Think Different

Finance and Technology

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 19:06:56 +0800

Finance and Technology

The terms, finance and technology are are analogous in our daily lives. While finance has existed since ancient times (by way of barter trade or using specific currencies to trade for necessities), technology pickup has been a more recent event, comparatively.

The challenge or complication comes when both of the two broad fields are married together to become “Fintech”. The term has been loosely used these days wherein anything that has to do with them together would be considered Fintech.

Small Businesses and Their Potentials

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0800

Background

While the COVID-19 pandemic ranges on (from the initial variant to the widely reported Delta variant), this has introduce a tectonic shift in the way how people work while causing an upheaval in the business world.

While large businesses continue to enjoy access to capital to stay afloat, small businesses tend to face further challenges, though government assistance (if any) may provide temporary reprieve.

Aside from that, employment rate soared and tapered off, though still remain alleviated, with a lot of people turning towards the gig economy (via e-hailing driver or food delivery) in order to sustain their lives.

Looking at Fund Investing (Part 2)

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 10:19:07 +0800

This is a continuation of the previous post done here.

After the previous post that described at Public Enterprises Bond Fund, this post would be dedicated to the brief review of Public Healthcare-Global Equity Fund, as I recently had the opportunity to do so.

Public Healthcare-Global Equity Fund is an equity mutual fund that invests in malaysia and other various countries. While the exposure would be primarily on equities (not limited to Malaysia but also other countries), the key selling point would be the targeted healthcare exposure of at least 30%. Main reason would be due to the current COVID-19 pandemic which gives rise to the valuation of healthcare related stocks and companies that are trying hard to engineer a vaccine for all. Other key reasons are increasing life expectancy and increased demand for healthcare quality.

Looking at Fund Investing (Part 1)

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 06:58:29 +0800

In this low interest rate environment due to COVID-19 externalities, it has been a tough year for investors. In the attempt to maintain the desired returns, investors are being forced to venture into riskier assets. This is on top of the economic hardships that may be experienced by individuals. In other words, on top of being worried on retrenchment, people may be worried as well on how to achieve Financial Independence, Retire Early.

After a Long Hiatus

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 11:15:04 +0800

It has been a year and a half since my last post! It has been an interesting one-and-a-half year from deciding to hike in the Annapurna mountain ranges to passing the Level 1 CFA examination. While development may have taken a backseat due to shift of focus to examinations, the desire to continue to keep abreast of tech, through Hacker News and reading various tech sites and blogs, never waned.

Therefore, hopeful to pen down musings garnered so far, from finance and tech to thoughts and developments.

My Experience As A Developer So Far

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0800

The Lookback

As I took a stroll down the memory lane on how I have developed my software programming skills, the difference has been stark indeed. Back in those days, languages such as Assembly, basic C, to slightly more complex languages such as Java and Matlab, are the prime languages learnt. However, currently, namely Ruby, via Ruby on Rails and Javascript, via EmberJS are my main stack. Choice of programming languages has been largely driven by the framework that goes along with it.

Supply & Demand and Insanity

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Supply & Demand and Insanity

Introduction

In this day and age, it is interesting to see how supply and demand curves work, from both tangible and non-tangible perspective. From tangible goods like consumables to non-tangible ones like money supply or even virtual currencies, such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP) or others. Such curves drive both real and fictitious trades; in other words, activities that can benefit the economy as a whole and the latter, pure speculative.

Human Potential

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 22:27:44 +0800

The human mind is something fascinating. If need be, it can be altered to learn new skills, cultures, perspective and way of thinking. If used properly, it can help to bring out latent potentials in people.

Given how society works nowadays, it is not surprising to see people being complacent and barely set foot outside their comfort zone. The notion of going through life by waking up, working to enrich others by trading one own’s time and repeat, rewires one’s mind to conform to a system and this makes the mind, comfortable. Shake it up and immediate chaos happens.

Investing in United States of America

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 22:27:44 +0800

Background

Occasionally, I would be getting queries from how do one open an account to invest in US to which counter to buy. As I have no interest in sharing which counter to buy, I am more than happy to share how does one start off investing there.

Before that, lets understand the motivation behind investing in US. Why would one invest in US when he or she can invest in Malaysia or Singapore for that matter?

Active and Passive Investing

Sun, 26 Mar 2017 22:27:44 +0800

In the world of investments, there are several areas of consideration to account for, prior to making the jump (i.e. forking out money and making it work for us). The main ones are both risks that one is willing to take and desired returns. Another aspect of the consideration that has been propping up in recent times is active investing versus passive investing.

Active investing has been the norm for most markets around the world, including US. This involves active buy-sell by investors or fund managers to exploit the price movement between what market is currently expecting compared to the securities’ current price. Generally, investors can perform this via direct investing in equities or via funds (i.e. mutual fund / unit trust / collective investment scheme).

Discomfort Zone

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 22:27:44 +0800

Background

One of the commonly used terms today, would be comfort zone. When one is in his or her comfort zone, one feels at ease and safe. Psychologically, one is inclined to stay at such state and not to change to a different state that would affect him or herself, at that point of time. Willpower is required to tell the mind to move out of it.

Complication

Naturally, when one is at ease and one’s mental state wants to remain status quo for the longest possible time, results will be mediocre, in everything done. Then, when the time comes for one to evaluate how one’s life has progressed in the past years, reality hits hard:

Savings Account in Malaysia

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 21:17:48 +0800

Background

Most Malaysians, at the very least, own one savings account. According to World Bank, 80.7% of Malaysians of the age 15 and above, have accounts in Financial Institution in year 2014. When compared to year 2011, it was only at 66.2%.

On an individual basis, one may have the following accounts:

Savings Account
Fixed Deposit Account
Investment Account

As the focus would be in Savings Account, the complication comes when one is being bombarded by so many types of it. From Regular Savings Account to Basic Savings Accounts and other Youth Savings Accounts, Elderly Savings Accounts or even Branded Savings Accounts, it is no surprise that one would be confused with such.

Hello Hugo

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 01:44:56 +0800

It is high-time now to update this site and now; instead of using Jekyll as the static site generator, this site is now using Hugo instead!

====== To ======

The page generation speed for Hugo is insanely fast as it is built with Go and it has a lot of themes that goes hand-in-hand with your site’s intent.

Highly recommended indeed and back to writing!

The Art of Learning

Sun, 01 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Musings of Learning

It is often said that one should never stop learning and the day when one stops learning is when he or she embraces failure or he or she is buried six-feet under. While there are so many things to learn, everyone ought to be selective on what to learn as well.

Dreams and Reality

Wed, 30 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Desire

It has always been one’s desire in order to achieve his or her goals. As per Abraham Maslow, self-actualisation sits at the top of the hierarchy. The main criteria in order for oneself to achieve self-actualisation would be:

Identify one’s potentials
Live them out
Master them

Gold Rush

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

An Introduction

Gold rush has always been in existent since the early 19th century. During those times, its definition leaned towards a period of feverish migration of workers to an area that has had a dramatic discovery of gold deposits. Since then, things have changed. Our society is gaining awareness that the value of fiat money depreciates over time and they have been on the bandwagon to search for investment vehicles with high yield, many of which perceived gold as one of the suitable investment vehicle.

Of Wants and Could Nots

Mon, 27 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Background

I have gotten the opportunity to talk to so many wonderful individuals (be it friends or families or strangers) throughout my entire life thus far and I notice an interesting trait from most of them:

I want to be successful in this field but I couldn’t afford to spend time in learning it because [insert your own imaginations here].

It baffles me, really.

Principles of Value Investing

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Intelligent Investor is definitely one of the best book for all value investors out there. It combines business philosophy, rationalization and mathematics to argue on the latent potential of value investing by Benjamin Graham.

Investing, according to Graham, consists equally of three elements:

A company must be analysed thoroughly along with the soundess of its underlying business before buying its stock
One must deliberately protect oneself against serious losses

Back From the Ashes

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Unconventional.co is now back online, powered by both Openshift and Octopress. Stay tuned for more updates!

The Renewal

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

This post summarises on the setup of Octopress on Openshift which utilizes Greyshade theme as per Unconventional.co.

As I have mentioned in my previous post, Unconventional.co is alive and kicking! Previously, it is hosted on Heroku and powered by Obtvse. After Heroku added a 10k rows of DB limit for its Development box, I thought it was time to explore on another Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and hopefully, I do not need to change to another service. Not to mention, I still got a lot to learn in terms of configuring a database (be it mysql or postgresql) to match it with a particular PaaS’ offering (believe me, it is a pain in the a$$). Thus, having a blog that requires database configuration for a particular PaaS and maintenance is a hassle and I would much prefer to spend time to pen down ideas than to try to configure a database that works on one PaaS but does not work on another.

I have been working on Openshift for a fair bit and its pricing for its FreeShift is definitely attractive to most PaaS seekers out there (myself included). On the other hand, enlightenment dawns upon myself when I stumbled upon Octopress. Without the need to manage database for blogging and also utilizing the hacker way of publishing via git push to push updates to the server.

There are three parts:

Setup an Openshift Account
Setup Octopress and Link to Openshift
Install Greyshade Theme

I would like to credit the deployment of Octopress to Openshift write-up to Shellcode and the Greyshade theme design to Shashank Mehta.

And so, it begins…

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Author

As an enthusiast in both investment & business and technology, Bryan spends most of his time studying the fundamentals of a company, learning the rungs of bootstrapping in entrepreneurship, and discovering new web application technologies.

For more info about his portfolio, visit his website. He also shares his thoughts via his blog. He also shares his life’s snapshot through this url. On the personal note, he enjoys dancing, performs outdoor activities, and appreciates good musics.

Books

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Think Different

Finance and Technology

Finance and Technology

Small Businesses and Their Potentials

Background

Looking at Fund Investing (Part 2)

Looking at Fund Investing (Part 1)

After a Long Hiatus

My Experience As A Developer So Far

The Lookback

Supply & Demand and Insanity

Supply & Demand and Insanity

Introduction

Human Potential

Investing in United States of America

Active and Passive Investing

Discomfort Zone

Background

Complication

Savings Account in Malaysia

Background

Hello Hugo

The Art of Learning

Musings of Learning

Dreams and Reality

The Desire

Gold Rush

An Introduction

Of Wants and Could Nots

Background

Principles of Value Investing

Back From the Ashes

The Renewal

Introduction

About

The Author

Books

Bryan’s Bookshelf