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Here's Bill Miller's take on Bitcoin. It's a very good take. Paraphrasing: - uncorrelated asset - put 1% into it - anyone can afford to lose 1% of their portfolio - it's a positive expected return lottery ticket Bill Miller says Bitcoin is interesting but that most cryptocurrencies worthless https://t.co/keSepOKmkH pic.twitter.com/2bkHSiHa5L — Bloomberg TV (@BloombergTV) July 27, 2018 I am so balls deep into crypto now that I feel like an expert on money and incentives. Funny thing is, most people, even investors, have shit knowledge on money itself. Making money? Easy. Spending money? Easier. Saving money? Great. Investing money? Not too shabby. Defining money? Wait u say mot m8? Most people can't go any deeper than "because my government gives it value and backs it up". Okay. If that's good enough for you, then great. The next crypto bull run is going to be madness. Mass media all have an ear out and someone covering crypto. Crypto is near the tippi...

I read this post by Blade Knight from Dividend Passive Income talking about the Hyflux shitshow . As many know, I rarely go out of my way to call out really trashy investments, because let's face it, a lot of investors are irrational and will gladly and happily buy up stupid shit. Just because something is terrible fundamentally, does not mean that it cannot be a good investment. Plenty of examples in crypto of pure dogshit going to the moon and making early investors 10-100x their investments. But Hyflux and Noble are my muse . I go the whole nine yards just to shit on them. I've been talking shit about Hyflux since forever, nicely summarized in this post , where I am *completely shocked* about what happened to them. Not. The Government should NOT bail out Hyflux. Replace Hyflux perpetual bonds / preference shares / stocks with ANY other investment, and you can see how ridiculous this notion is of thinking that the government has a role to play. There was no misrepresentation....

With the recent 2 co-op articles pumped out by Dollars & Sense (one of the few financial blogs that I hold in high regards) and by SG Budget Babe (fellow crypto warrior), I thought it's time that I dug out my old posts on co-ops. About 2 and a half years ago, I blogged about a mysterious financial product that as it turns out, is actually savings and share subscription at one of the co-ops . Based on the last financial report, annual dividend is at 3% and there is a 30% buffer, making it a rather "safe" investment vehicle in my opinion. As mentioned a long time ago, I am treating it as a cross between a last line of defense emergency cash, flexible rolling fixed-deposit and a retirement product that has emergency features to either: (1) borrow from myself with a small interest cost or (2) drain and withdraw entirely if need be. I must say, I am particularly happy to have stumbled upon and open this co-op savings account. If I continue at it, maxing my contributions...

Note: I drafted this post on 7 June 2018, not sure why I didn't post it. ------------------------------------------- Remember my post just a while ago talking about crypto securities ? The wheels are in motion by both Coinbase and Nexo . So institutional custody solutions are coming , and now crypto securities are up next. (As a side note, I want to reaffirm my stance - AGAIN - that people who classify crypto securities as a "negative" might be missing some brain cells. There have been several notable cases of projects stripping and removing every ounce of valuable feature from their tokens, making them PURE UTILITY tokens. Needless to say, they end up as worthless trash that nobody wants to own. **COUGH BEE TOKEN COUGH**) And if you listened to the podcast with the Bitmex CEO , you'd know that in his opinion, the vast majority of money in the crypto space belongs to retail. Institutional custody solutions and SEC regulated crypto securities pave the way for institut...

Crypto markets suddenly turned bullish on a dime. Coinbase greenlighted for securities. Blackrock rumours. Billionaire Steven Cohen gettting into crypto. CIA positive? South Africa's financial firms adding crypto India to regulate instead of ban crypto Eve Bloomberg is bullish To be honest, I'm meh about it. I've mentally hardwired as a contrarian psychopath, so I don't really care. To be honest, slightly bummed out that it didn't hit levels for me to raid my warchest (that I've been topping up slowly) and to add another leveraged long position, but oh well. The gain in my portfolio is nice, can't complain. Anyway, I've been slowly building up and adding to my toolkit of generally market neutral strategies (strategies where I make money, regardless of market movement up or down). As of now, I have: $2300 hedged profits $1500 unhedged profits in instrument A $2900 unhedged profits in instrument B and another ~$1300 profits in instrument C coming in at the...

"Passive income", "income investing", "yield investing" are the fashionable investing trend buzzwords of our time. If you thought that only traditional investors can be blinded by yield and end up completely overlooking fundamentals and only focusing on the yield number, you would be wrong. This sort of irrational thinking exists and runs rampant in the crypto space as well. The easiest example to give is the notion of Staking and Masternodes (MNs). What the similarities and differences? They are actually extremely similar. In both cases, you "lock up" your crypto and in return you get back a return. It's like a rolling fixed deposit. The difference is that for Masternodes there is usually a substantial minimum amount required, and also hardware and node requirements. Just why are Masternodes so appealing? Just check out the yield . For the top 10 largest cryptos with masternodes, the annual yield ranges from.... 7% to a mindblowing 1407%. O...

What is crypto-incrementalism and crypto-anarchy? This article is a fantastic read on that. I would like to clarify that I realize that I quite identify myself following crypto-anarchy, and that quite affects the way that I think, the topics that I write and how I approach them. I actually think that a lot of people would be quite pleased and agreeable to crypto-incrementalism , especially the "we like blockchain, but not Bitcoin" crowd. Heh. When I first learnt about crypto back in 2013, it was almost exclusively about crypto-anarchy - decentralized, uncensorable crypto that cannot comply to authoritarian requests. Bitcoin. As much as I was intrigued by crypto then, it looked like a dead end to me. Little did I know that the protocol evolves and upgrades and changes along with its community, developers and users. Just a while later, Ethereum would be "born". In mid 2017, I was allured back into crypto, NOT by the improvements made to the Bitcoin protocol, but ins...

1) No one in Singapore needs whole life insurance 2) Most insurance agents will immediately pitch you a whole-life insurance or an ILP (which you should not take). You should not continue dealing with them. 3) Most agents have extremely poor knowledge in financial planning and investing. Some don't even know the inflation rate and gives you bullshit numbers . 4) If you are lazy to settle your own insurance, you will pay an arm and leg for an agent to recommend an expensive product for you. Nothing wrong with that, if you're lazy. 5) If you are lazy to settle your own investments, you will pay an arm and leg for an agent to funnel it through an ILP to get subpar returns for you. Nothing wrong with that, if you're lazy. 6) Don't buy endowment plans . 7) BUYING. INSURANCE. IS. NOT. INVESTING. 8) If you need to buy insurance from anyone, DO NOT ASK YOUR INSURANCE AGENT "FRIENDS" . Ask a non-commissioned agent for advice or better yet, a friend who is an insurance ...

This article is really, really good. It's no secret, I am a big fan of stablecoins. I was really heavy into DGD , but I took disgusting profits from it's rise later on . Enough profits that my remaining position is free and I pocketed profits just from what I sold. I have used Maker to leverage , it was a terrible experience. Since then I've become rather bullish on a particular stablecoin project, which is Havven . I'm still a fan of DGD for its goal, though as an investment, it's thesis is getting weaker and it is struggling to gain traction and adoption. The article is an excellent read and I'm rather happy that the author concludes rather similar things that I have earlier myself independently come to conclude. In short notes, my interpretation of some of his key points: - Centralized stablecoins are easy, but stupid and goes against the decentralization movement. - DGX is the best model to have off-chain assets and corresponding blockchain-based tokens. - M...

ST wrote an article with some reasons. Fact is, a few years ago when COE was at $92,000, there was a clear "bubble" in car prices. In fact, I dare to say that prices have come down that it can almost be considered economically viable for some people to consider upgrading their transportation method. Some time ago, I wrote about the transportation situation in Singapore . I think that with more MRT stations popping up, along with so many transportation alternatives, so many last-mile solutions, people are realizing that the NEED for a car, is actually a very, very, expensive WANT. It's okay to WANT to have a car. You just need to realize that you just have to pay more. There's nothing wrong with that. However, if you are struggling financially, it's probably better not to get a car. Honestly, I get why a car is great. But a lot of people who aren't car owners also don't get why it can suck too. Driving yourself, renewing season parking, pumping petrol, top...

Here is the reference article , please read it. Here is the main classification table, I will reference it. Store of Value Only a HANDFUL will exist. Scarcity (stock to flow), decentralization and willingness of other people to accept them as stores of value are key factors to determine success. Upside potential is high, but can you figure out which crypto fall into this category? Stablecoins Has no upside, with 100% downside risk. Not for investment purposes, but excellent as a medium of commercial transfer and short term wealth transfer. Payment Tokens Shit. Governance Tokens Shit, unless you get paid (DGD) Discount Tokens Shit, unless people actually want to buy the tokens and use it for the discount themselves (BNB) Work Tokens This is my preferred classification. I believe that REP, HAV and actually even DGD falls into this category. The whole article above talks about why they are unique and special. Burn & Mint Tokens I have no opinion on them because I am not familiar with ...

Right now, price of ETH is $450 USD. After Casper + Sharding , 32 ETH is required to be a validator. (this link is a great read, btw) USDSGD rate is about 1.36. Do the math and you get $19,584, which will be enough to get the crypto capital required to run a validator. Buy a NUC for about $400-500 and you've got yourself enough hardware to host the node. (examples of NUCs: eg1 , eg2 , eg3 ) So there you go, for about $20,000 SGD, you'll have the essentials to run an ETH validator once Casper and Sharding is out. All of this is crypto nerd speak, but basically it's going to be a "passive income instrument". ROI is fuzzy. Some people think 5%, but I'd imagine that the real life returns are 3%, or maybe even lower. ROI is also in ETH, which is volatile against USD. I guess you can just assume it's 1 ETH a year. So now you have an interesting curious case of having crypto capital paying out crypto returns. Personally, I believe that ETH marketcap will be large...

If we want to talk about the crypto version of Acorns, we first need to know, what is Acorns? That's Acorns. It's a very, very, very interesting way and tool to help people save small amounts of money without thinking about it, and also a way to invest recurring and even lump sum amounts. The premise of Acorns is that brain-dead easy. I've talked about Acorns wayyyyyyyy back on my blog in 2014 , so I'm actually a very big fan of this model. I think it's a really good and painless way to help people save and invest. So, the reason why I talked about Acorns first is that there is actually going to be a crypto version of it, and it's called Bamboo . Same concept - round up small purchases and help auto-invest into a basket of cryptocurrencies. Acorns was founded in 2012, raised $100m and now is worth about $1.28b. Bamboo is looking to raise $20m with a valuation of $40m. However, it is important to note that TOKENS ARE NOT EQUITY . This is where I am kind of meh ab...