To The Moon

Introduction

Hello to everyone reading this blog! I’m the The Wonton Investor and this is gonna be my first blog post. In case you haven’t read my bio, I am a Singaporean student studying Computer Science who loves tech, finance, and, of course, wontons. I’m here to share my investing journey and the lessons I’ve learnt over the past 4 years of investing, and also personal finance tips on how I gather capital for investments as a uni student! I have invested across many types of financial instruments, including stocks, t-bills, crypto, bonds, options, NFTs - you name it, I’ve tried it! I have also tried many things from building my own startup/online businesses to doing Venture Capital and Software Engineering internships.

This will be my first blog entry as The Wonton Investor, and I wanna start it off with talking about my personal journey of how I hit $100K net worth while still being a uni student. And I’m not gonna beat around the bush, the answer is through…you guessed it…drumrolls please…investing! And in this first entry, I’m just gonna talk about very brief details of how I did it, and how you can get started too! Hopefully, this will also serve as an inspiration for other uni students out there, and hopefully yall can see that it is not an impossible feat.

As a Gen Z, I understand the struggle many of us face with reading articles more than 10 mins long, so I will try to keep each blog entry short and straight to the point 😆though since this is the intro it may take a bit longer. Through this blog, I hope to make investing less intimidating and more relatable for uni students like me!

The Biggest Hurdle

The biggest hurdle in investing, as many have said before, is getting started. I mean, the idea of throwing REAL money into an online chart that randomly goes up or down must be really daunting especially for poor uni students like us, right?

Well, not for me, because I started investing in the middle of the whole meme stock frenzy back in 2021. My thoughts when I made my first deposit of $10k for Gamestop was, “once i hit $10k profits from this, i’m gonna cash out and buy myself a nice watch (Seiko Presage, for you watch nerds out there. and no, i had no model in mind, i was gonna go shopping after i cashed out) and reinvest the remaining”

And guess what? That day never came 🥴 My glorious Seiko Presage is still sitting in a Seiko shop waiting for me till this day 😔 And yes, my portfolio saw a decline of over 50% over the next year or so when all the meme stocks started crashing. That was also when I decided that I was gonna start investing for real, learn the proper ropes, and make back all the money I’ve lost.

So why am i telling you all this? I’m not trying to prove a point that I can yolo better than you; my point is, the biggest hurdle is starting. and it doesn’t matter how you start. you can start conservatively, starting maybe from as little as $500 and slowly increasing your portfolio size as you grow more confident, or you can be like me and yolo a sum of $10k - it doesn’t matter. the biggest hurdle is making that deposit, and once you do it, it will feel like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulder.

But before any of you heed this advice and drop money into brokers, I implore you to read the next part first.

My Personal Investment Trilogy

When it comes to investing, most people suggest reading books before you start. While I second this, I believe my approach to investing for beginners is slightly different. Most people suggest reading books like The Intelligent Investor or going to Investopedia and learning about the different securities available on the public market.

Don’t get me wrong - it is important to know what kinda securities you’re dealing with, and definitely important to understand the underlying risks surrounding each of them. But I don’t think that is enough to get you started. Think of it this way - familiarising yourself with the types of instruments there are and all the investing jargon out there is like learning the language of investments, but just like knowing English doesn’t automatically make you a good writer, memorising the whole of Investopedia won’t automatically make you invest well.

Now I hear you asking “okay so what should I do then?” - great question. I believe that just like how writers have to get in the mood for creativity, investors should also harbour the “investing mindset” when making investments. This means learning the correct psychology behind how and when to make investments. To do this, I am going to introduce you to my personal investing trilogy - a series of 3 short books that will get you started on acquiring the mindset that helps you with your decision making process:

The Psychology of Money - Morgan Housel

One Up Wall Street - Peter Lynch

The Outsiders - William Thorndlike

And don’t worry - for yall reading haters out there, I have taken notes while reading these books and will be releasing book summaries soon! Though I don’t suggest reading summaries because that’s what I started out doing; while the lessons learnt are the same, you miss out on the examples given in the books when you read summaries. The examples are what give meaning to the lessons itself, so I would highly suggest still reading the books if you can! But that being said, I will try my best to do as comprehensive of a summary as I can.

The Journey From $0-$100K

I’m guessing this part of the blog is the reason why yall are even reading this entry in the first place, so lemme jump straight to the point. Since this is an intro post, I will do a brief timeline of what I did to hit $100K, and I will go more into details over a multi-part post in future.

From O Levels to A levels

The journey from $0-$100K was not easy, and definitely took up a lot of my time. I started working after O levels (16 years old), and continued to do part-time jobs throughout my whole JC life. I ended O levels with about $400 to my bank account (I was not the best at saving, but I did get better at it during JC I promise), so I was really not the brightest prospect for someone who would end up giving finance advice. But fast-forward to post A Levels, my bank account had hit around $15K (18 years old). As I was under 18, this was done purely without any investments, just saving and working.

Before Uni Started

After A Levels, I had to go serve NS (for non-Singaporean readers, NS is National Service, a 2 year mandatory army conscription all guys have to go through), which gave me an allowance of about $700 a month. NS was also the time I picked up investing (as with many other Singaporean guys 💀💀) and where I met a few other friends who were into finance in general. The good thing about NS was that it also gave me enough time to read a lot, which was also where I started learning more about the stock market.

And I must say, during my time in NS I made 2 very foolish financial decisions. First was yolo-ing into Gamestop, and the second was buying an endowment plan thinking it was a better alternative to a savings account. For those who don’t know what the different financial plans are (endowment, ILP, fixed deposits, etc), I will get into more details in future posts. For now, just know that it was a stupid decision on my part. This endowment plan basically set me behind by $500 a month, all the way until I graduate uni. So yes, i still have to put up with this for 2 more years. Anyway, back to the topic on investing.

Like I mentioned earlier, I lost over 50% of my portfolio before uni, so this was definitely not a very good time for my portfolio. While NS only paid $700 a month, I hustled very hard before uni, working about 4-5 jobs (yes I was crazy). This put the gross total of money I’ve earned from finish O levels till then at about $60K - but with the decline in my stocks portfolio it was more like $45K in real value so… (only half of my portfolio was in stocks)

If you’re still reading here, you must be thinking that I was just an absolute goon and that I shouldn’t be giving investing advice. And I must say that you’re right. The reason I started this blog is not that I think I’m a smart fella who should have the whole world worshipping me for how good I am to make $100K. No, I started this blog to show yall that someone as stupid as me somehow could still make a rebound in my portfolio given the right principles and psychology, and therefore you, a way smarter individual, can do it too.

Starting Uni

After uni started, I basically got a post-nut clarity for investing. I sold almost 100% of my portfolio and readjusted everything. My reason? I read the 3 books above. And just like how we look back and things we did in primary school and hide in embarrassment from how stupid we once were, I too looked back at my portfolio from NS and thought “what an idiot”. And the good thing about uni is that you start being exposed to a lot more practical things, though still not as much as an internship, but definitely better than JC or sec school where you learned trigonometry or chemical equations.

Uni meant the start of learning about real world stuff - for instance, in Computer Science, you start learning to code using libraries and tools that real-world professionals are using. This was perfect for investing because it meant that you no longer saw companies through the lens of r/wallstreetbets. It means that now whenever you see someone deploying something on Amazon Web Services (AWS), you start thinking “hm it seems like everyone is starting to deploy stuff on the cloud. is that where the world is headed towards? and why is everyone using AWS over Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure? Is Amazon doing something very right? lemme look it up” - and this is a lesson taught by Peter Lynch in One Up Wall Street, which is why this book is on the top of my trilogy list.

Once you start seeing the world differently, through an “investor mindset”, you start making better investment decisions too.

So in uni i started employing more of these principles, and over the course of y1 and y2, I managed to turn my portfolio around.

I also technically have enough money to pay for my uni fees, but i didnt want to because that would mean disrupting my compounding. So what i did was do something i learned from another book - Rich Dad Poor Dad - leveraging debt. The thought of debt is definitely scary though; as Asians, we’ve been taught that owing money means you are poor, and rich people can afford everything. While that is true, another thing to note is to weigh your costs and your benefits. In this case, the interest from a student loan in Singapore is 0% until you graduate, meaning my cost of borrowing is $0 for the next 4 years. Meanwhile, the SSB and T-bills (at the time i invested) were paying 3.3% and 4% per year respectively. This means that if i were to take a student loan, and put the capital that i was gonna use to pay for uni towards SSBs and T-bills, i would earn an extra 12-16% of my entire uni cost - which is about $3-5k over the 4 years. entirely FREE. and bear this in mind - SSBs and T-bills in Singapore are completely liquid, meaning you can withdraw it ANYTIME you want to - with a 1 week notice - at no fees at all. This means that there is really no downside to doing this, apart from the fact that now your bank account shows a negative balance.

At this point, i was employing the mindset of both an investor and a personal finance guru - maxing out investment returns but trying to ensure that I have proper risk management. And how i do this may look very math-heavy, but i guarantee u it takes nothing more than pri sch level math.

For instance, minimizing risk on my student loans = putting student loan amount into ssb and T-bills, making my student loans effectively 0 risk.

Minimizing my crypto portfolio risk = taking a percentage (for me i took 20%, but the number is arbitrary and completely up to your own comfort level) of my stock earnings and transferring them to crypto, and only buying projects that are heavily backed with high developer volumes

And you barely need a calculator for this - just remember that for every downside you are taking (e.g crypto = high risk, student loan = debt), you should have some level of upside to protect it (kinda like a personal insurance). For me, my insurance for student loan is the SSB and T-Bills, and my insurance for crypto is that they were my stocks earnings, not my initial capital. and if you stick by this principle, there is no way you can go bankrupt. you may not earn money sometimes, but you will certainly never lose money.

My Personal Portfolio

If you are wondering why I’ve been mainly talking about stocks, although I mentioned other instruments I’ve invested in, it’s because stocks were my portfolio’s main carry, as you will see in my portfolio breakdown below. But it is definitely still important to learn about where else you can deploy your money!

Please ignore my inconsistency…I’m always forgetting to keep track due to how busy uni can get

As you can see above, these are my finances starting from 2022 Q4 to 2024 Q4, and my net worth has been steadily increasing as uni progressed. The spike between 24’Q2 and 24’Q4 is mostly due to the stock rally this year, which has certainly given me a great boost in my net worth.

And if you remember what i said, i mentioned that i lost about 50% of my portfolio during NS due to the market crash - and if you realise it by now, my portfolio at the end of 2022 was $62k. But no, i did not start with $100k+ and then lose half of them and make it back to $100k (i wish i had that much money lol) the reason why i still have $62k at the end of 2022 was cause some of my portfolio had already recovered, and i had more active income over uni (though this was reduced significantly since i had less time, but still enough for me to put about $500 a month into stocks)

And the table below shows the breakdown of my net worth across the different financial instruments today.

Another thing I had going for me was that I was lucky I got into investing during the height of the covid era, because this meant that interest rates were sky high and i could easily get T-bills at a 4% rate, a rate that many of you probably won’t see for awhile 🤣

As for crypto, I think of it as the wild west equivalent of the stock market. While it is still possible to invest in crypto without being a degen and gambling all your money on a hawk tuah or Trump coin, it is definitely a less regulated market. This means that even the big names like Bitcoin and Ether are potentially less transparent than publicly traded stocks, and imo it is important to feel comfortable with your “investor mindset” in stocks before you start applying it to crypto too

And while I did call my endowment plan a mistake, it is still part of my net worth and something I can eventually cash out, so I still included it as part of my net worth calculation 😭

Conclusion

Before I end this entry, I want to say that I will not be giving stock recommendations - buy or sell. I will still be posting my own DDs in future and also my decision making process when I buy or sell stocks. However, I want to emphasise that I don’t believe that a good mentor is someone who recommends stocks to people. I believe that a good mentor is someone who will teach the right mindset and let his followers decide for themselves what are the best stocks to buy - and this is what I will do. Everyone has their own topics that they are familiar with - or as Warren Buffett calls it, a “circle of competence” - that makes them a better investor in that industry than others. And my goal here is to help you combine that circle of competence with an “investor mindset” that will ultimately work out well for you. And what works for you may not work for me too.

Hence, the reason I started this blog is not to create an investment cult where I wanna pump any stocks or tell you guys what to buy. No, my reason for creating this blog is to pen down my thoughts and teach you guys the thought processes that goes into my mind when making investment decisions - and i think the best way to begin thinking the way I do is through reading the 3 books I have listed above! these books have been very influential in my decision making process, and is part of the reason why i invest the way i do (not just in stocks, but in my money allocation - why I buy SSBs, T-Bills, how I choose which crypto projects to buy, and so on)

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to read through this first entry of mine! I hope I have given you guys some brief insights on how I hit $100K net worth as a uni student, and do look out for more blog posts in the future where I will be delving deeper into books, investment philosophies, my personal portfolio, and DDs of companies! Until then, peace out

If you guys have any questions regarding any posts I’ve made, please DM me on X at @thewontoninvest, and I will be more than happy to respond to the DMs! I don’t have an email yet but it’s because I personally hate emails so feel free to text me on X instead! Please follow my substack at https://thewontoninvestor.substack.com!