isaac chua

Investor, financial planner

[Ishika Rawat @Ishh_021]

🚨Anthropic just showed a 24-minute workshop on how to actually do prompts for Claude.

Taught by the people who built it.

Free. No registration. No paywall.

I've seen $300 courses that don't cover what they teach in the first 8 minutes.

Watch it and bookmark it now.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Zuckerberg's yacht once sailed 9,600 nautical miles, burned 676,800 liters of diesel, and waited two months in the South Pacific for him to show up.

He never came. It turned around and went home.

The vessel burns 1,165 gallons of diesel per hour at cruising speed. The carbon output of 630 cars running simultaneously. In nine months, it produced 5,300 tons of CO2, what 400 American households emit in an entire year.

Meta's sustainability report pledges net zero across their value chain by 2030. Zuckerberg's personal fleet (there's a $30 million support vessel that follows the yacht everywhere carrying submarines, helicopters, and water toys) produced more emissions on that single empty round trip than most people will generate in a lifetime.

The fuel tank holds 423,700 liters. A full fill costs about $230,000. Based on his 2024 wealth increase, Zuckerberg earns that in under 90 seconds.

Net zero is a line item in someone else's budget. It always was.

[Tesla Asia @Tesla_Asia]

Happy Spring Festival🧧
Year of the Horse — autonomous and prosperous 🐎⚡️

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Very telling

[Isabella Maria DeLuca @IsabellaMDeLuca]

This wins the internet today

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

Why I'm Voting For Donald Trump.

This is a sentence I didn't see myself writing not even a month ago.

I've been a disenfranchised, politically homeless voter since 2019.

As a former Democrat, I grew tired and insulted at their constant lying, gaslighting, and looking down on the voting base.

I felt like I wasn't really supporting a party - I was expected to vote for them because they are the 'good guys'. Not voting Democrat automatically made me a bad person, and forget it if I voted Republican. I'd be labeled a literal fascist.

Once I realized this was the core messaging of the party - not one of ideas or trying to make the country better, but one of virtue, I left.

Since, I felt like we were picking between the lesser of two evils - that an agent or administration that tirelessly worked for true, large scale, positive change did not exist.

Instead, we would have to be happy with a slow march towards certain collapse.

This is because I feel that the current state of politics and government is extremely inefficient, wasteful, and corrupt. It's a machine that chews up and spits out anything that attempts even the vaguest form of big change.

It makes almost everyone - especially as of late - bend to its will. This has resulted in increasingly terrible trends as a society.

A ballooning Federal budget. A $35 trillion deficit. Yearly interest payments that are larger than our defense budget. A cozy and corrupt relationship between industry and regulators. Awful health outcomes. Incredibly expensive healthcare, higher education, and housing. A spike in anxiety and depression. An obsession with limiting the speech of the people.

Almost everything important has been moving in the wrong direction, and I felt hopeless.

But, I became very excited at the thought of an RFK Jr. presidency in 2024. I thought RFK would have a legitimate chance of breaking open the system and bring new, fresh ideas to the table.

His controversial past didn't bother me, but what really impressed me was his willingness to have open, long form, complex dialogues about literally any topic.

I found him to be well researched and well read in many different areas, and I got a sense that he truly cared about the country. I didn't agree with everything, but I sensed his honesty and his well-meaning nature. I thought he would make a great leader.

This was in stark contrast to the usual, boring, borderline insulting caricatures that politicians are today.

Then, the Democrat party pushed him out. My disdain for the Democrats grew to an all-time high, but RFK running as an Independent took my excitement to a whole new level.

Then - he dropped out. Hopelessness returned.

However, something changed in the last few weeks as I've really started to analyze the current state of the race.

It started with me noticing that Trump was receiving the same legacy media treatment that Tesla and Elon Musk have traditionally received - both stories that I've followed very closely for a really long time.

If I could make a dollar for every false or misleading story about either of those two, I would be the world's first trillionaire (at least publicly known).

This made me realize that a lot of my preconceived notions about Trump were misplaced.

This was further reinforced by his long-form podcast run. I was able to listen to countless hours of Trump speak without the distortion lens from Legacy Media.

Legacy Media's obsession with lying painted an unfair picture in my brain of Trump, and once that became clear, my immediate dismissal of Trump faded.

He is far from perfect, but I do not think he's an evil figure.

For every fault that Trump does exude, I can identify the same thing on the other side that is far worse - namely the cover up of the Hunter Biden Laptop which was literal election interference, the awful measures during COVID that literally destroyed the lives of countless families, and the government's obsession with silencing dissent - a literal violation of the first amendment.

So now that both sides are on much more even footing, the following became clear.

First - not voting is not an option. Having the perfect candidate will never exist, and as a citizen of the country, it's my duty to vote for the options that are in front of me.

I can try to enact change while voting for what we have. Not doing so, by default, is a wasted chance to shape the future for the benefit of my family.

Second - given that I will vote, I need to analyze the most important variables to me and make a decision on which candidate is likeliest to execute on them.

For me, it's very simple - our current system is broken. Government is far too large, it wastes far too much, and it generates the exact opposite outcomes far too often.

The system needs a hammer.

I was extremely fortunate to work in environments where we got done way more than anyone else with way less than anyone else. It's possible. It's a matter of strong leadership, getting the right people, and empowering them to make it happen.

It can be done. It hurts and it's super hard, but it can be done. You can start at the government execution level, and then allow that culture to set the standard for the rest of government.

Once the people can see and feel that it can be done, candidates and the people will be inspired to get public servants in there that will make positive change like it's never been done before.

Now the question becomes - which of the two choices in front of me is more likely to execute against this vision?

If I look at the Harris campaign - I see not only more of the same, but more of the same on steroids.

I view the Harris campaign as an extension of the Biden campaign, which is currently being helmed by a person with beyond obvious cognitive challenges.

By default, this means that Biden is not really running much of anything in earnest - it's the system behind him that's running everything. The same system that I view as inept and corrupt.

Kamala has done nothing in my eyes to create any meaningful separation from this. If anything, with the endorsement from pro-war Neocons like Dick Chaney and others, all that tells me is that the Democrat party is the system party to the maximum.

I should not expect any meaningful change with the Democrats in charge. If anything, the current trend will likely get worse, with the military industrial complex growing stronger, the size of government growing bigger, and the continuation of more of the same.

In my eyes, this path leads to certain ruin, and furthering this by any meaningful distance makes no sense.

However, when I look at the Trump admin, I see a legitimate chance for real change.

I see a cohort of nontraditional members leading the party. RFK Jr. Tulsi Gabbard. Elon Musk. Vivek Ramaswamy. Nicole Shanahan.

For starters, this is a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and different moral viewpoints that have come together under one nontraditional candidate.

Each one represents ideals that I closely relate with, but set that aside.

By default, a nontraditional set of members, especially members like Elon Musk, will have a higher chance of enacting large scale, positive change vs the alternative.

The alternative is a guarantee of the continuation of more of the same.

I cannot vote for more of the same.

But I can vote for big change - even if the chance is small - because not voting increases the chance of more of the same continuing.

And so the question becomes - what are the chances that they cannot enact big change? What if it turns out that Trump's team does the opposite and they make everything way worse?

Yes - that's definitely a risk. But the reality is that the Democrats will for sure not enact large scale positive change. The chance of that is as close to 0% as you can get.

However small it may be, under Democrat leadership my feeling is that the path towards ruin will continue.

But with Trump, the chance of a massive reversal exists. And I am much more willing to vote for the chance to make it much better than to continue on the march towards ruin.

And in the worst case, I have faith in the American system to throw out a Trump administration if it truly does get out of hand, but I personally do not see that happening.

If it keeps going this way, we're leading ourselves to ruin. Why not give ourselves a chance instead?

[Farm Girl Carrie 👩‍🌾 @FarmGirlCarrie]

Kevin O’Leary, from Shark Tank, calls out the insanity of the Democrats.

This clip is absolute truth for all the CNN viewers watching. He explains that the leftist policies are destroying blue states and says they have become “uninvestable.”

https://t.co/Sk8551g9Pk

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

This is amazing 😂

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

As much as last night was an indictment of the Democratic Party for misleading party members and the country about the mental acuity and health of the president, the media deserve far more derision and scorn.

I and others were repeatedly criticized by the media for questioning the competency of the president. Among other false accusations, I was accused of spreading misleading videos which clearly showed Biden’s deterioration.

Do you remember the heavily excerpted and edited @POTUS Biden @60Minutes interview where the interviewer covered for the president by saying he was ‘very tired?’

@60Minutes knew.

The @nytimes knew.

@CNN knew.

@MSNBC knew.

Left wing media have had total and complete access to the president, his staff, and his administration.

They all knew, but they told you otherwise. They outright lied to you.

When Robert Hur, the special counsel who deposed the president, said that the president was not fit to stand trial and therefore chose not to bring charges, the media described him as a tool of the Republican Party and character assassinated him.

When the @WSJ recently published a several-thousand-word, carefully researched, front page piece on the president’s mental and physical health, it was described by left wing media as outright propaganda.

Now consider who has been feeding you propaganda.

A favored technique of some of the most evil leaders in history was to mislead the people by constantly repeating the Big Lie.

The Big Lie is so audacious that people accept it as truth because it is repeated so often that how can it be that something so important and material could be an outright falsehood?

In this case the Big Lie was our president’s fitness for office, let alone a second term.

A media organization is not supposed to be a branch of the Democratic Party.

The media have a profound obligation to tell the truth to the American people, particularly about something as critical for the country as the president’s mental and physical health.

People very close to me, my closest family and friends, trusted the media on Biden until the @CNN commentators finally owned up to the truth about Biden last night.

For months I have been accused by many friends and family of being misled by an @X-based ‘right wing echo chamber.’

The sad reality is that one of our most important institutions, the so-called ‘Fourth Estate,’ fourth only after the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners, has destroyed any remaining credibility it has.

Consider how your perception of @POTUS Biden and @realDonaldTrump has been manipulated.

The media can no longer save itself.

A suggestion. Rely on empirical data as much as possible. Listen to what someone actually said, rather than a headline summary or article about what someone said.

Get your news from people who have a track record of telling the truth, people who do so at significant personal cost like whistleblowers.

I follow broad constituencies on @X on multiple issues. That has led me closer to the truth. Citizen journalism has been a much more accurate representation of reality.

Thank you @elonmusk for saving this platform. It gives us a fighting chance to save our democracy.

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

Here's an edited version of the space by @Jason with @elonmusk @BillAckman and 2024 Democratic Presidential Candidate @deanbphillips.

This version reduces time by 30% and significantly boosts audio quality.

Link to original in replies. Thanks @DavidCarbutt_ for the work!

[Dhaval (Investment Books) @InvestmentBook1]

25. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a ...

[Watcher.Guru @WatcherGuru]

JUST IN: Thousands of users are canceling Disney+ subscriptions after Elon Musk told CEO Bob Iger to "go f*ck yourself" for blackmailing him over advertising on X.

[ANyONe Protocol @AnyoneFDN]

Based on the overwhelming requests from non crytpo natives on how to buy $ATOR, we have made this tutorial video that explains how to join the #atornauts

[Daniel Mahncke @MnkeDaniel]

The most legendary speech of Peter Lynch.

A lecture on the 10 most dangerous mistakes Investors make.

If you have never watched it, you must catch up on this:

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

20 Quality Stocks you should know

Monopolies and oligopolies outperform the market over time.

Here are 20 stocks which should beat the S&P 500:

[Walter Isaacson @WalterIsaacson]

Available for pre-order now:

https://t.co/bZ7lMG0VC7

[Brian Feroldi @BrianFeroldi]

How to analyze a:

▪️Balance Sheet
▪️Income Statement
▪️Cash Flow Statement

In less than 5 minutes:

[isaac chua @izchua]

@stats_feed @elonmusk Pls come to Malaysia soon! 🇲🇾

[Rayner Teo @Rayner_Teo]

If you are about to quit trading, read this…

When I was 20, the first book I read on investing was “Buffettology“.

It explains how the world’s richest investors become successful in trading, Warren Buffet selects companies to invest in.

I was fascinated by how a man could be so much wealthy by simply picking the right stocks to hold for the long run. Who wouldn’t?

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗿

After reading Buffettology, I was hooked.

I started researching all I could to make myself a great investor.

I read books on value investing and fundamental analysis.

Armed with my newfound knowledge, I was ready to pounce on the markets.

The first stock I bought was Sembcorp Marine in 2009 because it had solid fundamentals, and the markets were recovering.

I got long at $3.28 and told myself to hold this stock till the price doubled!

5 days later, I bailed out at $3.08. What a chicken I was.

Then I did a short reflection and concluded that it was my emotions that trigger this action of mine.

Not giving up just yet and with the markets making a bull run, I knew I had to get back into the game.

Being naive and ambitious I did more fundamental research and bought more companies, with margin.

Here’s what I bought…

I went long Noble Group, Keppel Land and Sembcorp Marine with an initial outlay of $20,000.

In 2 months, I was up close to $10,000.

But me being a fundamentalist, trying to emulate Warren Buffet to hold these stocks for the next 30 years, I held on.

At this point, I was feeling like a champion, with a knack for picking stocks.

Even my broker was commenting that everything I touched turned to gold.

2 weeks later, my unrealized profits of $10,000 vaporize into smoke. The Euro Debt crisis had hit the markets.

Now, I had nothing to show for it but a stench of bitterness.

One moment I was feeling like Rock Balboa, the next I was like Luke Skywalker when he realized Darth Vadar was his father.

"I am a fool. What was I thinking?!"

Those phrases kept playing in my head over the next few weeks.

Eventually, I bailed out of all my positions when the price went further against me. I just couldn’t bear the pain anymore.

A few months later after recovering from this mental trauma, I started reflecting once more. What did I do wrong?

After much brainstorming, I realized I had no plan for exits. So this led me to further research on stop loss, entries, and exits.

If you Google that long enough, forex trading websites would start appearing on your monitor.

And that’s how I entered the trading arena…

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿

So after my failed attempt at being an investor, I figured being a trader would better suit me.

I was immediately drawn to the fanciful charts and colourful indicators that beautify my screens. This beats crunching numbers and financial statements.

In a matter of days, I find myself drawn to trading more and more. It became my passion whereby I was spending more than 10 hours a day in front of the screen.

Everything started to make sense and trading didn’t seem that difficult.

All I needed was:

1) A trading strategy
2) Risk management

And it could be found on trading forums, for free!

Why would I want to invest in a stock for years when I can buy and sell currencies in minutes!

Easy money is ahead of me, all I need to do is click my mouse.

It was on Babypips where I was first exposed to a trading strategy.

I was looking for anything interesting and chance upon a thread teaching new traders like me how to trade.

The thread owner had a huge following and traders were worshiping him like a Demi-god.

Since I was new to trading and so many traders can’t be wrong, I followed him religiously as well.

𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗕𝗮𝗻𝗱

My first trading strategy was using Bollinger bands to buy low and sell high, and take profit at the opposite end of the bands.

I thought this was the Holy Grail!

Every chart that was posted made money.

But it was only after I traded it myself did I realize that there was more than meets the eye.

I traded this for 6 months and lost money. I concluded this wasn’t going anywhere and looked for another strategy.

Now...

Another trading strategy I was trading was harmonic patterns.

𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗰 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗻𝘀

The Harmonic Trading Strategy took me 6 months to figure out. I thought to myself that the more complex a strategy is, the more powerful it will be. How silly I was.

In essence, harmonic patterns are drawn by using the confluence of Fibonacci ratios and extensions. They have a few variations of harmonic patterns, like Gartley, Bat, Crab etc.

Personally, I find harmonic patterns to be the most beautiful thing on my charts. But I was in this business to make money and not draw beautiful patterns.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘁𝗵

Numbers don’t lie. And the reality was that I was a losing trader despite learning so many trading strategies.

(I had a drawdown of 50% after 3 years of trading)

From indicators to raw price action to harmonic patterns. Just name it, I probably would have tried it.

At this point, most traders would have thrown in the towel.

I mean, who would continue trading after spending thousands of hours at it only to lose more money than he started. It’s a losing proposition!

But the stubborn me refuses to give up, always believing that I am one step closer each day.

And know what’s the funny thing? I graduated with first-class honours but failed at trading.

So it is true that even if you have a degree, you may not be a profitable trader.

This had to be my darkest days in trading when the statistics stared right into my face.

I followed my trading plan religiously and adhere to my money management, but still, it wasn’t enough.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗜 𝗱𝗼?

When I graduated from university I knew there was only one career path for me, proprietary trading.

During one of the interviews, the interviewer made a statement that hit me hard.

He said, “If you’ve been trading your strategy for the last 1 year but it’s not making you money, you better find a new strategy”.

That was a wake-up call for me.

It doesn’t make sense to stick to the same strategy throughout the years, firmly believing you have an edge when clearly the result speaks otherwise.

I knew I had to let it go.

Shortly after I was accepted into their proprietary trading firm, my journey to professional trading began.

I first started out scalping the futures market and doing arbitrage across inter-related markets.

Within 6 months I knew it was not something for me as I wasn’t comfortable with the psychological aspect of scalping.

Albert Einstein said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results”.

It has been 4 years now and whatever trading strategies that I attempted to trade the markets clearly weren’t working. I had to do something about it before the fire in me dies out…

Despite trying out so many trading strategies and none seems to work, there were important lessons behind it that would make me the trader I am.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁

There is one quote that kept propelling me forward and to be open to constant learning.

There is no such thing as failure, only feedback.

After 4 years of trying out different trading strategies, I’ve gathered feedback to know what works and what doesn’t.

At the same time, I learned more about myself as a trader and started having an idea of what kind of trading strategy would suit my personality.

Here are some of the traits I learned about myself:

1) I wanted to be in the markets when it is trending strongly

2) I wanted to be systematic with less room for discretion

3) I can accept being wrong most of the time

4) I am patient and disciplined

When I understood my trading psychology better, that’s when I had an X-Ray vision to see which trading strategies that would fit my personality.

It is not long later that I came across, trend following.

Initially, my first impression of Trend Following was simply trading with the trend.

But as I read more books and studied research papers, I realized it is much more than that.

As a trend follower, there are 5 distinct traits that make it stand out from the crowd

The 5 traits are:

1) Trend follower does not predict where the market is heading

2) Trend follower has low winning %

3) Trend follower has no profit targets

4) Trend follower trades all markets

5) Trend follower buys high and sell low

After being a losing trader for 4 years, it took me 6 months to make back everything and more.

It felt darn good when I saw my account back into the green and growing after what seemed like forever.

To me, it is not the end but the beginning of a life-long career in trading.

If you’re reading this and struggling to be a profitable trader, then I want to tell you that it can be done.

Yes, the journey is tough, the obstacles are huge and the heat is on. But you are not powerless.

You have a mighty weapon called discipline and a protective shield called perseverance which will see you through the fire and the storm.

You can do it!

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Gosh this is such a good thread. Brian does a good job below of summarizing some big ideas in investing. But more subtilely, it presents the big issues we all face as investors. It’s obviously easier to read than to implement - but it’s important to understand the key point here:

We are all our worst enemies!

Psychology ultimately taxes our returns more than ANYTHING else. Learning to stop blaming others, focus on what you can control and staying disciplined in the face of volatility clearly pays off long term.

Definitely something to aspire to…