Dear Friends, Clients, Business Partners:

The past year has been an unusually busy year for my team and I. The easing COVID-19 measures has created a lot of opportunities for us, but has at times also took its toll on our health and wellbeing. I hope in this post-COVID climate you will be able to achieve the work-life balance that you always wanted—”self-care is not self-indulgence, but self-preservation”.

I attended the Million Dollar Round Table Annual Meeting in Boston in last June, and finally graduated from Masters of Science (Finance) from NUS Business School in December. It was indeed an arduous year, but I know that whatever I learnt would help the industry to grow further, and serve the ever-changing needs of our clients.

My biggest takeaway from the Masters Programme is Python Coding, which is something really foreign to me as an Arts student. Together with my student interns (yes I have some students working for me, and I would like more) we came up with a set of codes that will help to analyse any client’s investment portfolios (across any asset class) by looking at its statistics, like skewness, kurtosis, correlation, etc.

We also set up various client management systems via Tableau, Excel, etc so that I can work on my efficiency issues that some of you might have encountered in 2022.

COVID-19 disrupted several career development plans that I had previously envisioned. While I am lucky that most of these plans came to fruition in 2022, I would like to express my regret in being slower in responses during the past year. Studies, agency management, and work did make a slight dent on my wellbeing, and I will make a comeback this 2023!

I will be looking at expanding our agency in 2023. There are indeed many insurance agents and financial advisors in Singapore, but my team and I would like to stand out as a knowledge-based group that aims to equip our consultants with the best skills and henceforth uplift the image of the industry. Do link me up with anyone you feel that would benefit from this career in terms of personal development and work-life balance.

I started off this post by emphasising “work-life balance” because the past year made me realise that we only have so much time in our lifetime. It is therefore important that we spend some time off work to pursue our hobbies—spin classes, yoga, hiking, etc. Since the easing of COVID-19 restrictions I have been engaging friends and clients on heritage and nature trails around Singapore. Do join me if you can because it will be fun and enriching (I promise) and I don’t want to be the “transactional” kind of advisor that some of my colleagues might be! Please follow me on Telegram at https://t.me/duitnowsg. This is a Telegram Channel where I share daily news bits on finance and culture to nurture a learning community together.

The year of the rabbit will be a year of abundance and fertility for all. I would like to express my gratitude for you support thus far and I promise, 2024 will be a better one than before.

祝　阖家安康
Peace to your family,
Yang Sheng (Syamsul)