I’m usually a coffee drinker, I can’t start the day without a nice
cuppa. I typically have 5 different kinds of coffee at home, which I
alternate daily. But recently I started drinking more tea. It started
because of the weather. It’s now the “very hot” season, as opposed to
the standard “just plain hot” of most of the rest of the year. So in an
attempt to reduce the amount of diet coke I guzzle daily I started
making ice teas to drink throughout the day. I picked up a couple of
new teas last weekend and discovered a really nice one called Jiao Gu
Lan (胶股兰丸) or in its scientific name: Gynostemma Pentaphyllum. I’ve
been drinking it both hot and cold and I really like the taste. What
drew me to it was the label, which promises you immortality, well
almost.. it says (quoting):

Decrease Cholesterol
Decrease Blood Sugar
Increase Body Immune
Prevent for Cancer
Anti-Oxidant
Tonic

Who can say no to that? :-) In any case, whether this tea does even
10% of what it claims or not no one really knows for sure, but it sure
tastes great and despite having a vested interest in KO they will have
to do without my $.

This week hasn’t been very productive with mostly back and forth small gains and small losses. That’s just how things are sometimes. It’s also a short week for me. We’re taking advantage of a couple of public holidays and going on a short break. Till later.

Got back to Bangkok last night after a delayed flight. I had a really nice time in Singapore meeting friends and going out for drinks and food at our usual places. Just like the last time I went back to Singapore in November, Singapore has both changed and remained the same. Three related change themes emerged this trip:

1. Everything is even more expensive than before, prices increased across the board for everything. Surprisingly though people aren’t talking or complaining about it too much. I think there’s a bit of a boiling the frog effect going on, the gradual increase doesn’t cause much outcry but if you step away like I did for half a year and return then things seem different.

2. It’s more crowded. Everywhere you go you see lots of people all the time. A lot more than before. There are several government initiatives to increase the population of Singapore dramatically by a couple of million people and like in most areas, the Singapore government is showing results. The main downside I see to their strategy though is that they’re targeting very high quality immigration. This sounds like a good idea and indeed those new immigrants contribute to the economy from the get-go but it also carries high risks. Highly competent and skilled immigrants become transient again when the economy takes a down turn or better opportunities come along. A lot of efforts are being made by the government to recruit Aussies for example, I doubt though that many Aussies will settle down in Singapore forever.

3. Related to the above, everywhere I went and had to deal with some official business (telecom, banking etc.) instead of the usual request to see my Employment Pass or Passport I was always asked to show my Singapore Identity Card. That was very new to me. It seems Singaporeans are getting more and more used to seeing foreigners are locals.

Overall it’s always nice to go back there. A kind of home away from home no matter where I live.

I signed up to Facebook quite a long time ago and initially spent a bit of time there looking around. Mainly when I was still in my previous job. Quite quickly though I lost interest and never used it again, I still get tons of crap email though like “fun”wall writing, hot potatos, drinks, purchase offers, group notifications and lots of other utterly useless stuff. Well, no more. The straw that finally did it was chatting with a friend online, getting invited to a party and then being told go look up the event details on his facebook profile instead of just telling me, it’s this Friday at Bar XYZ at 8pm, see you there. 20 clicks later and instead of checking out the event I landed in Account settings, deactivating my account and opting out of all emails.

Will anyone miss me from there? I’m sure that no. But I will definitely not miss those emails either, getting poked and receiving speed dating winks even though I didn’t sign up to any dating service. If someone I know wants to contact me they have my email, IM, blog and phone. If they can’t figure out those other contacts then I probably don’t want to hear from them anyway :-)

It’s that time of the year again. Hag sameach to everyone.

There’s a piano nutter who moved in right above me. How do I know? Well being a nutter myself (in other areas) it’s easy to recognize one ;-) As you know I’m trading the US markets from Bangkok which means I have an odd schedule of “working” from about 8:30pm till around 4am and then sleep till about 10 or 11am. As a side note, actually a lot of the work happens during the off market hours and after the market opens it’s mostly just executing and trying to remain mentally sane.

Anyways, I noticed several times recently that at 3am someone living above me starts practicing on their piano! But aside from the odd hour to do this sort of noisy activity, they’re now going at it again since 8am in the morning. Clearly, this person is at least a serious hobbyist. I wish I could tell from the quality of playing how serious, but I can’t.

Typically I don’t care about it at night or hear it in the morning but I’m now sick with a nasty flu and I didn’t trade last night so my normal schedule is a bit off and I’m easily annoyed by such things. I thought about walking up last night at 1am (s/he started early) to find out where it’s coming from and knock on the door but I was too crook. Hopefully when I get better I will continue to not care about it.

What a wacky action in the market yesterday. After a nice run since end of Feb the morning short trap whipsaw cost me a couple of Rs. I saw OONR7 had a similar experience in the morning. It’s just one of those days.

Looks like the Fed will do almost anything and everything to keep the market and financial firms from crashing. In the short term it doesn’t matter to me if it works and the market rises from here or falls some more. My long term and lazy ETF portfolios have suffered declines but with a time horizon of decades on those, and their size being proportionate to a retirement fund I treat major declines as opportunities to add to them rather than a cause for concern. Every quarter or so I split my trading income into 3 parts: 1. a part I withdraw to pay for day to day expenses, rent etc. 2. a part I keep as short term savings in cash (not just in USD) and 3. a part that goes back into long term savings, mainly ETF portfolio. The size of the parts depends largely on how well I did each quarter. I wish I had started the lazy portfolio earlier in life but lack of understanding and sometimes dry spells in income meant it took a while to sort those things out. Better late than never.