On... KEN

What does it mean to live well? My mother in law is envious of a friend because she bought a large piece of land and built three houses on it. At probably the costs of 10 million AUD. My wife in the meantime is curious as to what my daughters cello teachers family do for a living because she lives in a big house with 3 Porsches in her garage. At probably the costs of up to a few million AUD? Does it mean those people are living well? For sure everyone has a different definition of living well. But it is not too far from reality if I think a vast majority of people equate living well to having a lot of material possession. Material possession is perhaps a kind of signaling. Why do I think so? I have no way to prove this but only gut feeling. If my mother in law had the money, I suspect she would not spend it on 3 houses. If my wife had the money, she probably would not buy 3 luxury cars. And it is likely the reason to buy those stuff is to say, "Hey look at me. I can afford these t...

Life is short and I could be dead by now. I am constantly reminded of that. My father in law was diagnosed with prostate cancer back in about 2020 and passed away in the span of about 2 years time after going through chemotherapy and all available medical help at that time. Few years after that, sometime in 2023, I had blood in my urine after coming back from a jog. Needless to say, my fear immediately jumped to fear and comprehension of getting cancer. Thats what recency bias do to you. Your mind latch on to the nearest incident. I later found out, after doing CT scans and Ultra Sound that it was most likely an accident injury. It's 2 years after that incident. If it was cancer, I might have been dead by now. The point of the story is not only that life is short but when your time is near, there is little you can do and it will be expensive to try. Medical costs will take a fortune. It may run up from ten's of thousands even to a hundred thousand. All of that just to keep you ...

AI seems to be the buzz word recently. Is this sector legit or are we in NFT2.0? NFT's were supposed to change the world in 2021, but sad to say that was a speculative bubble that popped within a year or so. Trading volumes peaked in January 2022 at about $17.6 billion, driven by hype around projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club and CryptoPunks. By September 2022, volumes had crashed roughly 97%, with average NFT prices dropping from $4,000 in early 2021 to under $1,500 by mid 2022. Fastforward to Q4 2024, something else exploded into the scene that caught my attention. Terminal Truth was released and it got the attention of Marc Andressen who funded it with some BTC. At around the same time was the Virtuals protocol explosion with AI agents such as Luna and AIXBT. So begins the AI space race, but I was not ready to dip my toe in yet. Raol's talk about the Economic Singularity also piqued my interest thereafter. The question was, how was I going to invest in this sector? If AI wa...

The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve was announced on the 7th of March 2025. This announcement was formalized through an Executive Order Trump signed on that date establishing both a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a US Digital Asset stockpile. The initiative was detailed further by the Whie House crypto Czar David Sacks, who noted that the reserve would be capitalized exclusively by bitcoin seized from criminal and civil forfeiture proceedings, ensuring no additional costs to taxpayers. With this announcement, it changed everything for me. Well, kind of. I was stacking Bitcoin since 2020, but it started as a speculative asset for me. Had I known this day would come, I would have gone in with more conviction. Bet hey, you have to respect the risks. And hindsight is 20-20, is it not? Now that the most powerful country in the world has declared it as a Financial Asset, other countries would follow suit. Word is that some countries are working towards this already. And as they say, Let the Games B...

We all play the game of money but what IF most people are playing the wrong game? What if most people are playing the game before the GAME? Some choose to but some people don't even know what the real game is. So whats the real game? This is just a wild ( What If ) thought, not something out of a textbook. Have you watched a Survivor Game show? I have watched a couple of seasons. There are some games where the contestants had to collect puzzles. And when they're done collecting all the pieces of the Jigsaw puzzle, they move on to the final challenge where they have to assemble the puzzle. Can we use that as a metaphor for our financial life? What if a job/career is just us running around to locate the pieces of the puzzles ( in this case - Capital )? And the real game starts when you have enough capital to deploy. This is the stage where you manage the Capital that you have assembled. For me, I feel like you have to acquire your first 100k ( a number I pulled out of the air ) a...

2025 marks the starting of the eight year of my investing. 2024 is a bumper year for me ( see below Figure ). My Net Worth broke All Time High in 2024 with a growth of 45% ( Largest growth so far ). The earlier part was pretty good and trending upwards until circa April 2024. It then started to dump and luckily reversed in December. ROI for my Portfolio is 7.9% ( ROI since Inception ). For the latest Portfolio Updates, see  Portfolio Updates .  In 2024, I started to include shorter term trades after listening to the 'Top Traders Unplugged' podcasts. They recommended diversifying across time frames to capture all possible upsides. The short term trades have a holding period of days to roughly a month. This year ( and consistent with the past few years ), Buy and Hold largely outperforms short term and mid term trades. Does it mean that I should revert to Buy and Hold? I think probably not. It just means that the market structure favors Buy and Hold but we do not know how the st...