Founder, Steady Compounding. Author, The Lunch Break Investor. Businesses strong enough to do the heavy lifting, so I can get on with living.
Joined October 2020
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OpenAI ramping up its ad team with hires from Meta and Google.
From The Information:
"The senior ranks are sprinkled with former salespeople from Meta and its competitors, such as Vijaye Raji, who spent 10 years at Meta before becoming chief technology officer of OpenAI applications a year ago. Mitch Pilar, a 12-year Google veteran, and Andy Sinn, who spent about a decade at Meta, joined in July to sell ads to brands and agencies in Australia and New Zealand. And in late September, Mark Bambury, who spent a dozen years at Roblox and X, became OpenAI’s head of ads for Europe, the Middle East and Africa."
Netflix says US churn improved this quarter.
So why swap its chief content officer five days before earnings?
My read on Netflix Q3, and what would change my mind: steadycompounding.com/invest…
Thomas Chua retweeted
【Selling Well!】
「The Lunch Break Investor: Identify winning stocks, build your wealth, and reclaim your time」
Author：Chua, Thomas
Publisher：Harriman House
Publication date：August 18, 2026
amazon.com/dp/1804091510?tag…
Whenever a company buys back shares, it puts a positive spin on it.
"We returned a record amount to shareholders."
That says nothing about whether the buyback was accretive or value-destroying. A lot of that depends on the price.
Many management teams make the same mistake as individual investors. They buy back shares while the stock is rising and freeze when it falls. But the discounts usually only show up when things are bad.
Buffett saw the same pattern in his 1999 letter.
In the mid-1970s, when buybacks made obvious sense, he wrote that it was "virtually screaming at managements, but few responded."
By 1999, near the dot-com peak, everyone was doing them.
berkshirehathaway.com/letter…
A lot of people wonder what financial independence actually is, or whether there's a rule of thumb for it.
I think JL Collins has a pretty interesting way of looking at it. It's not just the size of your portfolio. It's also how much you spend, and whether your portfolio can grow faster than that spending after inflation.
"One of the beauties of being financially independent is that by definition, you have enough money such that the power of compounding is greater than the opportunity cost of what you spend. Once you have your F-You Money, all you need do is make sure you continue to reinvest to outpace inflation and keep your spending below the level your stash can replenish."
JL Collins, The Simple Path to Wealth
I wasn’t sure how my first book talk outside Singapore would go.
Then on Saturday in KL, all 50 seats were taken and people stood along the side for the whole hour.
Very grateful to everyone who came, and to HY Tan and Guan of doitduit, who prepared the great questions and spread the word.
Thanks also to Pansing for keeping the table stocked, and Tsutaya Bukit Jalil for the room.
The book: steadycompounding.com/book
I was 13 when the red envelope showed up.
Every day, I’d check the letterbox downstairs—flyers, McDonald’s coupons, the usual. But a red one? That was different.
A few days later, the power got shut off.
So I started going to the library 10 minutes away. Easy reads first, then biographies, then investing.
@khoohsuchuang got the whole story out of me on the Do More podcast.
Catch it here: youtube.com/watch?v=MmFySwV4…
Twenty years of grilling CEOs at Bloomberg, Reuters and BFM. Today it was my turn.
An hour with Khoo Hsu Chuang in his KL studio for Do More.
KL, see you tomorrow at the book talk. Tsutaya Books, Pavilion Bukit Jalil, 2pm, with HY Tan and Guan.
Bruce Greenwald values a business in three layers:
- What it would cost to rebuild the assets
- What the moat earns today
- What growth adds inside that moat
“As we have said, value investors consider the three sources of intrinsic value to be the reproduction cost of the company’s assets, the current earnings power of any franchise, and the value of its earnings growth within that franchise.”
Bruce Greenwald
Take care of the downside and the upside will take care of itself.
“I don’t buy more of the ones I can make the most money on. I buy more of the ones that I can’t lose money on.”
Joel Greenblatt in Richer, Wiser, Happier.
Listening to Zuck and Wang’s interview on Cheeky Pint, it sounds like they’re having a lot of fun building Muse and with working together.
Howard Marks, Mastering the Market Cycle:
“‘What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end’ tells you 80% of what you have to know about market cycles and their impact. Warren Buffett has said much the same thing even more concisely: ‘First the innovator, then the imitator, then the idiot.’”
Can't believe this is happening next week!
I'll be at Tsutaya Bookstore Bukit Jalil, on 17 Oct 2pm to 3pm with HY Tan and Guan of doitduit
Looking forward to catching you guys at Kuala Lumpur.
For new investors, it’s not just a chance to buy at lower prices... it’s a chance to learn how you react when markets get choppy. Better to discover that early than later, when a mistake can cost you far more.
“Ironically, a crash at the beginning of your investing life is a gift. In fact, any pullback in stock prices is a gift while you are in the process of accumulating your wealth.”
JL Collins, The Simple Path to Wealth
