On... KEN

If you fall into a hole, you must crawl out immediately. Getting rugged in crypto is bad. But even worse is rugging yourself. And I rugged myself recently! It felt like falling into a hole. What happened was, I was supposed to send 1k AUD to a friend. But for whatever reason, I sent it to a wrong account. Needless to say, I am unable to retrieve the money up till today. I actually know the person I sent the money to. It is my insurance agent that I haven't contacted for more than fifteen years but it was still worth a shot of trying to reach out to her. She ignored me after I explained to her what had happened. Can't say I am too surprised to be honest. My faith in humanity is not very high at this point. Years of investing in the crypto space has turned me into a cynic. So after a few tries of trying to contact her, I gave up. And decided to move on. When you fall into a hole, you must crawl out as soon as possible. However, my family has from time to time, asked me whether I ...

Before you reach your first million, you should not take your foot off the gas pedal. If you really want to retire or retire early, consider reducing your expenditure. Not talking about small items like having a coffee but big ticket items, say values of more than 10k AUD. Because the wonders of compounding works in reverse when you spend big, it can significantly delay your retirement. I ran a few scenarios to compare what our spending do to our retirement planning. These are very simple scenarios with very rough numbers. You can do this for yourself and see how your spending delays your retirement. That should help you think twice before you go on your next big purchase! The chart below shows 3 scenarios. For all scenarios, it assumes the starting investment capital of 130k AUD with a portfolio return of 10 percent per annum. I assume you can retire when you have grown your account to 1 million AUD. Scenario 1 ( Blue ) is the Base Case. Scenario 2 ( Grey ) is a scenario of the impact...

What do we do if we have a stack of cash to deploy? I believe that for an asset that is predicted to go up in the long term, Lump Sum is the way.  Having said that, and I do have a stack of cash sitting on the sidelines at the moment, I chose to DCA ( Dollar Costs Average ) instead.  Mathematically speaking, I think Lump Sum gives a better financial return. But it is not all about the total returns. DCA means that I will a stack of cash available in case of an emergency. It is also more fun to deploy cash over time.  So DCA is better, that is settled then? It is in general but there are still some variations in how you can deploy your DCA. Although I prefer, DCA for the reasons stated above, I also like financial returns. Therein, I explore the different DCA scenarios. 1. DCA at the same rate over the investment term. 2. Front load your DCA. 3. Back load your DCA. Figure 1 shows the DCA Scenarios. The assumption is that I have 12,000 AUD to deploy over a 20 year period wi...

Compounding is the 8th wonder of the world. And it works wonders if compounding is done over the long term. However, sometimes the importance of time in compounding can be taken over the top as if it is the only important aspect of increasing one's wealth. Time is important but we have to look at other factors as well in our Financial Planning. Figure 1 shows the scenario of compounding my Networth by 4 percent per annum over twenty years. With a starting value of 600 AUD, and additional injection of 600 AUD annually. That takes us to a total of 20,000 AUD. You can see the 'hockey stick' part of the chart forming as we're entering our 20th year. From there on, it probably goes parabolic. That shows that compounding works best if we have a long time frame. However, what if we missed the first 10 years? Is that the end of our compounding dreams? Actually, not at all. We often state that time is the greatest part of compounding. Well, yes, you need to compound for a long t...

 Is inflation bad or good? Maybe inflation is neither good nor bad. Sure, generally it is considered bad as the costs of living keeps going up. As time goes by, your purchasing power is decreased, eaten up by inflation. A good example of this is the Big Mac price inflation as reported in the Visual Capitalist website . A Big Mac in Australia costs 2.27 AUD in 2004 and 4.51 AUD in 2022, a price increase of 98%. So, the price of Big Mac has gone up 98% in that time frame. Therefore inflation must be bad right? Well, not so fast. How about other things like property or stocks? Those things have gone up in price as well. Average house prices have gone from 539k AUD in 2014 to 993k AUD in 2023. I know average house prices is not really the best number to use because there are too many factors that govern the price of property ( such as location, type of house, etc.. ) but we know generally it has gone up. Well, then if the price of house has gone up, its bad if you want to buy a house ...

How much is our hourly rate? People chase money, but is the extra time we put into earning worth our time? You definitely need to put in the minimum time at work to fulfill your basic necessities of putting food on the table, a roof over your head, and paying bills. However, after fulfilling that, how much time do you want to put at work versus enjoying your life? My father in law was diagnosed with cancer and his medical bill was around 100k for chemotherapy. Unfortunately, that did not work, and he passed away. My auntie was recently diagnosed with cancer, and she paid around 100k for chemotherapy. As of now, she is still doing fine and I hope she continues to recover. The reason I brought up these stories, is because they made me think of time versus money. 100k is what we may pay to live longer ( if only just for an extra year? ). How much longer we don't know. Sometimes medical treatment doesn't work, but the gist is we are willing to pay a lot just to have more time. The ...

Some people ask "Why Bitcoin?" Thats a very difficult topic because people buy Bitcoin for all kinds of reasons. My reason is very simple - because Cash is Trash. Let's start from the premise that Cash is Trash. Where do we go from there? There are a few options of investment vehicles that you can look at. Super Annuation, Stocks, Property, Business, Crypto. The are dozens of ways that you can invest but the most accessible to most people are probably the 5 above. So, lets take a look at the different asset class. Super Annuation is touted as the Holy Grail by my mom and mom in law. That may not be a bad choice at about 7% annual returns. But 7% may just be tracking or even below inflation. Stocks is definitely a good choice. Just buying the index would get you a 10% annual return. I did actually start from stocks before I dabbled into crypto and it is still a major holding for me. Property is the go to investment class traditionally. I was actually into property even bef...

Money is like a melting ice cube. Given enough time, it disappears. People know inflation but my guess is they don't think about what that means and how it affects their life in the long run. A melting ice cube is a good way to look at it. Its because inflation erodes your net wealth over time. Generally, I see people react to inflation in 2 ways ( at the extreme end of the spectrum ). First is the rich ones. They worked hard and saved a lot. So they think they have enough in the stock pile to support their life post retirement. The other end of the spectrum is the one who is poor and at this end, there is no more choice. The only option is to work until they die. This time, I want to look at the first case - those who have money. The question is, how do they treat their money? Do they realize that money is a melting ice cube and if you don't do anything about it, it eventually disappears. If you invest your money ( in any way, shape or form ), then kudos to you. If you don...

 You should invest like you're running a business. I have written about this  before . After running this business for 6 years plus, it is a good time to have a snapshot on where I am. Unfortunately, it is still Cashflow Negative but with a little bit of luck I might get to Cashflow Positive within the next few years. Some metrics to track a regular business is as follows ( modified for use in Trading ):- CAPEX:- Starting Capital OPEX:- Annual Capital Injection Cashflow:- Cumulative Net Cash  PnL:- Annual Profit or Loss

Most people want to make money fast. I just want to make money slow. All things being equal, of course I'd rather make money fast than slow. However, not everything is equal. There is more stress and risk if you want to hit it big at a quick pace. Much less stressful for me, if I take the time. Some of my friends doing leveraged trading are going for 20x returns this bull market cycle. I'm just looking to increase my portfolio by 50%. And 50% would be a record year for me! Doing it slow lets compounding take care of your returns. I was reminded of this in the gym. I always thought of walking on the treadmill as silly as you walk but never reach a destination. But here I am, using a walking machine, on average twice a week. On the walking machine, I set the target of walking 2.4km by the end on an hour. I always beat the target and this is how it goes. On the 1st 5 minutes, I'm right on target. At the 10 minute mark, I usually beat my target by 10m. At the 15 minute mark, I ...

To mortgage or not to mortgage, that is the question. I say, to mortgage, at least at this point in my life. Let me tell you a story about a friend who I made back in 2004. We joined the company at about the same time. One day, we were having dinner and he asked me, "If you have enough money, would you pay off your mortgage? Or will you use your money to get extra mortgages and buy more properties?". Guess what my answer is at the time. Pay off my mortgage. He chose the latter. And now 20 years later, that man is a multi millionaire. And I'm just me, still grinding to make my first million. As a rule of thumb, always put your money where the return or interest is the highest. For example, if there are 2 banks, put your money in the bank which is paying the higher interest. So, my friend chose the right path and I chose the wrong one. Why? Consider this. Which is higher? Property appreciation rate or the loan interest rate? If a property appreciates 10% annually and your m...

2024 marks the seventh year of my investing. 2023 was the best year for me ( see below Figure ). Ironically my trading is down for the year but my Portfolio growth has been the best since inception ( although still far from Portfolio All Time High ). The earlier part was rangebound and mostly trending downwards until circa November 2023. It then went on a tear and almost reached the ASX200 ATH of 7632 points. ROI for my Portfolio is 2.7% ( ROI since Inception ). For the latest Portfolio Updates, see  Portfolio Updates .  There is no big changes in my trading/investing in 2023. As mentioned above, 2023 turned out to be the best year for me ( Absolute Values ). This is in contrast to losing money in my Active trades. It is counter-intuitive at first glance but think of the following scenario. You could run a business selling goods for example and due to poor demand in the year, you could suffer a loss. At the same time, the shop that you own that sits as an Asset in your Balance...