On... KEN

Last blog , I wrote about Time Management. One thing that stood out to me when planning my time, was time ROI.  In Finance, we always talk about ROI in terms of monetary value. But money = time. So, in fact when we manage our time, we should consider ROI because we don't want to spend time on things that have low returns ( or no returns in some case ). So, what's time ROI? To me, good time ROI is spending time on things that have good returns. I started to realize this when I started to do a bit of time management and there was just so many things to do. And there is no possibility of fitting all my activities in a 24 hour time span. This is a very rough guideline but it is one that works for me. Generally, I divide my time into three buckets - Fun, Rest and Work. Some activities are non negotiable of course, like sleeping which is 6 hours of my day. So, there is only 18 hours left per day that I can use ( 6 hours is actually too little for me and I plan to increase it in the f...

This blog was created to write about financial matters. This months topic however is about time. Its because time is money. Time is the most important asset any living person can have ( at least until humans figure out immortality ). If we spend so much time on planning financial matters, shouldn't we also spend a lot of time planning how to use our time? Where did all my time go? Isn't that a familiar question? Sometimes I feel like my day passes just like that and I wonder if I have spent my time wisely ( more on this in another blog post ). How can we judge our time usage if we don't have some sort of plan or guideline? So, I set out to map out how my time is spent, made some adjustments and came out on what I think is an acceptable and balanced time management. From my perspective, this pretty is "balanced". With 31% dedicated for rest, 33% dedicated for Work and 35% dedicated for Fun. Of course, it depends on how you classify things but I'm happy with wha...

Cash is Trash. Cash is King. Which one is true? Both actually, but perhaps at a different time frame and depends on the situation. Generally, you don't want to hold cash for a very long term. This is due to inflation. Official number of inflation ranges from 3 - 8%, but if I would guess, I would say its usually closer to 10%. Of course, inflation is a very personal thing and it depends from one individual to the next. Thats where the saying cash is trash comes from. I first heard about it from Ray Dalio. Basically, what it means is if you put your money under the mattress, after a year, it will lose 10% of purchasing power ( or whatever the inflation number you believe it to be ). In the past, this is solved by putting your money in the bank and your bank interest will compensate for the lost of purchasing power. These days, bank interest is very close to 0%. So, you cannot solve the problem of inflation anymore and you're doomed to accept the lost of purchasing power over the ...

 I don't care about the money. I say that sometimes, but do i really not care about the money? Well, I do and I don't. When I say I don't care about the money, it doesn't mean I don't care about money. I just don't care to have a lot of money. You see, a lot of people do things to get a lot of money. But I rather do things because I enjoy doing them, rather to get a lot of money. Am I so rich that I don't care about money? Only rich and wealthy people do things for fun and not because of the money right? Wrong. Whether you care about money doesn't depend on how rich or wealthy you are. It depends on your personality and your philosophy on money. Some people have a few million dollars, but they still strive to have a couple of million more. Heck, give me a million dollars, and I don't have to work anymore in my life ( well, I don't really work anymore but that's a different story ). Look, the reason I don't care about the money is not beca...

I'm always staring at my phone and my laptop, sometimes watching, sometimes listening, sometimes clicking and tapping away. At a recent holiday, my relatives asked me what I was doing in front of my phone and laptop all day. It's really hard to explain to normies.... I'm watching trading podcasts on Youtube, listening to psychology talks, clicking away on the Sandbox Voxel Editor, reading Twitter, grinding away on Discord channels, listening to Twitter Spaces.... etc. It all just sounds like nonsense. Truly, I don't really know how to explain. I just tell them I am fooling around.... and maybe, that's it. I'm just fooling around. Not doing anything productive. And my family thinking I'm just fooling around is actually good, not bad. As we all know, trading and investing, is a very difficult space. If it was easy, everyone would be rich. Your net worth can go up and down like a roller coaster day in and day out. You might be working hard all year ( whatever w...

2022 marks the beginning of my fifth year of investing. 2021 was not a good year for me generally. It started great until the end of April and May onwards was painful for me. Despite the tough environment that I faced, I felt lucky that I ended the year positive for my trading and my overall portfolio. ROI for my overall portfolio is 11.1% ( ROI since inception ). For the latest portfolio updates, see Portfolio Updates .  There are 2 big changes that I had in 2021 compared to previous years. The first one was to pick up crypto trading. I previously just hodled bitcoin as a safe haven asset. I never thought I would start trading altcoins. I was first introduced to Ethereum in 2017 but was not convinced that it is an investable asset. It took me 4 years before I would start to trade it. I guess in 2017, the environment was a lot more speculative. By the start of 2021, crypto had become quite mainstream with lots of institution adoption. The second big change in 2021 was picking up NF...

Last blog , I talked about taking up a job or having a Plan B that is antifragile or at least robust.  I have picked up trading as my insurance. One that I think can be antifragile. So which kind of jobs are fragile and which ones are antifragile? This is one of the topics that I first came across when reading the book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. In his book ( chapter 5 ), he talked about two types of profession - one with predictable income and the other extremely variable. So, which one of those would be considered a fragile profession? First thought would be the one with extremely variable income. But that's not the case at all.  I used to work as a white collar professional and that would put me in the first category. I had a predictable income and I could plan ahead easily. That's what I thought until I was retrenched when the oil crisis hit in 2015. My 'stable ' job turned out to be pretty unstable and fragile. Finding a new job was hard as the oil price would ta...