year.
It was so good to catch up with each other and be updated on what has happened to each of us since then. Some have become parents and others have moved on to another relationship and career. We laughed about the silly things we had done while being amazed that we had the stamina to work like crazy to achieve the sometimes impossible budget targets.
We have all aged and grown older since then. One of them is now doing well in her career, which I was happy to see. It feels so rewarding to have seen her grow up from fresh grad days till now and also a new parent too.
The hours passed away quickly as we had so many topics to chat about. The 12 of us remembered the times when we worked as a united team to organize client events and even performed in the Dinner & Dance competition, coming in as champions twice!!
I was looking forward to this gathering and I was not disappointed. As we grow older, old colleagues can turn to become treasured friends through the passage of time with so many precious memories to cherish.
Yes, the month of Nov has started. It signals the ending of the year when the festive period of Christmas and a new year is upon us soon. Many will aggressively plan for revenge holiday travelling and gift purchases as we finally get back to normal and leave COVID behind us.
Financial Institutions are also winding down their activities as liquidity dries up and they close their books for the yearend. Banks that are behind their revenue targets by now will aim to cut expenses immediately as a strategy. Citibank just announced Project Bora Bora to cut 10% of headcount. It has been standard practice over the last 2 years for all industries to adopt this move to slash costs by Q4 as a last resort.
On the weather front, we are unsure if the coming winter will be mid or colder than usual as there have been mixed signals globally. Some places have experienced warmer autumns while other cities are cooling down fast. The back-to-back years of the highest summer temperatures in 2022 and 2023 have made experts project that Earth’s warming will permanently increase temperatures by 2 degrees Celsius instead of the previously projected 1.5 degrees. Climate change is genuine and visible now. Surprisingly, the years of COVID lockdowns did not help Mother Earth to repair itself but accelerated the warming trend instead.
The feared prediction of a stock market Oct crash did not happen. It went the opposite way and we saw a strong rally instead. It started with expectations of an earlier rate cut possibility as inflation numbers eased. Oversold conditions, solid earnings and a sharp pullback in interest rate expectations have been the primary drivers.
With a likely stalemate of a US government shutdown in the pipeline and a recent Moody’s US credit ratings downgrade to negative, we may see volatility into this new month as liquidity tightens when banks start to close their books for the year.
Crypto prices are rising again in anticipation of BTC and ETH going mainstream. We have seen BTC jumping from 26k to 37k, a 42% increase within a month. I am still holding on to my crypto portfolio. I will try not to be too greedy like the last time and aim to take some profits off the table while playing within the new higher ranges as volatility spikes.
Hopefully, FTX will also be settled soon for clients (me included) to recover their claims as the judicial manager had managed to have some success crawling back some assets. SBF’s Alameda/FTX investment into the Anthropic AI startup looks promising now as valuation has surged since 2022.
This week at work was mainly to settle human resource issues and finalize the 2024 budget. I managed one exit and negotiated to bring in 2 new members. The exit finally ended 2 weeks of to-and-fro discussions and compromises to craft an amicable and professional breakup solution that was equitable to both sides. The new members were also needed as part of the overall stop-gap solution. This included an internal transfer of a junior staff.
The 2 rounds of budget presentation, proposal and discussion will provide us with at least 12 months of runway for our fund management startup. We will try our best to launch our funds by 3Q’2024. There is a lot of hard work and moving variables we need to get right in order to succeed.
I also had a video call with an undergraduate on Thurs who had reached out to me for career advice. I have been a mentor in the university mentorship program for the past 5 years. I wanted to pay it forward back to my alma mater. The participation also enabled me to interact with students that are around my sons’ age. I wanted to understand their challenges better and try to help them shorten their career learning curves. Since I started full-time work recently, I have decided not to continue in this program. As this undergrad continued to reach out to me, I was more than happy to agree to the call.
A long weekend holiday ahead and I plan to do a few 1+ hour-long runs which I missed doing since I started work 2 months back. I am also excited that my older son will finally start his work career in HK this week after finishing his 10-week orientation program in New York. Everyone is looking forward to the yearend holidays!
Cryptos rising
Budget 2024 week – presentations and round 2
HR matters – managing one exit and bringing another one in, plus a junior internal transfer
I have been around the block quite a fair bit in my 57 years of existence. I can say that I have met all sorts of people, good and bad, who have helped me sharpen my EQ skills over time. But once in a while, someone comes along and surprises me again.
I usually leverage on my past experiences to try to dissect the situation and identify the key aspects of behaviour I have to address. After all, I have been on the sales and marketing side for more than 30+ years and have managed team members before. Because of my career, I usually say I am a bullshit marketer when asked to introduce myself LOL.
But this week, I encountered new lessons in the complexities of human behaviour. My interaction with 2 such persons required me to call up all my past experiences to try to determine how I have to deal with them.
The first person was someone I started to know much better only in the last 2 months as I started work. He was a bit of a character whom I was warned that could be hard to manage. Things started on a strong note as we bonded over the past 8 weeks. We were driven by the same career goals and it seems we could work well as a team.
Then something happened a few weeks ago over a confrontational meeting where strong words were exchanged. The decision of a change in corporate strategy was a point he found hard to accept. He pondered and vexed over it for the last few weeks and decided that it was not what he wanted. Things boiled over this week and he suddenly decided to abandon ship, packed up his stuff and left.
While I was trying to get over the shock decision from him, I had to scramble to update management and plan for the next steps. In hindsight, his behaviour had changed in the past week, from showing enthusiasm to being less responsive and even silent at times. I had a gut feeling the weekend before that there could be such a reaction from him and actually discussed it with someone about it a few weeks.
Anyway, I had to go into damage control and try to end things amicably while being professional about it all. Hopefully, the negotiation can be finalized next week and we can move on. I just don’t understand why an incident can eat into him to make him cut losses and run so dramatically. It had shined a bad light on him and showed a level of immaturity. Talking to others who know him, it seems that he has had a pattern of such career behaviour for the past 10+ years to quit and run.
I had been trying to get to know him better over the last 2 months and all this is going down the drain now. I thought that I had figured out what motivates him and what buttons to press but I was wrong. We now have to look for a replacement and I have to start all over again.
The other person I met this week who intrigued me was someone who assumed a lot about me from the get-go even though we had hardly known each other. He tried to get me to do something I was not comfortable with and I refused. His rapid-fire style of communication was at times off-putting and he was not a very good listener too.
He tried to explain to me who he was and the many flaws he had plus a number of failed marriages. But that should not justify his continued obnoxious behaviour. He kept on saying “I understand” when he did not. The 2 words were just like a punctuation pause for him to distract and move on to another topic. His attention span is too short for a meaningful conversation even though he is smart and very sharp.
I simply refused to do what he wanted me to do the next day after only a 30-minute introduction session the previous day. He then backtracked to do damage control by offering to explain his actions, saying he perfectly understood why I stood my ground. He insists that this is who he is and how his mentors trained him to explain away his aggressive behaviour to succeed at all costs. That was really a red flag for me. He can be a loose cannon that can get out of control.
I must be out of touch after not having worked full-time for 6 years. My part-time consultancy work during this period also did not require me to have to maintain a long-term strategy of getting to know people better at work. This week woke me up again to the complexities and intricacies of human behaviour which I will have to sharpen my saw again to deal with the dog-eat-dog commercial world.
Time really flies when you work full-time. I have just crossed the 8th week of going to work every morning…
It was really meaningful to start working again while having the weekly strategy meetings with my new colleagues on how we can achieve our timelines and the milestones we set for ourselves. I am going to give it my best shot and aim to succeed, even though there are so many uncertainties and moving variables ahead. It will require careful planning and tracking to reach the many goals we set for our company systematically.
As I told my COO during my first day of work, I am also scared but by hook or by crook, I am going to give it my best shot. It will likely be my last career push before permanent retirement as I reach 60 in 3 years’ time. The mission is a grand and audacious journey to try to be a game changer in the Green/Clean Tech space, to be the first to bring together different parts of the fragmented aspects of the industry to create a win-win end game for all.
To be given an opportunity to utilize my past experience and lifelong learning skills I had acquired in the last 6 years to pivot to a growth area is indeed a golden opportunity. Having spent numerous hours learning new Skillsfuture knowledge to reinvent myself, I hope to see an eventual payoff from this new job. Artificial Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Blockchain and many other new skills that I had picked up which had caught my interest will assist me in this new venture.
During this week at the office, we had a number of meetings with external outsourcing agents to help us size up the ones we would like to engage with eventually. There were also 3 investment leads we wanted to follow up on from the connections made at last week’s Biochar event. I had to also send my car for urgent repair work on Monday as it had overheated a few times during the weekend. It turned out that the main engine fan coil was not functioning well after 13 years of use.
The best news of the week came on Friday late morning when the authorities informed us via email that they had finally agreed to issue the CMS/LFMC regulatory license to us. It has been a long journey for everyone in the company, starting from Jun 2022 when the overall company business plan was being conceptualized. This was followed by months of working with our lawyers to prepare for the submission of the license application in early Dec.
That was followed by at least 5 rounds of to-and-fro questions and clarifications with the regulators till they finally issued us an In-Principal Approval in late Aug 2023. By then, I had to start my employment contract in early Sep. We spent the last 2 months preparing the required items in the to-do checklist to submit to MAS on 16 Oct. They finally came back with a positive reply on 27 Oct (yesterday) to confirm that they have agreed to issue the license to us. It was 330+ days from the license application start date till this glorious day.
The next stage of the company will begin as we prepare our 2024 budget, complete our marketing deck and begin a soft sell campaign to gauge investors’ appetite for Green Tech. We can then fine-tune our final marketing push to launch the funds around mid-2024.
We just had a wonderful dinner last night with old friends and spouses to celebrate the birthdays of the Oct babies in our group. We have known each other since our university days and it will be 36 years (from 1987), a lifetime ago. We have seen each other grow over the years. From studying together, starting our careers, getting married, having many vacations as a group and seeing our kids become young adults.
It has been a life journey of unforgettable shared memories that we will still be talking about for years to come. Some are actively planning for retirement soon and targeting a halftime pivot to the next stage of their lives. I treasure these friendships dearly and it means so much more for me into my second halftime.
