Hi friends,

Welcome to my 2nd ever monthly email, in this segment called “Michael’s Monthly Musings”. If you missed my 1st monthly newsletter (which explains the point of this newsletter), please refer here.

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Personally, a lot of exciting things have happened in the last month for me, and I’m thankful for all the friends, family, and readers of this newsletter for the support and replies via email I got from my last newsletter. We’re nearly at 100 email readers! Feel free to share this with friends who may find this interesting or may want to meet/know me.

But first I wanted to talk about something this month that has been on my mind again.

🧑‍🏫 Just a few words on mentors…

Mentors are something I speak a lot about. At least a few years ago, when I mentioned to people I had a mentor, I often raised eyebrows. It just sounds a bit weird. I myself confess to thinking the same way until I had a mentor myself.

When I describe the relationship I have with my first mentor, Albert Hung (Co-founder and Investment Chairman of Australian Eagle Asset Management), I often think back to how fortunate I had been to encounter him in my 3rd year of university. I also realised a lot of people traverse life without a “mentor” of any kind, even as supposedly fully fledged adults in their 40s and 50s.

Now I am not saying that everybody needs a mentor, but I do not see the downside of having a good one. So why not?

There is often a lot of noise that one receives as a university student, and I myself received a lot from my surroundings. Whether from friends or family or observers telling me how to live my life. Sometimes the feedback was helpful, and sometimes it wasn’t. For me personally, I find having a “designated mentor” helpful for screening out a lot of noise. Especially if he/she is able to be objective, loving, and honest.

Now of course, I am not saying my one mentor, will have the answer to everything. In fact, more often than not I’ve found he does not really give me many answers. But I think that’s the point. The mentor is more there to hold you accountable to things, and to be a “second filter” when screening noise/signal to making big trajectory altering decisions.

For me, that was making the pivot from a career in audit, to a career in funds management. To this day, I still think this was one of my best decisions I’ve ever made for myself personally, and I have my mentor to thank a great deal for the guidance there. Of course he’s not the only person who helped me in this decision (some friends and family were just as instrumental), but Albert was super important to even make me consider seriously the idea of perhaps breaking into the hedge funds industry (and he also did let me intern unpaid at his fund).

And over the years I’ve also come to the realisation that Albert is not the best at answering all the questions I have. Part of it is just that we are in different life stages, and so I’ve begun to appreciate more and more the idea of a “moat of mentors” instead of a “single mentor”. Over the last 2 years, I’ve recognised other people I trust, with whom I’ve also asked to be my mentor in other areas of life. I think this is something that I think goes unappreciated. The collective wisdom of the 4 mentors I currently lean to, with diverse experiences, has in many ways helped me make better quality decisions in many aspects of my life I would like to think.

It’s often hard to know though whether many of my decisions I make are high quality in the present, and can only be assessed in hindsight, but whilst I may not be able to measure it, I am certain it has been an incremental positive for me.

Having seen the benefits of how one mentor, but also a group of mentors can have, I encourage my readers (if they do not already have a mentor, or have even considered this idea) to research and assess whether having a mentor could be right for you.

As it relates to more of the practicalities of mentors, I would say you should find somebody you trust, who can be objective, but also honest with you. If you can, you should provide value to the mentor first, before asking for value from them. It should be somebody you admire and with whom you think will make you the best version of yourself. I personally used Linkedin (as a potential way to find mentors at times), but other settings like church, work, etc can work too. People have different ways of thinking about their mentors, but I tend to think about them in different “roles” (e.g. careers, spiritual, personal development, etc) and they can overlap. There should also be some structure, e.g. I meet up with my mentors on a quarterly basis, and also document my discussions with them in One Note.

That’s all I’ll ramble about on mentors.

To conclude for now…

Please do hit <reply> to this email if you have anything to add / any questions. I quite enjoy replying to comments/emails as a source of procrastination. Please share this email with others if you found it value-adding.

Have a great next month!

Michael

🙏 Some of my favourite memories from Feb 2022

• City Bible Forum’s Headstart Program has officially started, which is a program by young workers and for young workers to wrestle with the everyday issues that we face as Christians. This program happens on Monday nights during school terms (usually). Been encouraged to see new faces.

• Had a friend’s “bachelor” party, where we ended up exploring Camden and Warragamba Dam. It was actually so fun and educational! Did you know ~80% of wider Sydney’s water supply comes from this dam?

• Caught up with a friend (with whom I had not seen in ~6 years) who co-founded his own smart locker business and I’ve been really excited to see where he goes next in 2022 with the start up. Check out YellowBox here.

• Received my Bulb tokens! A special shout out to Ronson and his team for the tireless efforts they’ve been putting to build a crypto based blogging platform of the future, Bulb. I’m invested personally.

• Getting a housewarming gift for a friend (who bought a new apartment in Parramatta), when shopping at Ikea in Rhodes. Pretty happy with this present I have chosen with some help!

• Finally paid for an annual Netflix subscription (never had Netflix until now, and only had Disney Plus)! Totally using my time wisely now that I have my CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) designation…

• Not technically in Feb 2022 (rather in Mar 2022), but at time of writing this newsletter I had my first “piano lesson” at the Conservatorium in the longest time! Loved it and I didn’t make a complete fool of myself? I was rated 11/10 today! I’ll take that. 😀

• In talks to run a personal finance workshop at 2 different high schools in Sydney (further details to be announced soon! And no this is outside of Sydney Science College).

🚀 Some public announcements for Feb 2022

Firstly, from Jan 2022, I want to first say thank you to those who tuned in for the 2 personal finance workshops I ran at Atlas Academia (one for high schoolers and one for recent high school graduates). I want to express my thanks to Anthony and Wayne for giving me the opportunity to share thoughts on budgeting and saving money. Turn out was great, having 10+ attend for each of the 2 zoom calls. For a Sunday night, to attract high schoolers, not bad at all.

(1) This is close to my heart, but I am speaking at my church, Macquarie Baptist Church on you guessed it... personal finance! A topic that I care deeply about, and importantly how to think through some of the common ways we use money (giving, saving, spending and investing) as a Christian.

Often a topic that seems taboo with Christians... But I want to explore it because it's necessary.

This will be LIVE PHYSICALLY at Macquarie Baptist Church's activity centre on Sun, 20 March 2022 at 11am-1pm. NO ZOOM unfortunately. Would love to see a few friends come! Or DM me if interested to find out more. Open invitation to all! 😀

Formal details of the event here.

(2) Something else exciting, is I will be one of the final panel judges for the Emerging Market Stock Pitch Competition coming in Mar 2022. There are a group of 4 universities with students in teams around the world (not JUST Australia!) pitching a stock idea from the MSCI emerging market index with a AU$600 prize. Looking forward to this.

See link here.

(3) Speaking at the UNSW Investing 4 Charity TA Introduction Event tomorrow. Like I have committed to doing every year since I graduated from UNSW, I have been thankful to be doing a guest talk to introduce myself and welcome the trainee analysts for the UNSW I4C society at the start of every year. Looking forward to meeting the new TAs tomorrow. Also will be my first time stepping onto UNSW campus in a long time to give a “physical” talk.