When I was getting my driver's license, my instructor gave me a simple rule about the yellow box junction. "If you're turning, you can wait in the box. If you're going straight, you can't." That was the whole rule, as far as I knew. As an obedient rule following Singaporean, that was exactly what I did. When I was turning, I entered the box and waited without a second thought. When I was going straight, I held back. Simple. I never questioned it. Recently, by chance, I was re

Photo generated by ChatGPT. Pretty cool "What do you use to track your expenses?" It's a good question. The client wanted to get serious about their money, and this was the natural first step. How do we track expenses? Because this is the first commandment of personal finance: Thou Shalt Track Thy Money. Every book, every blog, every adult (and child) will tell you: know where your money goes. But my answer surprised them. "I don't track my expenses." The look on their face w

People assume that because I do this for a living, I live a textbook financial life. Every decision optimised. Every box ticked. I don't. Some of what I do—and some of what I don't—might sound controversial. Here are three. 1. I don't count the house I live in. When I look at my own net worth, I leave my home out entirely. Not because it has no value. It obviously does. But the cash value of the house is a lot less than it looks. To unlock it, I have to sell. That takes time,

Part two of a two-part reflection on Lee Freeman-Shor’s The Art of Execution. Read Part 1 here In part one, I wrote about Illusion, the idea that more data doesn’t necessarily lead to better decisions. The lesson was that we often respond to how risk presents itself, not to the risk itself. Here, I want to turn from how returns feel to how they actually arrive. Outliers Most individual stocks are bad investments That is not pessimism. It is arithmetic. J.P. Morgan’s Michael C

Part one of a two-part reflection on Lee Freeman-Shor’s The Art of Execution. Read the second part here. I read a book whose ideas run contrary to my own investing philosophy. Lee Freeman-Shor writes in his book, The Art of Execution, about a High Conviction approach. He gives a group of fund managers a single rule: invest only in your ten best ideas. When Lee studied the 1,866 investments they made, he found something humbling. Only 49 percent of those “high conviction” inve

All things considered, still a great trip. This is me, with the car, on the F1 Montreal Circuit (opened to public, I had no idea) I want to tell you about something that happened to me recently. It reflects badly on me; but the lesson it left behind is one I think is worth sharing (and a good reminder to myself). Just last week, I was in Canada. I rented a car from Avis to get around. When I returned it, I made a point of asking the counter staff to confirm that the tank was

This post is part of my ongoing series on investment philosophy. If you haven't read the earlier pieces, you can find them at https://www.williamseah.com/blog. This post is part of my ongoing series on investment philosophy. If you haven't read the earlier pieces, you can find them at https://www.williamseah.com/blog. Let me ask you something honest. When you check your portfolio and it is down — even slightly — how does it feel? Now think about the last time it was up by the

So often we’ve been told that hard work is all that we need to succeed. Rags to riches stories encourage us to strive harder and believe that we can achieve greatness. And when we don’t succeed, what does that mean for us? Are we lesser than others? Is success purely due to effort? Malcolm Gladwell writes that success is the result of accumulative advantage. That success, while dependent on hard work, is also reliant on our history and our own advantages, such as family backg

All financial decisions are emotional decisions. This rang especially true when I read the article by The Straits Times, “World’s biggest luxury spenders are label-loving South Koreans”. Nothing captured how all financial decisions are emotional decisions better than this discovery: “Helping to fuel the surge was South Korea’s runaway housing boom, which saw property prices in some cities double during the pandemic, making homeowners feel wealthier. ” - The Straits Times, 26

Earlier, I wrote an article about survivorship bias. We love to study success stories and we try to emulate these people, but we fail to consider the stories and experiences of those who tried and failed. We assume that success can be replicated by identifying the strategies of each success story and repeating them. But by ignoring the ones who failed, and in particular, the ones who carried out the same strategies and failed, we miss out on an important data set. Here we loo

An interesting article appeared in The Straits Times on 14 January 2023. Written by Tim Harford, the title was a deliberate click bait “We get a lot on personal finance wrong”. A screenshot of Tim Harford's article on 14 January 2023. The key point raised by Harford was that theory and practice are oftentimes not on the same page. A quote attributed to Albert Einstein was that “in theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not”. But before we decide to ca

We love to learn from success stories, especially from people with tried and tested models. These stories of hustling, challenging themselves, changing their lives through different methods intrigue us and inspire us. They challenge us to hope: “if they succeeded, why can’t I?” Often, we tend to attribute their success to their efforts. We emulate them. They took the uncommon path, big risks, and won big. However, is this always true? Have we asked ourselves, how about ones w