I recently rewatched SBF being interviewed on the David Rubenstein show . SBF was asked, " Why do so many young people seem so attracted to crypto... it seems like young people are particularly are very interested in it. Why is that? " "If you're...you know... twenty-one years old, and trying to get access to markets... you want to be able to trade, to invest. You can sign up for an account on crypto-exchange and get full market access. If you try to get that same level of access in equities, in commodities, you can't get it. You're going to end up with heavily mediated access that has like pretty limited amounts of real interactive-ness, limited amounts of liquidity, limited amounts of size, limited amounts of market data. And so for a natively digital generation looking to take more control of their finances, actually being able to do it with crypto is a big big difference." - SBF As I was watching David Rubenstein's expression to that response, I wasn't sure if it was skepticism or that he was cringing inside. So much of what SBF had replied to the above insinuates a mindset of wanting unlimited quantities of everything. It also says something about the rebelliousness and perceived inadequacies felt by younger people, that they don't get the same opportunities and access as older folks. I am not sure if I align with this. For one, why is having "limited amounts" of liquidity a bad thing for the younger digital generation? That just sounds crazy. Whatever happened to spending within your means ? If you are twenty-one years old, you shouldn't be trying to " get access to markets ", you should be trying to acquire hard skills and learn through experience. Providing a platform to unlock more liquidity for trading crypto-assets doesn't seem like a very wise way to get young people equipped with the knowledge of money. The problem with today's financial markets is that, everyone forgets the first principles of a stock exchange: Enabling businesses to raise money so that they use the capital to grow their business. Exchanges were initially not meant for punters to speculate amongst each other. It was greed that got everyone carried away in the frenzy of buying and selling based on story-telling. Bankers were just happy to profit from being the middle-men. For what the FTX fiasco is worth, it has further reinforced the point that: Despite how far and sophisticated we have come in terms of building an efficient capital markets, our understanding of risk-reward are now severely distorted. Rather than using leverage as a financing tool to grow business, a large part of leverage today is being mis-used as a product by bankers to profit from greedy customers who want to achieve outsized investment returns. Platforms - whether crypto or not - that offer investors the so-called unlimited liquidity to have "more control over finances" simply appeals to the vice of human nature, which is greed. It removes having skin in the game and transfers this risk onto the financial ecosystem buoyed by multiple layers of story-telling. [ Read part I ]

The world was a very different place in 2006. We were two years out of the SARS crisis, I had finished my final exam papers, and completed presenting my engineering thesis involving a weather forecast mobile app running on a 2G cellular network. Shortly after and to much surprise, I came across a French IT consulting firm on LinkedIn. The firm at that point of time, was being engaged by Philips TV to develop a software prototype. The job opening was a software engineer role that needed to be filled urgently. After a couple of conversations with the team and some deliberation on my part, I took up the offer and showed up to work while the rest of my peers were still in the middle of their graduation trips around the world. The product prototype being developed then was meant to be used for all of Philips' clients in the hospitality and healthcare sectors. My work desk looked like this: My work desk at my first job ever I was a fast learner and picked up stuff quickly by working closely with the Chief Engineer. I had gotten proficient at writing code, good enough for demonstration to the Philips CEO during his visit to Singapore. But I ended up leaving less than six months into my role. I needed to get out. My motivation was driven by: The fear of being stuck in an engineering job, working from 9am to 5pm everyday for the rest of my life , and perhaps more importantly: The want of earning more money by getting into a banking job. That was primarily how banking and the world of corporate finance appeared to me then. I was told fresh graduates were taking home 8,000 dollars a month. No other career offered that kind of money, definitely not in my field of study. But I was not lucky. My grades were less than mediocre and I had been in the 'wrong' field of study - engineering . I wasn't cut out for investment banking . I didn't even know what a Bloomberg terminal was, how to calculate a series of discounted cash flows, or the definition of enterprise value . I didn’t get my 8,000 per month dream job but with some luck and the help of a school senior, I eventually managed to join the valuations team of one of the large accounting firms. My cover letter in 2006 Trial by fire. I will never forget my first day of work. The office was on the 23 floor on Hong Leong Building just next to the iconic Lau Pa Sat in Raffles Place. As I walked from the lifts and through the swinging glass doors, I saw my new colleagues, probably twenty-something of them, looking smart, well-dressed, some with ties, all seated behind their cubicled desks. I wasn't given a desk of my own. Apparently the firm had over-hired due to the overwhelming number of assignments, and the only space they could put me up to sit was a narrow corridor next to the printer where two other new colleagues sat and shared a long table. One of them was a graduate from the prestigious Yale University, the other was an audit senior of five years who had been seconded to the corporate finance team. All eyes were on me as I turned left and walked to my space. Despite being a fresh graduate like most of everyone else, I had finished my studies a year later than all my engineering peers, thanks to an additional year that I spent overseas in Shanghai. This made me two years older than the guys who had graduated from accountancy and four years older than their female peers. In short, I was the " uncle" of all the analysts in the team. And for the longest time, no one could understand why I had chosen to take a 33% pay cut from my job in Philips to venture into the unknown from a zone of comfort and familiarity. Many times, I even had to clarify where I worked at previously: "Not Phillip Capital the securities house - Philips , the electronics company..." It was also much later into my role that one of my colleagues revealed to me that they were all wondering why I had come to " steal their jobs " as an engineer. So, it was with the combination of a bit of dumb luck, a vacant junior position created by the timely departures of a few analysts, and sheer persistence that landed me into a corporate finance role. Truth be told, I was incredibly scared during my probationary six months. I had come from a working culture that involved going to an office in a techno-park to write code five days a week, to a place that required retrieving stock prices on Bloomberg while discussing which companies were raising capital, or running a sale process to a consortium of private equity investors. The closest I would ever get to writing code was visual basic in Microsoft Excel. Other than that, I was a fish out of water. I was so afraid that my line managers would deem me unsuitable for the job and ask me to leave. However, what they did do was make a bet that I would voluntarily leave within those six months. This incident was later unwittingly and awkwardly revealed by a stranger who crashed one of our team drinks. I remembered him saying: "Hey! You lost your bet. He's still here!!" It was just one of those things people in banking like to do. It sounds condescending and insensitive, but you pretty much got to have thick skin in order to survive. Investment banking isn't just about getting through the gruelling late nights and delivering on the number crunching. It was also about the harsh and toxic environment that one has to be prepared to put up with for many years to come. No shortcuts, no straight paths. Today, I get a lot of questions on how to break into a corporate finance career whenever I teach at the Singapore Management University. "I don't have any accounting or finance background, how do I get in?" Ironic as it seems, most of the people asking me these questions have better credentials and working knowledge about the field of investment banking than I had during my time. My attempt to learn about the workings of financial markets was through punting in stocks during the bull market, which peaked shortly in 2007 and went bust later towards the end of 2008. I dabbled into the markets not to make money, but more so to experience first-hand how it was like to invest, trade or punt . It sounds unusual given younger people today are more investment savvy and have even more access to investment and trading platforms. Unfortunately, I don't have a straight answer for how to get into an investment banking role. I guess the willingness to work hard beyond the stipulated 8 or 9 hours a day was definitely a plus, but beyond that, it had been challenging to also prove how you could get the job done eventually or the value you brought to the team. For most of my peers it was mostly due to the fact that they were familiar with navigating the culture , having done similar internships before. In my case, it was probably my posturing as the go-to-coffee-boy for all the work that no one wanted to do. Mostly, I attribute most of this to being at the right place , right time and meeting with the right people (天时地利人和). That said, everyone has a different trajectory. In 2006, I had found myself then in a somewhat employees' market in which banks had been actively poaching from the accounting firms, creating a vortex of hiring, and I had been lucky to get dragged into the process. Revisiting "the want of money" Bankers during those hey-days were also raking in deals (most notably from the many S-chip listings) and taking home multi-year bonuses. I recalled hearing someone from one of the local banks earning thirty six months of bonuses. Even if his base pay was mediocre, the absolute quantum still sounded crazy. At that point of time, it was even common for bankers who got less than a year's pay in bonuses to jump ship just because they felt they weren't compensated enough. What a crazy world. To contextualise this to a working person with an average pay, just imagine: Bankers typically earned in a year, the equivalent of what everyone else outside of investment banking makes in 3 to 4 years. It also implies that after working for 7 to 10 years in investment banking, you could possibly retire for the rest of your life. It makes everyone else's job look like a joke. And yet there are still those in the industry who continue to complain about working the long hours and being under-paid. Fast forward 10+ years on, the frenzy of hiring and huge bonus payouts have significantly subsided. But the brutality of the work environment probably hasn't changed. Many fresh graduates today continue to worship the altar of corporate finance, chasing the money and prestige of being accepted into the bulge brackets . It is important to realise that there are many careers out there which pay decently well (but may not pay as " fast and furious "), if you stick it out consistently. It is obscene that bankers are paid so much for the work they do compared to most other careers. "It's unacceptable that chocolate makes you fat, but I've eaten my share..." Therefore easy for me to say " do whatever makes you happy " or " be open to other well deserving jobs " when I have personally gone through and benefited from the system. No guarantees At the end of the day, everyone has to make peace with whatever career you have landed into. Many of my engineering-schooled friends are doing very well today, even having not gone into banking roles. Some are in sales, business development, entrepreneurs, etc. After all, not everyone who lands an investment banking career is guaranteed to make lots of money and the promise of working on exciting deals. Most of the day-to-day work in investment banking tends to be iterative (and sometimes even borderline mundane). These include stuff such as research, spreading numbers and window-dressing a company's profile. As a junior or mid-level banker, you'd be lucky to get involved in and be a spectator in deal negotiations. Be realistic, you won't get to be portrayed a hero or a rockstar deal-maker. This is not the movies. However, you will be paid well and most likely be a target of envy for most of your peers who are probably earning only a fraction of your salary. By the time you reach director or managing director level, chances are that you will feel the mighty burden of revenue targets and also deal with the complex politics that come as part of the job. Hopefully during this time, you stay grounded and haven't gotten too used to a lavish lifestyle that will put you in golden handcuffs for the rest of your life. More important than the prestige that comes with investment banking, you really have to love what you do. The dots really do connect backwards . It is not so much about simply earning the big bucks, but whether you also appreciate the dynamics of the job and find a way to sustain yourself in that line of work for an extended period of time. As I look back on my cover letter dated in 2006, I recall of how starry-eyed I was when I applied for a role in investment banking. I had been lucky, yet, at the same time, it also reminds me of how far along I had come. I had applied for the money, saved some, spent some, invested some and lost most of it. I'd gained knowledge of the subject matter, technical skills and the experience, including the network of people, intangible resources built over the years, and spat out by the system. But. No regrets.

In the last couple of years, Hong Kong had remained relatively “closed” to the rest of the world. Once a vibrant city home to conferences and events, I think the city is bearing the brunt on the psychological and commercial front from reduced travel globally. No one is making plans to get in, unless it was home. This was favorable from the perspective of a traveller as accommodation prices once considered to be incredibly high for Hong Kong, had plummeted significantly. I had never given much consideration towards the amount of rent paid only until recently. As most of the world opens up, the return of overseas travel has led to steadily increasing airfares and hotel rates. When I returned to Hong Kong this year, I discovered that the lease on my place had gone up by about 30%. Last year had been a tough period for Hong Kong. 14-day quarantines, tourist inflows from China taking a hit while businesses and residents were relocating away. So this year, with the anticipation of the world re-opening up, I foresee that prices will continue to increase into next year. When I graduated from university, I had been one of the lucky ones that did not have to worry about paying the rent on my apartment. After amassing enough savings over 3 to 4 years, I made that decision to buy an apartment rather than renting one. Renting had never really been a consideration for me, maybe because being a resident in my own country, home ownership was the de facto option. Or at least it was so until I moved to Hong Kong last year. From an economical standpoint, owning a place and servicing the mortgage payments work pretty much in the same way as rent with a few key differences. Both rent and mortgage service are cash expenses, but the behavioural psychology behind paying the mortgage every month can be quite different from rent. With regular mortgage payments, one takes some comfort in home ownership , knowing that your equity position generally improves with every month of debt repaid (assuming the value of your home doesn’t go down). Property has generally been accepted to be a good store of value. While interest rates on a home loan can be as brutal as paying rent, with rent, cash out flow is basically a one way street. A sunk expense with no return on investment. Rents remain much more sensitive to sudden price spikes driven by abrupt changes in supply and demand. Interest rates can be volatile but are insulated against market forces as the mortgage payments are largely priced and sized on your income. To add on, it can be difficult to call a rented place home, especially if you do not have long term visibility of staying in that city. This uncertainty leads to a great deal of inertia when it comes to upgrading your living conditions. Therefore, to an immigrant, the bottom line is everything i.e. the less I pay in rent, the more I bring home in cash. While I consider myself middle-class and one of the more fortunate and relatively better-placed immigrants, I can totally feel what it is like to be an outsider alone in a foreign country earning a living, setting aside as much as possible every month with the end goal of going home one day.

I stumbled upon a photo of an event brochure while browsing my Wechat social media feed one day. It reminded me of how I used to spend hours on end refining the design of our brochures and website for our Asia Investment Conference (AIC) event.  I always made it a point to ensure the formatting and alignment of our collaterals was impeccable. This meant appropriate font faces and font sizes standardized. Yet at the same time, I had been responsible for the production and overall P&L of the event. This meant sourcing, negotiating, and closing sponsors, and making sure that cash flow was in positive territory. Largely because both my money and reputation was on the line. Some might say the time and energy might be better spent talking to more sponsors to bring in more money. If I had a higher up , I think that would have surely been their feedback: “ You should more time looking for sponsorship dollars rather than sweat over curating the perfect speaker rundown or making sure our marketing collaterals are done to perfection.”  It is true. Sometimes the time I spend on aesthetics and event rundown would be disproportionate to the time spent on reaching more sponsors. For example, I would stay up all night just to get our agenda right, get every alignment on the website to perfection, making sure that the theme of the conference and the panel discussions we curated were in sync with the latest trends taking place in the industry.  Marketing and sales were also laborious. But fortunately by the third iteration, we had nearly systemized our execution by using automation and scripts. With just the click of a finger, thousands of email invites would be sent, we would head off to lunch and come back an hour later with easily anywhere between twenty to fifty responses. I would also study our competitors closely. I would analyze their creative pricing strategies, their panel topics, the kind of online ticketing portals that were being used, and think for hours how we could do things better and differently. As a result, every sponsorship closed or ticket sold meant more than simply just dollars. It meant that we had done something right . But I faced many challenging and conflicting moments too. There were always speakers who dropped out at the last minute, rejection emails by sponsors (which were sometimes nasty), sponsors who were willing to pay huge amounts in exchange for bending a panel discussion to their personal interests, potentially throwing our conference theme off-track. Those who paid minimal sponsorship dollars but showed up with more than their allocated share of guests. It was a fine balance of having to preserve and uphold the quality of the turnout, ensuring the panel discussions were relevant to the speakers and attendees, all the while making sure that the overall economics stay above water. Planning... planning... It was difficult to accurately quantify what actually made AIC successful. Was it our unrelenting sales pitches? The rockstar speaker line-up? The obsessive need for perfectly designed publicity materials? The touch of making sure that everything ran smoothly on that day, or the goodwill of friends? Maybe it was a mix of everything. And then the pandemic struck in 2020. The untimely "circuit breaker" brought all face-to-face events to a standstill, effectively crippling our efforts and momentum in assembling the fifth installation of AIC. Even past the aftermath of COVID-19, many of our friends, past attendees, including sponsors had written to me, asking when we were planning to hold the event again. The reply had always been the same: “ we are still evaluating and will definitely reach out once we have firmed up a date ”.  I remain deeply grateful for these people who had reached out personally to give us the vote of confidence. Many had also approached me to restart the event. Some had even offered money to invest. Truth is I had no bandwidth to continue doing this. While we operated on a somewhat “ asset-light ” mode with very minimal manpower, you still needed someone to follow execution like a hawk. Without money on the line and skin in the game, no one would take ultimate ownership and responsibility for the outcome. Yet, if an investor were to put real money into this venture, the Asia Investment Conference might have turned out very differently.  We would have intense weekly catch up meetings to take stock of progress, not to mention monthly milestones and year end targets, doing more events every year by adopting profit-sharing incentives.  There is nothing wrong in taking a good idea or product and bringing it to its full potential. But I think AIC turned out successfully the way it was because every stage of the curation and design process had been painstakingly personal - or at least it had been for me.  The thing is: most of the time, the stakeholders who try to do this often just end up prioritizing sponsorship dollars over making a good product, or they just get caught up in the publicity and social hype, or wind up thinking about how much profit they can reap from selling it in five years. And that exactly is how the good stuff gets killed.

More than three years into starting up, I acquired a new-found respect for many areas in the day-to-day operating of businesses which are presumably overlooked by most people. These range from back office functions, human resources, payroll, corporate communications, financial reporting, legal and compliance, sales and marketing to overall general management. In short: a lot of work goes into the creation of a business and even more goes into supporting it. I think all founders go through that same process, though everyone's experience is slightly unique depending on which stage your business is in. For some it could be the fundraising process, for others it could be human resources, developing sales channels, etc. I thought it might be useful at this juncture to summarize a few important aspects of the process as a gentle reminder. Cashflow. You have to be really ready to be comfortable with very little cash in your bank at some point of time. Everyone’s financial background is different, just make sure you evaluate and prepare yours accordingly. Do something everyday. When you find yourself lost, just keep moving - meet people, read stuff, explain to friends what your business model is about. As long as you move , you’ll learn and get something out of it. When it comes to matters involving shareholding, always respect the money. It can be tough to quantify who contributes more at the onset of any start up given everyone's level of experience, age, capabilities and financial situation. One way to do this is to have everyone commit to an agreed amount of capital to put into the company and split the shareholding based on contributed capital. Even if one party had 20 years more experience over the other doesn't mean the more experienced party deserved a larger portion of the pie. Last drawn pay is irrelevant, only the economics and spirit of the equity injection matter. Take for instance the founding of Blackstone: Pete Peterson and Steve Schwarzman both put in $200,000 of their money and split the shareholding equal ways, even though Pete was held a more senior position in Lehman Brothers. Really have a shareholder agreement. Even a simple one is good, because that gets everyone committed to the business (at least statutorily). Do up a budget. THe idea here is to have some idea of how much expenses will be incurred each month. Everyone usually has some idea of how much is required but once this is inked on paper, it becomes crystal clear in terms of where the largest expenses are going, especially when it comes to manpower, tech spending and travel. Banking and money matters. Where bank and money matters are concerned, as far as possible always rely on joint signatories for check and balances. "Cheerleaders" are good but the will to execute is more important. It is absolutely critical to maintain a encouraging and positive mindset when starting a business, but also equally important to differentiate those who "cheerlead" vs those who actually do the work. The will to execute is probably more important, sometimes even more so than simple idea contribution. Everyone in the boat must paddle. All co-founders must be technically strong and have skillsets which are ideally complementary. No passengers allowed. Resolving disagreements. In pushing a point across or in any disagreement, no one should ever counter an argument by saying “ I don’t need this ”. Co-founders may never agree on everything , but when the decision is made, everyone must remain fully commited to execution. Trust is important . There is trusting in a person's integrity and also trusting in a person's ability to deliver. Both are important. Trust through years of friendship should not cloud judgement in trusting a person's execution or their ability to deliver. Change and growth. Be fully prepared that your idea and vision of your start up will evolve and change significantly along the way. This is mostly a good thing. Just be mindful and open-minded of the possibility that you could end up with a business that is quite different from what you had set out to do. Share options . Dilute no more than 20% of the company. Founders always need more skin in the game. Then comes the how and when to give share options: Reward those who have contributed to top-line and growth of the business. Here are some suggested guidelines: (i) Contribution to the business top-line (revenue) (ii) Where revenue is irrelevant, evaluate based on overall execution support Never give away equity. Not even to buddies who cheerlead you, period. See point above on respecting the money. Talent. Identifying, sourcing, acquiring and motivating people are ultimately key in growing and sustaining the business. As business owners, always: (i) Lead by example, be hands-on and show the way (ii) Invest in your strongest staff: train them professionally but also develop them personally as individuals (iii) Hire for attitude over aptitude (iv) Always be upfront and honest in your communication All employees will leave the firm one day, but the social goodwill generated during their time at your firm will be intangible and will go a very long way in establishing both you and your company's reputation. Beautiful presentation decks do not win deals . Good ideas, actionable strategies and the executing the plan builds credibility. Good decision making achieves multifold benefits . In making any decision, try to see if it can achieve multiple purposes. Don't undermine the importance of a healthy digital footprint . Anyone who tells you not to publish your background on LinkedIn is smoking you. In today’s digital age, a website, a corporate LinkedIn page and proper email account is almost synonymous with legitimacy. Corporate "mileage" or existence can also be a fairly strong indicator, register your company as early as possible. Stay positive and be comfortable with uncertainty . Complain less, do more. Be comfortable with uncertainty. There is always a possibility that an idea will not work, but if you fail, fail fast and pivot quickly to another strategy that works. Failure is an opportunity to learn . When you make a mistake, just get up and just move on. Otherwise, you may never grow as a person. Failure makes you a humble person, adversity builds character, and makes you a better person. Never victimize yourself . Our strengths and weaknesses are all shaped by our experiences and our will to do things. No one will bail you out from your self-pity and self-limitations. Be solution-oriented. Instead of close captioning the problem at hand, think of ways to solve the problem, then execute it. Make time for sanity, whatever the definition of sanity is to you - chilling over coffee, taking time to travel, spending time with family, etc. No one should work 24-7. At the end of the day even if you make it at the expense of the things that matter most to you, think about it: is it worth it? Keep in mind that everyone draws a pay check is fundamentally an employee . An employee’s mindset is different. Remember this always when you manage staff, work with partners, negotiate with clients and even raising funds from investors. You can learn a lot by working on the day-to-day mundane stuffs . You learn a lot when registering a business, making payments to mandatory employee provident funds, pay suppliers, write invoices and chase for payments. Trade receivables is a very real thing. Working capital and cash collection are some of the most important aspects of any business. When you are on the paying side just remember not to spoil market and a lways pay your suppliers on time. Take responsibility for your decisions. Good or bad, you are always responsible for the outcomes of your actions. Never look desperate. When fundraising or getting customers, never ever be desperate. Prospective investors and clients can smell desperation. The world works in ways more complex than you can think . Don’t believe everything you see and read. Teamwork is everything. There are no heroes in starting up.

Words from a few folks which I had whiskey with today: Not all PE firms are created the same: One of the best things to do is to track all the projects that these guys put money into. Everything they touch just turns from gold to brass. Instead of the “Midas” touch, they have the “minus” touch. Like the Forbes under 40, there should be a separate league table for investment deals called “Forty under 40”: The top forty deals that have an IRR of -40% or less... On China: A lot of private equity return models are broken: When it comes to decision making... Stupid questions asked by stupid people... The world needs enough stupid investors for astute investors to thrive. Investor relations is an art:

The reason we work. Learnings from a hearse driver ( read off LinkedIn ). "You could be professionally correct, but being correct does not mean that it is the right thing to do." - said an unnamed older colleague over lunch On dealing with people in a position of great authority and power.

I miss Blatage cafe in Shanghai. It is located in the Pudong new area, approximately 30 minutes by taxi (off-peak) door-to-door from where I usually stay in Shanghai (on the Puxi side). The small cozy cafe is along Binjiang Avenue (滨江大道), twenty minutes by bicycle from Superbrand mall or a 40-minute leisurely walk along the river. This is an extremely therapeutic exercise especially on the spring and autumn weekends. The indoor seating capacity is no more than ten and they serve an excellent flat white for CNY 30. Although situated close to some private homes in the vicinity, there isn't a morning coffee culture where people get up early to grab coffee. I am the cafe's first customer on most days when I arrive at 8 in the morning. View of the 黄浦江 from Blatage Cafe Back home in Singapore, " Blatage " is 40 Hands cafe at Tiong Bahru. A lot of people ask me why I spend so much on coffee when I can use the Nespresso machine and enjoy a cuppa from the comfort of home. Just as people sign up and spend their money on regular yoga classes, I spend mine on ' coffee yoga '. While yoga enthusiasts do stretching exercises to feel good. I indulge myself with sipping coffee. Case in point: a single yoga class ranges anywhere between $15 to $25 while an artisanal coffee is about $6. Just as people find inner peace and tranquility in an hour or so of meditation, I find mine through sitting by the street or in a quiet corner where I am able to reflect and declutter my inner thoughts. Not everyone understands this but everyone do need their own version of Blatage coffee - yoga, religion, travel. Sometimes, there isn't a need to architect a pricey escape into the Himalayas to seek private retreats. A lot of these can be found at your doorstep. 40 Hands - Street View You don’t need to fine-dine in order to enjoy good food. My favourite local hawker fare is the bak chor mee at Tiong Bahru market. You don’t need to own a car to have convenience. Even if I use Grab everyday my traveling commute expenses will probably never exceed $500 a month. And sometimes all you need is to buy a house in the right place with good access to public transportation. You don’t need to stay in a private condominium or landed property to enjoy your spatial environment. You just need the right renovation decor at home. What is the use of real estate if you wear it with a huge financial burden and/or can’t share it with your closest friends and family? You don’t need lots of money to be wealthy. In fact, you don’t even need to prove to anyone that you are wealthy. The wealthiest people are those who are comfortable in their own skin and do not give a f&*k about opinions from the rest of the world.

When FTX imploded, some of the largest investors including OTPP and Temasek Holdings issued public statements to disclose their full write-downs of the investment. Unfortunately these two entities fall under relatively more heavy scrutiny not because they are huge, but more so because of their source of funds. These are either the state coffers or life savings of relatively financially unsavvy civil servants and decent few who make an honest living out of making a real contribution back to society. To know that millions of dollars have been lost due to the apparent oversight of a few fund managers is unacceptable. At the end of the day, someone has to be held accountable. This is not to say that privately managed funds that have raised money from accredited and sophisticated investors can get away with calling caveat emptor . Regulators and the financial system exist to protect the interests of those who may not be equipped with the analytical skills to make sound investment decisions i.e. stupid money . The state of capital markets today. Stupid money doesn't necessarily refer to mom and pop money. It could be a hundred million dollar fund moving ahead with the decision to invest largely based on the fact that a well known name in the market like a Temasek or BlackRock is backing the deal. The underlying notion is that: if a large financial institution managing billions of dollars is putting money in this company, the due diligence is probably airtight. These institutions are also supposedly staffed with the brightest minds hailing from the best business schools . The investment process has probably also gone through numerous rounds of review under the scrutiny of multiple eyes. So what can go wrong? This is apparently not what it seems as highlighted in an article published by the FT recently, highlighting that in due diligence processes: "The hands-on work usually fell to the youngest lawyers, consultants and bankers. Today’s 20-somethings have no meaningful downturn experience so were less experienced at judging the adequacy of controls and clauses that only matter when money starts to run out." And so it somehow feels that even at the largest and most prestigious institutions, the decision to move ahead with a deal does not involve the knocking of experienced heads at the conference room table, instead it all comes down to endorsement . The endorsement of branding, track record and taking comfort that a 'rocket scientist' has crunched the numbers. That's essentially what today's capital markets has come down to. Talk to anyone in equity sales. Chances are that he or she will be an excellent story-teller. Don't bore them with the mechanics, and the nuts and bolts of the transaction, they'll almost always refer you to the deal team. Those in sales tend to have a condescending attitude towards execution work and often a lack of appreciation for details and protracted deal processes. In the world of equity markets, you (investors) have been conditioned to make that decision to invest almost solely on subscribing to the "equity story". Buying a share in a business equates to buying a bet on its future, and not its past. Sure enough you can "diligence" the historical numbers, ask about existing customers, next year's revenue, cost structure, profitability, cash flows, etc. But at the end of the day, chances are that owners of the business will insist on being valued based on its outlook. I have even seen some companies who turn away potential investors that ask too many questions. What kind of crazy world is that? But stupid money seems to be important, a lot of stupid money is born out from FOMO and FOMO is exactly what drives people to do stupid things. The final equity "takeout". There is nothing wrong with a fundamentally sound business with a good equity story. Ultimately, we just need to remember that a significant part of what supports the valuation narrative hinges on sufficient stupid money being in the system i.e. liquidity. And liquidity is a big part of what drives financial markets. For what initial public offerings are worth, they essentially represent the final destination for all stupid money, the final equity takeout representing the finishing line for all early investors in the business. This refers to those who had come in at the seed stage all the way to pre-IPO backers and cornerstone investors. It is basically whole lineup of "smart" institutional money waiting for their payday. This is the unspoken dark side of all IPOs. The smart money needs enough stupid money to get out. Can you imagine any decent institutional investor taking out a huge block of primary shares of a to-be-listed business that has an incredibly low free float? Portfolio managers also frequently turn down follow-on offerings of companies that have a low daily trading volume. The main idea here is that should there be a need to sell down their stake one day, they need to get comfort that those shares can be sold in the shortest amount of time within the open market. Liquidity basically gives investors the ability to transfer risk quickly to another party. So the next time you hear fund managers talking about "sufficient liquidity", what they are really saying is that they want to see enough stupid money circulating in the system for the investment to make sense.

I always have had interesting conversations around the assumption and concept of terminal value (TV) in my valuation and financial modelling classes. The above formula is an extension of the Gordon Growth Model - an economic model developed by Myron Gordon , a professor from the University of Toronto, a key assumption being that a company lasts forever . Corporate life cycles and the secondary market. The ecosystem of companies and their life-cycles today are very different from 40-50 years ago. Nokia came and went in 7 years. BlackBerry (RIM) lasted for no more than two decades. GE is probably one of the more closely relevant examples of how a company lifecycle could run its course for a relatively longer time before being dismantled into three separate segments in 2021. But I think most companies today don't enjoy that kind of legacy. Many corporate decisions are made using five and ten year plans. While founders may even have a longer term view of how they envision the business to be, these are mostly aspirational, some might even say fluffy. To make a call on a business over a 20-year horizon is almost unfathomable. Most human minds can't handle outcomes beyond a few decades, and as a result, economists try and simplify this scientifically, and in the process, disregard the cyclical nature of businesses - which is a practical consideration for most investors with a finite professional life. After all, the terminal value is only as tangible as the ability to monetise the underlying asset at the right time. The perpetual growth model also ignores the effects from secondary markets - investors and individuals that are prone to speculating on a company's value, taking positions both on the stock and derivative instruments such as CFDs and options. This opens up an alternative scenario: Instead of holding on to a share to perpetuity, there is a choice to flip their position for a quick profit, as long as the equity story continues to hold up. This makes both the use of market multiples and communicating the right narrative even more relevant. Origins of the 2% perpetual growth rate. Besides, as we all know, casting the remaining cashflows into terminal value after the forecast period usually implies that you are basing 60-80% of the total firm value on the discount rate and the perpetual growth rate, which to me seems very paradoxical given that we spend a significant amount of time working out the company's revenue and free cash flows, only to chuck it into a mathematical black box. Interestingly, the so-called 2% rate widely used in our perpetual growth models originated from New Zealand in 1989 when the reserve bank codified its monetary policy. According to the then central bank chief, he said that this was “ a chance remark " and that the figure was " plucked out of the air to influence the public’s expectations ”. The US would later on reference and incorporate this into their policy goals to balance economic growth, wages and unemployment among other things. If you try and communicate this with someone sitting in China or parts of emerging Asia, no one would have a clue what you were talking about. Most people in Asia simply don't care about what long-term growth rate you use for arriving at the terminal value. Discount rates are ultimately investor driven. We used get into hours of academic discussions over the WACC and terminal value during my earlier days in banking. Some of it was deemed as a test of your corporate finance knowledge. Other times it was because a valuation report required the loose ends to be tied in order to arrive at a fair value , or that we needed to demonstrate some form of credibility in the delivery of our report. The reality is: In the M&A world, there is no such thing as a fair value . There are no formulas for the correct cost of capital. There are only astute decision makers and those who are afraid to get caught on the wrong side of the outcome. Calculating the cost of capital or terminal growth rate with precision is only crucial either from a financial reporting point of view or only if you expect someone important to be challenging these assumptions specifically. " What is then the right discount rate to use? " Perhaps the more appropriate question is: What kind of returns are you expecting ? If you are evaluating a start-up, this could be anywhere north of 35%. For private equity firms, the rates could range between 15-25%. Institutional investors of public equities could expect 9-15% with zero tolerance for failure. Simply put: The discount rate is mostly investor-driven - which if you think about it, very similar to the CAPM (Capital Asset Pricing Model), only that the CAPM assumes the investors to be fully diversified. Investors who use their own yardstick for the discount rate and can't get to the valuation they want, generally try to manipulate the cash flows or find ways to "create value" in order to establish a case for the investment. Don't get so caught up with economic and valuation theories. They are only as important as much as you can use them in the real world. As the dynamics of the real world change, so must our understanding and application of finance.

"In the end, I am a teacher; that is really how I see myself." – Jorge Paulo Lemann When we think about teaching , instructional delivery is the defacto thing that comes to mind. This is probably the most familiar setting in which a professor or a lecturer pulls up a set of powerpoint slides and speaks to the class. Giving a two-day lecture on financial modelling has always been an enjoyable session for me - the interaction, debates and sharing of anecdotes. One of the biggest highlights personally is to see someone complete his/her Excel financial model (plugging the ending cash from the cash flow statement into the balance sheet) for the very first time. Doing up a financial model might be considered rudimentary for seasoned bankers but a ginormous task for someone who is either not trained in corporate finance or struggling to put together an investment thesis at the workplace. But my teaching engagements go beyond the classroom. At the work place, I am also the go-to person when it comes to troubleshooting excel files and powerpoint, explaining a financial model to an analyst or investor, or when someone needs a slightly older person to be present in the room or to do the presentation in English, etc. Aside from that, I've also been a listening ear to many of our colleagues at the office, from the senior and mid-level folks all the way to the rank and file. I've even been called to help in a situation whereby someone had called our front desk complaining about an imposter who offered him a job at our company. In August, we closed a landmark financing transaction with a highly reputable investment firm. The process was lengthy - mostly because we had very sucky lawyers - but also because it involved a deal structure that no one else had done before. Parts of the term sheet were tricky and the closing was even more convoluted. One treasury analyst (协办) in my team had the 'privilege' of assisting me on the deal. Joke was that I had brought her aboard a pirate ship (带上贼船), unleashing an incredible amount of documentation in the process, spanning at least seven inter-connected agreements. The deal was eventually closed and some weeks later, she resigned for better opportunities and left this note: Over that same period (with a separate team), I was also running multiple conversations on getting our first-ever "ESG financing" framework accredited by a international ratings agency. Although we had paid a fee for doing so, the negotiation process was tough. The ratings team sitting in Europe didn't have a clue on the overly long payment cycles experienced by public hospitals in China, and how supply chain financing for pharmaceutical companies delivering medical consumables actually resolves this critical financing bottleneck. When we finally obtained the official second party opinion (SPO) , I counted over 100 threads in the email exchange. It was not only the first time we had ever published a social and sustainability-linked financing framework and received a vote of confidence by an internationally reputed ESG ratings agency, but more importantly, this was one of the key CPs to drawing down on a RMB 500 million syndicated loan facility . In situations like these, I find my teaching methods taking on a more practical element. I am no longer working within the 'harmless' confines of the classroom where I can freely talk about structuring, negotiation and valuation. My actions have tangible repercussions on the outcome of the deal, and at every step, people are watching. Middle-to-senior management roles (much like my typical classroom lectures on financial modelling) are often like stage performances: As long as you don't screw up big time, you can always afford a few slip ups, which is perfectly normal, but the show has to go on. Look, most of the time, you work for money and are subject to the obnoxious KPIs placed on you because of your position. But once in awhile, your job gives you a unique opportunity to make a difference. That difference is sometimes not measured in the millions of dollars you bring in for the firm or the big bucks you bring home at the end of the year, but the impact that you make on the people around you. That difference could range from anything as simple as fixing the alignment on a powerpoint slide, fixing a financial model, helping someone negotiate through a transaction bottleneck or simply changing the mindset and perspective of a particular person. It is often said that we can't let our jobs define us. But how we do our jobs, and behave with our colleagues and clients ultimately determines the kind of person we are.

" Why is Starbucks coffee so bad? " was the thought that came to my mind as I was writing this in one of the Starbucks outlet located in Harbour City on a weekend morning. I had gone here obviously not for the coffee but mostly because it was relatively less populated due to the fact that is at least a 7 minute walk from the main shopping arcade. If you are a coffee "connoisseur" like me, you will appreciate what goes into a good cuppa. The type of coffee beans, the quality of the milk used (for lattes and whites), the crema at the top when it is served. Yet Starbucks, despite all its Seattle legacy, fails to impress those (or perhaps just me) who have acquired a certain palette for quality coffee. Most of us will also agree that for the same volume, prices have gone up significantly over the years. The topic of Starbucks is a perennial topic in my valuation classes. The argument being people are willing to pay premium, attributed to classy branding over the traditional local chains. In addition to brand, the quality of coffee beans used in the grind are also a contributing factor. There is also the element of Starbucks selling ambience. Based on my limited observations of several cafes in Asia, most operators tend to shun patrons who hang out for too long at their premises. From minimum spend, time-limited seating to restrictions on the use of Wi-fi, cafes in Asia use a variety of tactics to maximise table-turnover. Understandably, they don't really like their customers sitting around for too long as this is bad for business. This is quite different in the US, based on this this Starbucks story which glamourises one entrepreneur's experience of working out of an outlet located in San Francisco. This of course raises a more fundamental question: Is Starbucks selling overly-priced coffee, a lifestyle or something else? Starbucks has been known to drive up the prices of real estate in the places they have been opened. In 1999, Starbucks also made headlines when it opened its first store in China. It's almost like a bellwether for the gentrification of cities. So maybe Starbucks coffee tastes so bad because Starbucks isn't really selling coffee but real estate. The cup of coffee buys you the right to sit in one of their outlets. Those who order takeaways are basically just an added bonus for the shop. The value of that right to sit in the shop comes in different forms: a business meeting, catch-up with friends, quiet time alone to work on your proposal or simply arriving early and waiting for someone. Just for trivial comparison, retail rents in Singapore ranges anywhere between $8 to $37 psf monthly. In Hong Kong, the range is between HK$1,200 to HK$1,400 monthly. Here's a very rough breakdown of what it takes to keep that coffee outlet afloat: A few things to note here: Breakeven sittings per day and gross profit excludes manpower costs. We also assume that the outlet operates for 30 days a month Monthly rent and price per cuppa varies by location The average real estate per sitting is much smaller in HK as compared to Singapore. Also, each sitting assumes an average of 1 to 2 pax, hence 1.5. Pax count and sitting real estate again varies depending on location and the interior decor of each outlet. Rental cost per sitting assumes that 50% of the lettable area is for customers i.e. not the entire shop space is for sitting, half is set aside for common areas, the barista, cashier counter and the kitchen. Configurations vary per outlet. Gross margins are roughly between 70-80% , inputs costs comprises ingredients, electricity, and packaging. Excludes additional revenue earned from other products and channels e.g. food items, takeaway and online orders In fact, many retail businesses find it helpful to think about their business in terms of sales per square foot/meters rather than units sold, which enables the business to re-focus on asset-utilisation since a huge part of the overheads are attributed to maintaining the store front (i.e. real estate). Here's another helpful tip: By breaking down the cost-economics by real estate and sittings, you can essentially monitor the number of table-turns over the day to assess (i) whether you have achieved break-even (ii) which days are you making more money, and potentially (iii) which sittings have the highest turnover. Like real estate, retail yield is also a function of the footfall and surrounding amenities. Because a good number of people go to Starbucks for the space and not so much the coffee, it is probably also more helpful to evaluate the business on an income per area basis. At a breakeven of seven to eight cups per day, feel free to sit freely in your cafes. Starbucks isn't selling coffee, you are after all paying for the lease, and the nice drink is just a bonus. [ updated for number of cups ]

Finally and for the first-time, I took the high speed rail from Hong Kong into Shenzhen. Going to the High Speed Rail interchange from Austin MTR in Hong Kong Despite the lunar new year festive period, the station didn't seem as crowded as I remembered it pre-COVID. Entry gates at the Kowloon West Station I got my tickets online from 12306.cn, the official site of China Railway for all rail passes in China. I collected the hard copies from one of the counters the day before to avoid any long queues on the day itself. Ticketing gantry Once you pass through the gantry, numerous signboards will prompt you to fill up an online health and itinerary declaration form, which will generate a unique QR code for scanning at the border control points. While there are no swab or PCR tests at this point, you are required to obtain a negative PCR report within 48 hours before departure. e-immigration control point Queues form at the entry gates minutes before boarding En route to the platform... Entering the trains: To a certain extent, this feels similar to boarding the maglev in Shanghai. The cabin is as clean as it gets. and Arriving in Shenzhen Futian Station only just 15 minutes later... The Shenzhen Futian High Speed Railway station And that's it - this post is as short as the journey on the high speed rail.

Eating hotpot is great even if you are doing it alone. I do lots of things by myself, sometimes to the extent people think I’m an oddball. Time alone is priceless and highly underrated. Waking up at 7:00 am every day consistently regardless of whether it is a working day is not only an issue of discipline, but a conscious effort to carpe diem . Some of my most enjoyable and productive moments take place sitting out of a quiet cafe at 8:00 am in the morning. Nodding doesn't imply that I understand every single word that's being said in a dialogue. Some times it is simply an acknowledgement that I have been attentively listening, but more importantly it also shows a certain amount of respect to the other party. Nevertheless I'm grateful that most people give me the benefit of that doubt. Walking and pacing stimulates my thinking. It’s been shown that walking for 20 minutes increases brain activity and facilitates idea generation. As a result I tend to pace around a lot while on conference calls. There was even an occasion in which I had spent an entire hour on a conference call while walking outdoors from home to the office. Teaching is more showmanship than a demonstration of knowledge and experience. I realised this when I started giving lectures on valuation and financial modelling. You can be the most knowledgeable and technical person at the workplace, but in a classroom setting, it is all about entertaining the audience. In the words of The Kinks : Give the people what they want . Writing helps me consolidate and organise my learnings in a somewhat meaningful and chronological way. Unlike drafting publicity flyers, marketing materials, investment memos and work emails, I don't write to sell. I write to simply share. Disagreeing with people is sometimes pointless and tiring for me. In most cases, I usually just indulge them. Most people cannot accept, and don't like to be told that they are wrong. Besides, there’s really no point in proving that you are right if you can’t get to "keep your money [ #40 ]". Investing is highly personal. Each individual's perception of risk and expectation of returns can be vastly different. For example, I trade a lot of options and also use it to hedge my long and short positions. I don’t bother explaining this to a lot of people. Half don’t know how tradable options work. The other half don’t really care because they adopt a totally different approach towards putting money to work. Either way, it doesn't bother me because I’m not staking someone else’s capital on the table. Walking away doesn’t always necessarily mean you are giving up. It’s simply a risk management strategy involving the elimination of uncertainty. Morgan Housel talks about " getting the goalpost to stop moving " in his book, The Psychology of Money : "It gets dangerous when the taste of having more—more money, more power, more prestige—increases ambition faster than satisfaction. In that case one step forward pushes the goalpost two steps ahead. You feel as if you’re falling behind, and the only way to catch up is to take greater and greater amounts of risk." Most people experience what we commonly know as the fear of missing out (FOMO), which is exacerbated especially when others say " if only you had [done this] ”. You have to remember that what works for others may not work for you because people prioritise and value things differently. I think that one of the biggest masteries in life is not only to be at peace with the decisions you make, but also to make peace with the outcomes that follow.

Some of my new year resolves include: Drink less (no more than a glass day). Run a marathon (an offline one). Be selectively ignorant to people, projects and information that drain my energy and time. Remain focused on my personal goals and the big picture. But above it all, stay humble.

Social media had only really started to take off some time in 2009 . In the 2020 TV documentary The Social Dilemma , the show talks about how creators of social media encourage and nurture the addictions of users to help companies make money. But the impact of social media went beyond commercial exploits. Over the years, it also subtly cultivated a deep and unhealthy sense of emptiness . Luke Burgis talks about this using the story of a man with his martini in his book, Wanting : Social media has successfully connected strangers across geographical boundaries and re-connecting friends who have lost touch with each other over decades. It has also allowed us to keep up to date with what is going on around the world such as receiving breaking news about something happening halfway around the world, or browsing someone else's holiday pictures on Facebook, or reading about a friend closing a multi-million dollar deal with several well-known investors. We have had the privilege of more information but on the flip side, this has also amplified any feelings of envy, insecurity and greed . By understanding what drives these feelings could help us better appreciate why so many companies and founders choose to believe that they read, to inflate their corporate identities and "social circles" in hope that some investor will come along and take the bait. This is manifested in keywords across corporate websites, chasing social media endorsements, snagging a high-profile media interview, or participation in heavyweight conferences. As such, we have been led to believe that if something is sensational and disseminated widely enough, it often the "truth" - even better if someone seemingly important says something about it. Curating a healthy media presence is one thing, bullshitting to feed your ego is another ( as in the case of BN Group ). Celebrity endorsement is one of the most time-tested and effective ways to endorse a product. "It’s easy for someone to become an overnight expert on 'productivity' merely because they got published in the right place" - Excerpt from ' Wanting' Remember the reality TV show Shark Tank? Kevin O' Leary, aka Mr Wonderful, recently revealed taking a $15 million 'deal' from FTX to be its spokesperson . Never mind whether or not Mr Wonderful was a cryptocurrency-skeptic-turned-ambassador. In today's world, it seems that at the right price, people are willing to say enough bullshit to endorse a product or a company, regardless of whether they believe in it or not. This strategy has been effective in the business and investment world. Social media just made it better. People who consume bullshit will believe in bullshit. Feelings of envy and FOMO often drive people (and investors) to make foolish decisions. One of the biggest fears of any VC is to be left out in a multi-bagger deal. Some compensate for this through 'diversifying' their portfolios. Those who have staked their money have a vested interest. They want to make sure they don't look bad doing the deal, and therefore will do anything to ensure that the equity story holds up, at least long enough until they exit. This is the state of fundraising in the world today. This is the reason why we have so many asset bubbles. In light of the many recent frauds, scandals and apparent lapses in due diligence, investors have started to increasingly become more discerning about who they deal with, what they read in the media, the kind of information they are fed with, and perhaps even more importantly, where they put their money. If they haven't, they should. The era of bullshitting is over. Companies and people need to wake up to reality and stop the proverbial fake it till you make it , "over-packaging" their products and services, and start getting real about talking about fundamentals and their numbers.

It was 2011. The government debt crisis in the EU had reached a stage that required the bailout of several countries long thought to be considered creditworthy and stable. I was a senior analyst then and the bank that I was working for wasn't spared from this contagion. The outlook was bleak and the bank's share price had taken quite a beating. As part of ' austerity measures ', there were also talks of bonus and job cuts across the offices from Europe to Asia. The economic turbulence and uncertainty kept everyone on their toes. On one fateful afternoon that year, I was called into my CEO's room for a few words. It was a brief conversation but in short, I had been given the assurance of a " golden ticket " and had been recommended to be sent to HQ in Paris for training. At that point of time, I had no idea what this meant. I gave up the opportunity to another colleague whom I felt needed it more. It was only much later on that I realised this in fact an all-expenses paid two-week trip to wine, dine, possibly stroll along the Champs-Élysées, and rub shoulders with our colleagues from all over the globe. The valuation training was simply a side show. And then a few weeks later in a twist of events, I resigned to join a competitor bank. The offer came with a sixty percent increase in pay. It came at a time where I had to fund several huge upcoming expenses including the downpayment on my new house. The news of my departure didn't go down too well. While everyone else was 'congratulating' me, my CEO refused to speak with me during my final days at the firm. Later in that year, I also discovered that the entire analyst/associate pool had basically been decimated, leaving only the VPs and one analyst. That analyst was meant to be me, the last man standing. Fast forward a couple of years later, the team that I had jumped ship for shut down as part of an internal re-organization exercise and cost cutting. Talk about karma . Decisions like these can be tough. Some might say it was foolish to trade goodwill for money. The money had been good and without it otherwise, I probably would have been crushed under the weight of work while struggling to make ends meet. Besides, goodwill (to be blatantly transactional) is only good if you can derive something tangible from it in the future, and given the state of the Eurozone crisis then, it didn't look like a pay rise was on the horizon anytime soon. Yes, not everything should be weighed by its monetary merits. But it is fair to say that many of the benefits and opportunities I enjoy today are the seeds of goodwill planted years ago. Seeds that didn't appear to have any benefits ten or twenty years ago. That said, being able to gauge when to cut your losses and walk away, versus sticking it out for a benefit in the future requires a certain amount of judgement and faith (some say craziness). Even more so if you have something immediately lucrative on the table. "Summertime soldiers" are what Marc Andreessen calls those who only joined a company in the first place because it was already successful and have no interest in really bearing down and applying themselves to a challenge. These people while hardworking, are however not the type of people you want to retain and groom. As an employee, it isn't technically wrong to jump ship for a better paying job, and I never regretted what I did. Given the choice to re-write history, I might have went for that incentive trip, soldier on being the lone analyst within the firm and later on down the road, find a way to make back that sixty percent increase in pay.

To understand and decide whether bitcoin is a good store of value, let's consider other classes of assets such as real estate and commodities. Consider real estate. I remember hearing folks talk about property being a good store of value and something that has that ability to stand the test of time. In some ways that is probably true. Real estate has not only been able to hold its value but is also an instrument that has proven to deliver returns through generating rental income or appreciate in value steadily over time. Within Asia, real estate has not only demonstrated resilience through the up and down cycles, but also been a beneficiary of the economic prosperity of the regional economic titans such as China, Japan, Korea, as well as Southeast Asia. A rising tide lifts all boats. That trend still holds true to a certain extent today. Property is still pretty much the go-to choice for many investors flushed with cash and those in search of a relatively safe-haven especially during a recession . People continue to trade and invest in real estate because fundamentally, they know that a roof over the head is a basic foundation of life at least based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Residential property is also somewhat a good proxy to the overall global economic cycle. A resilient jobs economy encourages home ownership, driving up property values. Although its initial investment outlay can be high, real estate is also relatively liquid . Liquidity in valuation, is a metric that tends to be overlooked. In layman terms, this loosely translates to how easy it is for an asset to change hands. You can list your second-hand car for a million dollars on Carousell , but at the end of the day, it's still worth nothing if it can't be sold. The price of a share in a company is only as real as how much others are willing to pay for it, not how much you want to sell it for. Furthermore, liquidity is also driven by the availability of buyers and sellers, and also shaped by the perception of the broader market. All things considered, we can assume that property, as an asset class, remains still highly regarded amongst investors as the go-to asset class for investment. Now let's consider lab-grown diamonds. "A diamond is valuable only because people say it is, not because of its clarity or cut." Jewelers and advertising companies around the world have done an extremely successful job in positioning the diamond at the apex of all precious stones. But the raw material for diamond is carbon - one of the most commonly available elements found on earth, ranked many times above gold, silver and platinum. Yet despite being available in relatively large quantities, consumers continue to pay absurd amounts of money for a small rock mounted on a ring or co-joined in a necklace. To add to the paradox, lab-grown diamonds are significantly cheaper than their natural counterparts, even though they share the exact same properties and make. In fact, according to this website : "If you buy a lab-created diamond, you’d have a beautiful stone, yet no jeweler will buy it back." So, what can we learn about the value of bitcoin from real estate and precious stones? There's much talk of late about bitcoin being a store of value . I know very little about the world of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies - only limited to the banter that I read on Twitter and the news. Is bitcoin a good store of value? Only time will tell . Just like property, gold and other precious stones, it is considered a safe haven only as much as others see it . In this case, the erosion in value (and faith) of the dollar could be one of the key catalysts behind the value of bitcoin. Investors buy bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because they have lost faith in fiat currency. Traders of bitcoin expect that one day, the guy over the counter of a McDonalds or convenience store will accept a bitcoin or cryptocurrency-equivalent as a valid form of payment in exchange for goods and services. Far out as it might sound, but for a billionaire or any large investor sitting on heaps of cash, this translates to a possible devaluation of their cash holdings. i.e. cash as we know it today, might one day be no longer king if crypto-currencies were to take over. I think that crypto-exchanges were created largely because of this phenomenon. Crypto-currency platforms are only viable and commercial if there is a sizeable market for trading. This implies that there has to be a significantly large pool of investors willing to kickstart the initiative and make the market so to speak. This is similar to early stock exchanges which were created to provide an avenue for companies to raise capital, and also an alternative gateway for investors looking to put their money to work. While people are comfortable with buying and selling shares, there is still a huge inertia is driving a paradigm shift in financial markets to accept bitcoin, inertia likened to re-inventing the wheel. There's a reason why successive versions of Microsoft Windows in its early days were so slow and buggy. We can blame the limitations of hardware and software but the reality is that having to re-write a software for the world from scratch is simply too lengthy and costly. Why demolish and re-build something that is already selling even with some occasional bugs and flaws? Far easier it is to patch the errors than to re-invent the wheel. So our existing financial system is not perfect. Market players are rigging interest rates, manipulating currencies and stocks, and laundering money. But the reality is that the paper currency since its inception a thousand years ago still works as a go-to medium for the exchange of goods and services. To revamp today's highly complex financial system using bitcoin or any crypto-alternative would simply take too much work involving several iterations of monetary reforms, even an astronomical " reset " on the global system, sending us all back to the barter economy. Just as how asset values move in cycle with the economy, bitcoin will probably follow the same trajectory. However we belittle cash, there are many commodities and asset classes out there which still serve as good alternatives to what we define as a "store of value". Bitcoin is only but just one of them.

The last few weeks had been a huge tailspin for me. I attribute it to the multitude of challenges compounded upon each other - first, the physical distancing barrier, then the business-cultural aspect of it and then the technicalities of the underlying business. To add on, while investment and banking is not unfamiliar to me, the work of public relations and investor relations remains uncharted territory. Perhaps the biggest difference is that the mindset that one takes into any job, any role, any engagement. Never take on a job purely because of money . This might be one of the most important starting points in terms of getting the right mindset. Money is of course important but the experience of taking on the engagement should enable you to grow as a person, forge new relationships, learn new things that you never knew before, and naturally add to your professional credentials. To add on: Never switch jobs solely because the pay on the other side is higher. The "intangible assets" that you give up from making that move might cost you a lot more in the future. Never wear your designation / rank like a "political shield" or a "badge of honor", and let it get in the way of what you should be saying and doing. Most of the people that I know like to flaunt their status of being a VP, Director or being in C-suite roles. That kind of ego wears off fast when things go bad. The ability to be hands-on and execute will eventually outlive ego. Never stop moving or learning. Towards the ending scenes in the movie, The Martian , Matt Damon (as Mark Watney the astronaut) talks to a class at NASA saying: "At some point, everything's gonna go south on you and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one, and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home." He didn't survive the journey back home by squatting in space, flaunting his celebrity status as an astronaut and griping about how people back on earth could have done better in trying to rescue him. Whether it is a Fortune 500 company, a small medium enterprise or a start up, the foundational principle of any organization is just to "get things done." A true entrepreneur - whether running his/her own business or working in someone else's organization - doesn't care about pride or rank. He/she just cares about getting the job done and getting paid for it. Unfortunately, most people out there aren't entrepreneurs, so excuses such as not being paid enough or avoiding assignments outside their work scope becomes the common excuse. And for all the people out there who think that they are "too senior" to be hands-on or doing grunt work: I still take a lot of pride in being able to build a three-statement financial model from scratch. I consistently do this during the classes that I teach at SMU and remind everyone that it is really not that difficult . If you refrain from revisiting the basics every now and then just because you think you are "too senior" to be working on models, you are going to regret it much later on in life with that kind of mentality. Keep telling yourself that you are too good or qualified for any job or you should be getting more credit for your work and you'll also find yourself in a lot of trouble when you get older.

I recall that the early days (and nights) of my banking job was spent in the office working on ppt slides and having discussions with my VPs and directors. Occasionally when they wanted to work directly on the numbers or show me how something was done, they would come over and sit at my desk space, typing away at my computer while I stood and watched how it was done. It was a simple gesture - fixing a problem right when and where it was needed, in person. And that simple gesture didn't only solve the problem (whether it was a glitch in the model or some formatting on powerpoint), it also demonstrated leadership right then and there. This seems quite different today. No more in-person consultations and discussions, no more live demonstrations. Nearly everything is done over Zoom. There's a Chinese saying that goes " fighting the bull from across the mountain " (隔山打牛) - which basically translates to trying to solve a problem from afar. So right now, that's how a lot of things are for people working away at their desks or from home. Clients and suppliers trying to deal with new normal of doing deals virtually without a handshake or sighting of the product. Employees and their line managers trying to make a project or a pitchbook work while being separated hundreds and thousands of kilometers, connected only by email or whatsapp / wechat. To take the challenge up a notch, imagine the difficulty of new joiners who may have never seen their bosses, co-workers and their office desks. Leadership and management in a virtual world is also extremely difficult, especially when it comes to showing how things should be done, or to foster camaraderie without having a meal together in person, or simply chugging a few beers after work. It is extremely hard to show charisma and motivate others when you can't show up in person. Lots of things get lost in translation when you don't see, don't talk directly to the other party. Zoom calls can only do much in facilitating communication in a physically disconnected world. But in order to restore the current situation back to equilibrium or the good ol' days, we'll eventually need to be able to go out and travel, meet people and forge collective experiences together.