On... KEN

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...

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...