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Adam Khoo 80 Of My Portfolio Is In This

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TITLE: Adam Khoo: 80% of My Portfolio is in THIS CHANNEL: Piranha Profits DATE: 2026-06-20 ---TRANSCRIPT--- If you’ll be financially stable in [music] 20 years, it’s going to be 3,000 a month because of inflation that 3,000 is going to become 6,000 and be 8,000 in the future. The riskiest thing you can do for yourself and for your family financially is to not invest. Because if you don’t invest or you don’t have work anymore, you won’t have enough to be able to survive. I know of a lot of people around me and instead of building their wealth, they ended up losing their hard-earned money. And I saw my own father go through that.

Hi everyone. Thank you for tuning in to our YouTube channel. I’m Zafrian from Piranha Profits and today we have Adam Khoo here. We’re going to be asking him and talking to him about his journey as an investing teacher, trainer, and mentor. And also talk about the stock market. So Adam, thank you for joining us here today. So I understand that you’ve been teaching investing for over 20 years and you started in 2005 with the Wealth Academy Investing Masterclass. Then around 10 years later in 2016, you took it online with Piranha Profits. So what has been your motivation and what’s your journey been like for these last over two decades? Well, I’ve always been excited to teach what has worked for me. So for those people who have been following me for more than 20 years, for maybe in fact 30 years, they know that I actually started teaching people how to study, how to get good grades because I was a lousy student myself and then when I went for a lot of programs about accelerated learning and all that and I applied it to my own life, I started to do really well in school and I was driven to teach that, all right? And then later on, I learned about NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, which really helped me to manage my own emotions, my own psychology, and help me to really achieve a lot in terms of my early career, my business. And so I got excited to teach that, all right? And then from there, when I started to accumulate income and I invested the income, initially I didn’t do very well like most people. I didn’t know what I was doing. So, made money, lost money, made money, lost money. Went in circles for many years. And then I finally figured out how the stock market works. It’s not a casino, it’s a supermarket of businesses. And when I began to learn how to combine a lot of the knowledge from the greats of the industry, right? From Warren Buffett to Peter Lynch to Victor Sperandeo, combining fundamental analysis to technical analysis. And then when I started to get those results, when I started to see my wealth grow, I got excited to teach that. So, all my life I’ve always been excited to teach what worked for me. Like you mentioned, 2005, I started the Wealth Academy Investing Masterclass. Because one of the my objectives was to be able to empower retail investors, like me, on how to become a self-directed investor, on how to be able to not just make money consistently in the markets, but how do you outperform the index, how do you outperform professional investors. Because number one, I know of a lot of people around me who are retail investors who had no idea what they were doing. And instead of building their wealth, they ended up losing their hard-earned money. And this is a very common thing. And I saw my own father go through that. This was back in 1999, 2000, the dot-com bubble. So, my dad at the time, and a lot of other people, they were told by their bankers to buy these dot-com funds, which they had no idea what they were about, right? So, my dad is an artist. He’s got no financial background, so he just bought all these tech funds that they said, “Oh, you know, it’ll keep going up, right?” Then when the tech bubble burst, it wiped out a big chunk of his savings that time. Um and it happened to a lot of people, right? Then in 2008, 2009, thank god that didn’t affect my father because he was smarter then already, right? Started listening to me. But remember ‘08, ‘09 when a lot of retail investors were told to buy these Lehman Brothers bonds. They say, “Oh, it’s very safe and all that.” And when Lehman Brothers collapsed in the great financial crisis, a lot of people, in fact, a lot of elderly people, retirees, lost their their savings. The reason is because a lot of retail investors, they think, “Oh, I don’t need to learn investing. How hard can it be? Just listen to my banker, listen to my friend, read the news, and and I do it myself, right?” I would say that investing is very risky if you don’t know what you’re doing. Right? It’s the same as swimming is risky if you have never taken swimming lessons. Uh driving a car is risky if you don’t know the traffic rules. And the trouble is that a lot of people they jump into the market without learning to swim, without learning to drive. And that’s why they drown financially, they get into bad financial accident. And I’ve seen that again with my own family, friends. And that was always my mission to be able to teach people that once you learn how to invest intelligently, once you learn to invest safely, then investing no longer becomes risky. Just like once you learn how to swim, swimming is no longer risky. It becomes healthy, right? And it gets you where you want to go a lot faster, which is financial security, financial freedom, compared to leaving your money in the savings bank and getting less than 1% and getting wiped out from inflation. So, a lot of people know that you’ve built a portfolio of over $20 million to date. And you’ve been able to outperform the markets consistently year on year. So, you could be on a beach in Maldives, just relaxing. What’s been motivating you to continue teaching? Uh couple of things. I would say number one, if you read all the testimonials that come in, you know, once in a while, actually not once in a while, quite often, every other few days, we see students posting on the chat group about how the lessons have changed their life, have literally changed not just their life, but changed their families’ life financially. And when I read stuff like that, that really motivates me to keep going on because it gives my life purpose. And I guess the second thing is what will I do if I don’t teach, you know? I’ll get bored to death just following my wife shopping every day or sitting on the beach every day. I’ll literally get bored to death. All right, and number three, in a way, you know, we all like to feel important. I mean, I guess when people listen to me, it makes me feel important, right? Because, you know, sometimes your dog there or sometimes our wife don’t listen to us, our kids don’t listen to us, our dog don’t listen to us, right? Uh but when I’m sharing these ideas, it’s like people like, you know, they listen and and you feel good about it, right? You feel needed. It gives your life some purpose, you know. One of the things I realized is this that once you have made a certain amount of money, more money doesn’t motivate you anymore. You have to find something else. That’s why I know a lot of my personal [snorts] friends who have so much money and they are depressed because they’re like, you know, what’s next? I’ve got all this money, but somehow my family doesn’t love me or I’ve got no purpose in life and they go into deep depression. I really have got friends who have got like half a billion dollars or 100 million dollars who are depressed. Because they don’t have anything that excites them anymore. So, do you think that everyone should learn investing or only the types of people who want to be wealthy or wealthier? Yeah, you know, everyone needs to learn how to invest, right? Not just people who want to be like really wealthy. You know, whether you’re a teacher, you’re a policeman, you’re corporate executive, you have to learn how to invest. Uh and the reason is very simple because inflation. Inflation is our number one enemy, okay? And if you look at the long run, inflation depends. Like Singapore is about 2% in the US, it’s maybe 3%. You like Indonesia could be a lot higher or Malaysia a lot higher, right? So, what does that mean? That means that every year the cost of living is going up. The price of goods and services is going up every year. So, that means that if you hold cash, the value of your cash is falling every year by two, three, four percent. And every year it loses two percent, two percent, two percent, two percent. And if you compound that, that means every 10 years you lose like over 20% of your purchasing power. In 20, 25 years you lose like 40% of purchasing power. And it’s quite scary. So I tell people that the riskiest thing you can do for yourself and for your family financially is to not invest. Because if you don’t invest, it’s a guarantee that 10, 20, 30 years from now when you cannot work anymore or you don’t want to work anymore, you won’t have enough to be able to survive in a developed country like Singapore or the US or whatever it everything is two, three times the price and you’re struggling financially. And I don’t know about you, but you know, I see people now in the late 60s, in their 70s who work hard all their life, who save up, but because they did not know how to grow that, today they find that they’re struggling financially. They can’t afford the things that they need. And you know, you don’t want to be that person in 10, 20 years. All right? So you have to plan now. How can the average working person today, can they become a millionaire in today’s market? Like how long do you think it will take them? Okay, first of all, remember that when I first started 30 years ago, a millionaire was what we all aspired to be. Oh, a millionaire, right? But now if you think about it, a million dollars is nothing. In Singapore, you cannot even buy some HDB government flats with a million dollars. If you think about it. So nowadays a million dollars is really not enough. So first of all, you need to have a target of how much money you need to be financially stable in the future and you got to work towards that. So a rough rule of thumb is to take your annual expenses and times 25. It’s a very rough rule of thumb, right? So it’s different for different people. So for example, in Singapore, if you ask most Singaporean families, family of four, family of five, combined middle income between husband and wife, most of them will say at least 8,000 a month expenses to pay for the car, the condo, and everything. Let’s take it as 10,000 for example, right? So, 10,000 * 12 is 120,000 annual expenses. So, * 25, what’s that? I I’m not really good with mental math. Let me take out my phone. So, that proves you don’t need to be good in mental math to make money in the markets because I’m not good in mental math, right? So, if you take 120,000 * 25, uh that’s 3 million. You need at least 3 million to be financially stable and comfortable so that if you lose your job or you can’t work anymore or AI takes over all the jobs, you can at least be able to live on that 3 million from the interest and draw it down till you die at 85, for example, right? But, of course, if you’re single, it’s different. If you’re single, got no family, no children, then you don’t need 10,000 a month. Zaf, you tell me, for example, a single person in Singapore, how much would they need to be at least comfortable? Watch a movie once in a while, go to restaurants once in a while. If I don’t have to pay for a house, if I’m just going off like living expenses. You still need to live somewhere. I would say if it’s a rent, it’ll be 1,500 or 1,200. Yeah. And for food, maybe uh another thousand. Then medical insurance, you have got transport. Yeah. You got entertainment. Okay, so both of you, how much do you think you need a month to be at least comfortable? Expenses-wise, every month maybe 2,000. 2,500. Okay, 2,500 for a single person. Yeah. Okay. So, 2,500

  • 12, that’s 30,000 a year. Okay, so * 25, that’s 750,000. Okay. Yeah, but that’s today’s dollars, right? So, if you want to be financially stable in 20 years, it’s not going to be 3,000 a month. Because of inflation, that 3,000 is going to become 6,000, going to be 8,000 in the future to have that same lifestyle today. So, that’s why, you know, the first thing I tell people to do is this, you have to find out what are your annual expenses, number one. Then number two, multiply by 25 to get a rough idea what is your I call it the your financial freedom target. What is it? 750,000 or 3 million or whatever it is, right? And then from there, you need a plan to work towards it. To know, okay, how much must I save every month at what rate of return to hit that 3 million or 2 million in 10 or 20 years, all right? And that’s what we do, right? We’ve got the financial calculators to help you to do that. So, in fact, in the upcoming live online webinar in July, which is the anti-bubble mania webinar, I’ll have a specific segment where I’ll share with you how to use the tools that we have to achieve financial freedom. In order to calculate what is your financial freedom target, how much to save every month, what’s your targeted rate of return, and the realistic timeline to get there.

Okay, so as of today, the S&P is continuing to make new all-time highs, and some people think that the market is actually too high and too expensive right now. And they think that it’s in a bubble, but what do you think? So, everyone has an opinion. For me, I don’t believe in feelings, I don’t believe in opinions, I believe in let’s look at the numbers, let’s look at the facts. And what a lot of people do is they look at what they call the price to earnings ratio, the P/E ratio of the S&P 500 to kind of like guess is it expensive or cheap. If you look at the P/E ratio right now of the S&P, it’s about 21 times forward earnings. So, is that high or low? Well, if you look at the last 5-year average, it’s about 19.9. The last 10-year average is about 18.9. So, 21 is above 19.9, it’s above 18.9. So, the market is, in terms of the P/E ratio, is above its 5-to-10-year average. But, it’s not super above. So, I would say that overall is expensive, but it’s not like super expensive if you use PE ratio. But, as I’ve said many times, PE ratio by itself can be misleading because it doesn’t take into account the growth of the earnings. Because companies today are growing their profits a lot higher than 10 years ago. So, you can’t really compare PE today to 10 years ago. You have to compare the growth, right? So, a better measure that I use is the PEG ratio or the PEG ratio, where you take the PE ratio divide by the earnings growth rate of the companies today. And if you do that, you’ll find that the PEG ratio for May is about one. But, if you look at history, one is considered actually fairly priced. Not expensive, not cheap, fairly priced. So, this is the overall market. And again, what is the market? It’s basically the S&P 500 index that represents the market. But, if you actually look under the hood of the car at the actual 500 companies, not all of them are expensive. Some of them are very expensive, some of them are a bit expensive, some of them are undervalued. So, you have to look at individual, which is again what I’ll bring you through during the my webinar, during the mid-year anti-bubble mania webinar. I’ll bring you through exactly which of the 500 companies are actually expensive and which are cheap. Okay, so Adam, you said that not all AI companies are the same. So, how can we tell from the hype companies and from the profitable companies? Okay, so there are two things that are really important, okay? Number one is what I call the economic moat of the company. It’s not something I coined, all right? It came from Warren Buffett. Economic moat means the sustainable competitive advantage of a company. So, remember a company can make a lot of profits now, but is it sustainable? Can it continue to grow at the same rate or sustain the growth 5, 10, 15, 20 years from now. That is the most important thing. So, to me when I invest in a stock, I am not looking at the current growth. I’m looking at can it sustain for the next 10, 20 years. So, for example, if you use the Stock Oracle app, it shows you immediately the moat of the company. It ranks it from 1 to

  1. And I usually look for companies where the moat is at least like seven, eight, nine, or 10 out of 10. So, that tells me that it’s sustainable. So, that’s number one. Invest in companies with strong moats because if the moat is weak, it’s like below six, then yeah, the profits can go up now, the growth can go up now, but if you invest in it, it could be very dangerous because it’s not sustainable. In the next few years, competitors can come and take away their market share. Or the growth cannot sustain and then the next thing you know, your investment goes down 50% and it never comes back. That’s number one. The second thing I look at is, okay, even if a company has got a strong moat, the growth is sustainable, but are you paying too high a price for it? So, that’s where we look at the intrinsic value. And of course, in my webinar, I’ll share with you how I calculate intrinsic value. You can do it manually using an intrinsic value calculator, and with Stock Oracle, you can see the valuation right on the app. So, the discipline is I only buy a great company when the price is selling below the intrinsic value. I don’t want to overpay for something.

So, a great company can still be a bad investment if you pay too much for it. Yeah. So, I always say that a great business can be a bad investment if you pay too much for it. But a great business is a great investment if you can buy it for less than what it is worth. It’s the same for everything. Like, let’s say for example, you find a great property, great apartment, great view, great location, renovation, beautiful, right? What do you do? Well, you ask the seller, “What’s the bank valuation?” The bank will do a valuation. So, let’s say the valuation the bank does is, “Oh, the property is worth 1.5 million, okay? But then you are very desperate. You say I want to buy the property in case someone snatches it from me. And the seller is like, “Hmm, okay, how about 2 million?” And you’re like really desperate, “Okay, I’ll pay 2 million.” So, what happens? You’re paying 2 million for property that’s valued at 1.5. You’re paying half a million above valuation. Is it a great property? Is it a great investment? No, right? Okay? And there are people in Singapore who have done that. They overpaid for Sentosa Cove. Or some of these hot properties 10 years ago, after 10 years what happened? They’re still losing money cuz you overpaid for it. But let’s imagine if for some reason the seller of the property, he was desperate to sell. His business is going bankrupt, he’s going through a divorce, and he was desperate, right? And at the time, you said, “Hey, I’ll tell you what, you know, I’ll sell it to me at 1 million and I’ll pay you cash right now.” And he goes, “Oh, okay, sell sell it to you, right?” Is that a good deal? Yeah, you bought it half a million below valuation. Now, is it easy to find these deals? For Are we talking about properties or stocks? Okay, so for property it’s very difficult, right? It’s really difficult to find someone who went through a divorce who’s desperate to sell below market. Very difficult, right? Yeah. That’s why I don’t invest in property because it’s really hard [laughter] to find that person. But the great thing about the stock market is that it happens every year. Thanks to Donald Trump. Okay, now I’m just kidding, right? But because of all these fears that people have, you know, Trump, you know, there’s this war and they’re going to raise interest rates, or there’s always something to spook the market. So, whenever there’s this kind of event happen, the market panics, ah, right? And that’s when the share price could temporarily drop, you know, 20-50% below valuation. So, that’s how I got rich by taking advantage of this short-term panic that people have. They panic, they throw their shares, and I pick it up at 20-30% below valuation. But again, the important thing is you must know which ones to buy because if you buy lousy companies that are cheap, cheap will get cheaper, and it never comes back. But, if you buy great companies that are cheap, they always bounce back, and that’s the key. Yeah, I think the the problem with a lot of new investors is when they see the market drops, they see all the stocks drops, they don’t really have the eye to analyze which stocks are Yeah, they’ve got no idea. between company A, company B, they’ve no clue what’s the difference. Yeah. Like to them, they look at a Micron, look at Nvidia, what what’s the difference? Right? But, there’s a big difference, right? Yeah, I think before I even learn how to invest, when I see these kind of stocks, I don’t even think to look at the revenue growth or the profits growth. I just like see, oh, is it a good company? Then like I don’t look at the numbers. I just like think if it’s a good company or not. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so on the topic of sustainable growth, when you see a company like Nvidia growing their profits to crazy amounts, what do you think of that? Do you think that’s sustainable for a company like Nvidia? Well, for Nvidia specifically, I think that is very sustainable because Nvidia used to be a company that sold GPUs, graphic processing units, right? For gamers. Yeah. They no longer just sell GPUs, they sell an entire AI factories, where it’s not just GPUs, but the entire software ecosystem. And it’s not just for gaming, it’s for data centers, it’s for robotics, it’s for autonomous driving. So, that is something which I think is more sustainable than let’s say another company that just sells memory chips because there’s no software ecosystem, and memory chips tend to be a bit more cyclical. Okay, so for someone watching this who owns AI stocks, what should they be asking themselves right now? So, the first question you can ask yourself is is the AI stock you own, does it have, again, a sustainable competitive advantage? Does it have a wide economic moat that can continue to sustain for the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years? Does it have a narrow moat, or does it have no moat? So, again, no moat means that yes, it can make a lot of money now. Profits can go up a lot now, but because it’s got no moat, it may not be sustainable. They can easily be disrupted by competition the next year. So, if you have a company that has got no moat, and it went up a lot, good for you, you better start getting out. You better start selling out, all right? Because it may not be that sustainable. Then the second question is you have to calculate the intrinsic value. And there are many ways to value a company, of course. So, one of the main ways I like to value a business is the discounted free cash flow model. So, what does that mean? That means you need to project how much free cash flow the company would earn in the next 20 years, and then discount it to present value, all right? A business is a money-making machine. The more money it makes, the more it is worth, very simple. So, what is the business worth? It’s worth how much money it can generate in the future. So, for me, I’m quite conservative. I always take a 20-year timeline. How much can it generate in 20 years? Discounted to present value because of the time value of money, that gives me a rough idea what the business is worth. So, if the stock I own right now is selling, let’s say, more than 100% above that value, I’ll start to sell out, which I’ve been doing actually for some of my stocks. I’ve been starting to sell out some of them, all right? Because they’re way overpriced. But some of my stocks that are not way overpriced, they’re fairly priced or underpriced, I’m holding and I keep adding to that. That’s why intrinsic value is so important. It’s one of the most important ingredients in the secret sauce. Okay. So, Adam, you mentioned in the community that you’re not selling all your AI stocks, but you’re also not going all in. So, what does your portfolio look like right now? Okay. So, see, I believe, and this has helped me for many, many years, right? That to be a great investor is not about predicting where the market will go next week, next month, or next year, because no one can predict for sure. Whoever tells you that they know exactly where the market is going, is a liar or an idiot. Okay, because no one can do it. Not Warren Buffett, not Peter Lynch, no one can do it, right? No one can predict. So, the key to successful investing again is not to predict when the AI growth will end because no one knows, right? But it’s to build a resilient portfolio that will do well under all situations. So, even if the AI mania ends tomorrow, my portfolio will still do well. So, whether high interest rates, low interest rates, whether economic recession or no recession, your portfolio should still do well because it is well diversified across different types of sectors and industries and investment themes. Now, if you look at my portfolio right now, about 20% are in what I call the pure AI infrastructure companies. So, these are companies that purely focus on building the AI infrastructure. For example, semiconductor stocks. So, that’s about 20% of my portfolio, okay? Now, another 20% of my portfolio are stocks that are related to AI, but it’s not purely AI. They do other stuff as well. So, a good example is Meta Platforms, right? Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, and all that, right? So, we know that Meta is involved in building AI, but that’s not their only business. Their other business is social media where they make a lot through advertising. So, even if the AI thing slows down, they will still make a lot from their ads from other stuff, right? Another example again is Amazon. So, Amazon is involved in the AI capex build-up. Is that their only business? No, Amazon is in the ad business as well, right? In fact, Amazon’s advertising business has overtaken YouTube. Amazon is in logistics. Amazon is in e-commerce, right? They have a lot of other stuff. So, these are what I call related to AI, but it’s not just AI. Other stuff, right? So, that’s is another 20% of my portfolio. So, 40% of my portfolio has got AI exposure. The other 60% of my portfolio has almost no AI exposure at all. But they are great businesses. I’ll give you an example. One example is an insurance company called Arch Capital, ACGL. All right, so nothing to do with AI, but they make a lot of money by selling insurance, specialty insurance. So that’s how my portfolio is positioned right now. Recently, those stocks that I have that are pure AI capex buildout, I’ve been selling some of them. Not a lot. I’ve been selling the ones that are not that sustainable. That are way over priced. I’ve been selling them. In fact, I’ve been buying stocks almost every day. For those of you in the Ultimate Investors Playbook, you get my notifications what I’m buying and selling every day. I don’t give financial advice. I just show people what I’m buying and selling, but you have to make your own decisions. What I’m buying almost every day are stocks that have got nothing to do with AI. And the reason is very simple, because I know that this AI-driven bull market will end. When? I don’t know. Could be today, could be next year, could be 3 years from now. I don’t know, but it will end. And once the AI bull market ends, what’s going to happen? The pure AI infrastructure stocks, especially the ones that are overvalued, would have the deepest corrections. It will easily drop 50% easily. But when it drops, where does the money go? The money will all flow into all the non-AI stocks that have been discarded, ignored, and left behind. And these are the ones I’m accumulating. And this playbook is not new. It has happened many times. The dot-com bubble. All right, so I don’t know if you were born yet. So for those of you who remember, during the dot-com bubble, this was 1998, 1999, 2000, right? So at the time, all the stocks that had a dot-com went up every day. All right, and if you bought it, you felt like a genius. Wow, all right. But the main difference was all these dot-com companies, none of them made money. At least now the AI companies, many of them do make money, but that time the dot com none of them made money, right? So, they were going up every single day and all the money were chasing these stocks. And all the companies back then, in 1999, that were not dot com, they were dropping every day. Almost every day were just dropping, dropping. unloved? Unloved, hated, disregarded. These were called the anti-bubble stocks or the anti-bubble stocks. But, these were the companies making money. They were making a lot of money. These were like the McDonald’s, these were like the Boeing, these were like the Walmart. No one wanted them. They were being thrown away because no dot com, right? And then in 2000, when the dot com bubble burst, then all the dot com stocks dropped 80, 90%. Again, none of them made really money. So, yeah. Half of the companies all went bankrupt. And then all the money flowed to your Coca-Cola, your Walmart, your Boeing. The non-AI stocks, those then went up double digits. The same thing is going to happen now. Yeah. Exactly when? I don’t know. I’m preparing for the day. So, would you say that the a lot of the professional investors and hedge funds, they are also positioning themselves ahead of the retail The smart ones, of course. Obviously, the smart ones. Yeah. Of course, you got great hedge fund managers and you got lousy ones. Yeah. The smart ones are doing it already. Yeah. Would you say your goal is to profit from the AI mania, but not entirely rely on it? As always. So, AI is a real thing. AI is not hype. It’s a real thing, all right? I use AI every single day and it’s really increasing the profit margins of companies. So, it’s real. I’m not saying it’s not real. But, it comes to a point of time when everyone is buying that, that chases up the price beyond the valuation. Again, not all AI companies, but some of them. There are a lot of AI companies that I don’t think are expensive, that are still reasonably priced and have a lot of growth ahead. Nvidia is one of them. I don’t think Nvidia is expensive at all. All right, so I continue to hold Nvidia. I’m not selling it. Again, like I said, the whole thing is to be able to construct a portfolio that will do well in all situations and all circumstances. So, I think a lot of like new investors, they’re holding on to a lot of cash. They’re afraid to enter the market. Like, what would you tell them? So, first of all, I always say that 90% of people should not buy stocks. They should just buy an index ETF. Okay? Reason, 90% of people out there have no interest in analyzing businesses. So, if you’re one of those people who have got no interest in analyzing businesses, don’t force yourself. Just buy the index. Whether this is a Straits Times Index or the S&P 500 Index or the Dow Jones Index, that’s it. All right? Because long run, you’ll always go up. In the short term, it it goes up and down. And the way to deploy your capital, if you’re like most newbies who don’t understand technical analysis, just do dollar cost averaging, which means invest a fixed dollar amount every month or every 3 months. And that’s the easiest thing to do. And if you do that, long run, you’re compounding at about 8, 9, 10, 11% depending on the market. Yeah. I would say 90% of people should do that. But of course, if you do that, it takes longer to reach your financial freedom target. Okay? Now, for the 10% of people who are interested to beat the market, like myself and my students, then you got to be willing to do the work. You have to be willing to analyze businesses, to calculate the intrinsic value. In the past, it took hours to analyze a business, but of course, that’s why I created the Stock Oracle app. With Stock Oracle now, in less than 3 minutes, you can analyze a business. You know, is it a predictable company? Is it profitable? What’s the intrinsic value? Ba ba ba, everything in less than 3 minutes. So, it makes it a lot easier, but you must still look at it. You must still do a bit of work. So, for those people who are willing to do that work, what you do now in the market. So, right now in the market, are there high-quality companies now that are undervalued? Yes, there are quite a number of them. And again, a lot of them are the anti-bubble companies. The ones that have been disregarded and and hated because they’re non-AI. A lot of them out there. And these are the ones I’m buying every day. So, I will show you in the upcoming webinar what are the ones I’m looking at. So, do you think that the rotation out of AI is already beginning? Or are we still in the middle or early on in the AI mania? So, every few days you see a bit of the rotation. Like a couple of days ago you started to see some of the AI capex stocks drop, and then non-AI went up, right? So, you’re seeing a bit of that. But, no one can predict exactly when the big rotation will come. Like I said, it could happen tomorrow. It could happen next year. I don’t know. Okay, so if you had $10,000 or $100,000 today, and you knew to investing, what would you think about before you buy anything? So, the first thing to do is to decide how many stocks you want in your portfolio. So, I always tell people that never put all your money in one stock, no matter how great you think it is, because anything can happen that you you can’t always predict, right? You know, let’s say you put all your money in Tesla or SpaceX, and then what happens if Elon Musk gets hit by a rocket the next day? And he’s the key man, right? So, high key man risk, you know, your whole business could be gone because very high key man risk. Now, of course, if you invest in McDonald’s and a McDonald’s CEO gets hit by a hamburger, you don’t really care, right? Because he’s not so dependent on him. Okay, so the whole point is number one, you must have a plan how many stocks in your portfolio. And I always tell my students minimum at least eight to 10. Divide your money into minimum at least eight to 10 great companies. So, that’s the first thing. So, decide. Is it going to 10? Is it going to be 20? At least eight to 10. Then the next step is to then decide what are the eight to 10 stocks that’s going to be in your portfolio. And these eight to 10 stocks should be high-quality companies that again, like I said, have strong economic moats and the growth is sustainable. And again, uh with Stock Oracle, you can check all this in three to five minutes. Again, there are five things we look at with Stock Oracle. Right, number one, is the growth predictable? Is the profit revenue predictable? Number one. Number two, is it highly profitable? In terms of does it have high return on capital, high profit margins? Number three, we look at again the economic moat. Is it strong moat? Number four, debt. We want to make sure the company has got little or no debt. If it’s got too high debt, that’s very dangerous. That’s how Lehman Brothers went bust. That’s how Highflux went bust because the debt was too high. So, we want to invest in companies with sustainable debt. And the last is valuation. So, it’s got to pass these five main pillars. And then we put in these eight stocks in a portfolio. And we buy them slowly. You don’t buy all at once. You buy them when the share price drops below the intrinsic value to what called the support levels. So, again, in the webinar, I’ll talk about how to identify these technical support levels where I will add shares. So, these are the few commandments to successful investing. So, the way I teach investing is very mechanical. Right? So, the way I invest is I don’t make any predictions because like I said, no one can predict where the market is going in the short term. Why? Because unless you sleep next to Trump, you don’t know what he’s going to tweet the next day. You can’t predict what, right? So, whoever tells you, “I can predict the market.” is a liar or is an idiot. Right? I mean, I can’t even predict my wife’s mood the next day because I can’t predict what my maid will say to her or whether she’ll get into a traffic jam. I I can’t predict that. So, the way I teach investing is stop predicting. It’s a waste of time. Instead, the rules I teach are very mechanical. Identify great companies, know the intrinsic value, once the price goes below the intrinsic value, you add and build a portfolio. And you’ll do very well. What’s the biggest mistake that you see retail investors doing in the current cycle? Or in every cycle, the biggest biggest mistake retail investors make is that they have no idea the business behind the stock they’re buying. And they treat the stock market like a casino where they’re trying to predict where this stock will go the next day, the next week, the next month. Will it go up? Will it go down? And if you do that, you are gambling. You’re not investing. And if you gamble, can you make money? Of course you can, right? A lot of gamblers make a lot of money. But it never lasts. Because eventually your luck will run out and eventually whatever you make, you will lose plus more. Because the house always wins in the end. The house means the casino. But when you look at the stock market from a different perspective like me, I don’t treat the market as a casino. I treat it as a supermarket of businesses where businesses are on sale every day. But out of all the businesses in this supermarket, less than 1% are high-quality businesses. 99% are not high-quality. So, I only go for the 1% and I buy them when they’re on sale. So, when you look at a market from that perspective, you are no longer a gambler. You become the house. And the house always wins over time. So, I want to know your mental model when you sell a stock. Like when do you decide you need to sell this stock? When do you decide to hold? So, when I sell a stock, first of all, depends on did I enter it as an investment or enter it as a trade? Okay. So, I do both investing and trading. Although the majority of my portfolio are investments, the minority are shorter-term speculative trades. Now, obviously, if it’s a trade, then it’s very simple. The moment I enter a trade, a speculative trade, I enter with a stop loss, okay, that’s placed at a strategic position, and a profit target. So, the exit is very simple. Once it hits the stop loss, get out. I lose 1 R. If it hits the profit target, I get out with a profit, I make 2 R. That’s very simple for trading. For investing, my decision to enter and exit has got nothing to do with the price. It’s got to do with the business. So, when I invest in a business, I know the business will keep growing over time, and I exit if I feel that the business uh is no longer going to grow as well, or I feel that it’s losing its competitive advantage, or it’s having some permanent deterioration of the business fundamentals. Or, it could be a great business, but I sell it because it’s way overvalued. If the price is more than 100% above the intrinsic value, then I start to scale out. So, for the average person, what would you say is the strategy for spending, saving, and investing? Like, how should they allocate their income? Well, you know, the general rule is always save at least 10% of your income. A good thing in Singapore is that you’re already forced to save through CPF, right? Some people may already know this, but you can actually use part of your CPF savings to invest in the stock market, even the US stock market, through an S&P index fund. And of course, if you can invest more from your cash, then that’s even better. I mean, the higher the better. And what really helped me to accelerate my wealth is that at a very young age, I learned to always spend less than I earn. So, whether I earn 2,000 a month or 10,000 a month, I always spend less than I earn. And it’s a habit I’ve carried through, to not buy stupid things that are wants, but not needs, and to buy things just to show off to people, but people don’t really care. Yeah. So, I know you’ve been actively trading options. How is that performing lately? Is it any different in the current AI mania market? No different. So, I trade options almost every day. Yeah, for those of you in my ultimate investors playbook, which is a subscription, you get all my option trade alerts every day. Again, this is not a recommendation that people follow, but it’s educational so you can see how I trade options every single day. There are many option strategies. So, most of the option strategies that I use are not meant for speculation. They are not meant for predicting where the market is going. Most of my strategies are what I call in a way market neutral strategies. That I don’t really care where the market is going. Yeah? So, one of the main things I do is I sell cash secured put options on stocks. Which in a layman’s way is like selling insurance. Big fund managers, when the market drops, they buy insurance to reduce the volatility of their portfolio. And by buying insurance, they have to pay the premium. So, guess who sells them the insurance? Me. All right, I’m the guy selling them insurance. But again, a smart insurance company who sells car insurance, for example, who do you insure? You don’t insure the reckless drivers. You insure the safe drivers, right? And that’s how you collect premium. So, same thing for me. Out of all the stocks in the market, less than 1% of stocks are solid businesses. So, I only sell options or sell put options on these solid companies during temporary drops. So, that’s how I get premium. So, to me, it’s been a very good bread and butter income stream for me. Having said that, once in a while, I do use options to also trade bounces in stocks using this thing called the bullish synthetic spread strategy, which I’ll be teaching, in fact, during the upcoming anti-bubble mania webinar. I’ll be sharing that strategy that I use as well. The bullish synthetic spread, which is a way where I trade 100 shares of stock using options with less than one quarter the capital required. So, this capital required for the bullish synthetic spread, what would you say is the minimum account size that someone needs to trade this? A good minimum account size would be I would say at least 3,000 3,000 US dollars, yeah. 3,000 4,000 5,000 will be a good account size. Okay, so Adam, can you run us through a simplified breakdown on how you do your cash secured puts options trade? Okay, so here’s a simple example. Let’s say we take a stock like Microsoft. Again, it must be a company which is very sustainable that I’m sure long run it always goes up, but short term it goes up and down. So, Microsoft is selling at about $400 right now. And first of all, I must ensure that it is undervalued. So, I must know the intrinsic value, which I can check from Stock Oracle easily. And let’s say the intrinsic value is $550. So, valuation 550 and it’s now selling at 400. So, it’s now undervalued, right? Okay. Now, could I buy the shares right now if I wanted to? Yeah, I could if I wanted to, right? But let’s say I want to play hard to get. So, what I do is instead of buying at 400 now, okay, I will sell a put option at let’s say a strike price of 350. So, what does it mean? So, when I sell a put option at the 350 strike price, it’s like selling insurance. When I sell insurance, I collect a premium. So, I collect money up front, right? But by selling the insurance, I’m now obligated to buy the shares at 350 within a certain expiry date. Normally within about 30 to 45 days. So, in the next 30 to 45 days, if Microsoft goes up from 400 it goes up or it goes sideways or it can even go down, but it doesn’t go below 350. Then what happen? Then by the expiration date, the put option will expire. Right? The insurance I sold will expire. All right? And I just keep the premium. So, it’s like getting free money. But in the next 30 to 45 days, if Microsoft does drop below 350 and stay there, then I’m obligated to buy the shares at 350. Which I don’t mind because Microsoft is worth 550. I buy 350, wow, big discount, right? So, it’s a win-win to me. You get what I’m saying? It’s a win-win. Microsoft goes below 350, I win because I get to buy it very cheap. Okay? I buy I get to buy it 350. And remember, I also collect the premium. So, let’s say the premium is $10 premium that I collect up front, right? So, I’m buying Microsoft at 350, but I collected $10. So, my actual price is 340, which is damn cheap, right? But if Microsoft doesn’t drop below 350, it goes up, goes sideways, or goes down but above 350, I don’t get to buy the shares, but I keep the $10. So, to me, it’s a win-win scenario. So, is there anything someone should understand before they even attempt to trade options? Yeah, please do not trade options unless you know exactly what you’re doing and you have taken our options WaveRider course that covers everything about options. So, you must understand the risk, the rewards, how to manage a trade, what are the entry rules, what are the exit rules. Okay? So, again, it goes back to the analogy of please don’t jump into a car and try to drive the car without taking driving lessons. That you know what is green light, what is red light, you have to know the speed limit and and all that stuff. Is options risky? Yes, options is very very very risky if you don’t know what you’re doing. Same as everything else. Getting married is very risky if you marry the wrong person, if you don’t know who you’re marrying, right? But if you know who you’re marrying, if you know how to drive, if you know how options work, then it is no longer that risky. Okay, so Adam, I’m to hear about your dividend and income investing portfolio. I know you told us that you made 400, 500,000 a year just from dividends investing. That’s enough to cover your financial freedom, like more than enough. Yeah, well, actually the actual figure is actually close to $700,000. So, I collect $700,000 in dividend and interest income every year. That’s purely passive income. I get that money every single year. And good thing in Singapore, it is tax-free. It is totally tax-free because in Singapore dividends are tax-free. Interest is tax-free. So, I do that by having a portfolio of income assets that consists of, number one, REITs, real estate investment trusts. Again, I only buy the high-quality ones, and there are not many around. Number two, bonds. Mostly are investment-grade bonds, but I do have some high-yield bonds as well. Number three, private credit, which I buy both listed private credit through a BDC, which you’re going to learn what it is, and unlisted private credit, which you can buy through a bank. And the fourth thing, specific dividend stocks, of which most of my dividend stocks are in the three Singapore banks, which I think are great for dividend investing. So, I’ll be showing you everything in my upcoming webinar in the NT Bubble Mania event. I’ll show you my income portfolio, how I structure it, and again, how I generate passive income every year of that amount. So, can you share with us what accounts size, what’s your portfolio value, and what’s the ROI to be able to make that 700,000? Okay, so my total dividend portfolio, which includes all my bonds, is roughly about 12 million Singapore dollars. So, of the 12 million, some are in REITs, some are in dividend stocks, some are in bonds. And so, like my private credit, the dividend yield is about 9, 10%. My high-yield bonds is about 7%, my REITs are about 4, 5%. So, if you take a consolidated yield across my whole portfolio, it’s about 6% yield. So with a 12 million portfolio, 6% yield is about 700,000 in income. Okay, so Adam, thank you so much for being here with us and sharing a lot of your thoughts and your insights. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to share what I know. Can you also tell us what you’ll be covering at the July’s anti-bubble event? Yeah, so I’ll have a couple of webinars, live webinars that you can register for. So my first one would be on investing, value momentum investing, and again how I’m structuring my portfolio to ride this AI wave as long as it lasts, but at same time how I’m building all the anti-bubble stocks, anti-AI bubble stocks, so when the growth slows and the market rotates, my portfolio will be in a very good position as well. So that is the first webinar. And then I’ll do another webinar on how I trade options and again I’ve got many option strategies and one of the ones I’m going to focus on is how I use the bullish synthetic spread strategy, which is a technique on how to trade 100 shares of stock with less than 1/4 of the capital required. Now, many people when they want to do that, they trade on margin which I don’t think is a good idea because interest rates are very high, the interest will kill you. Or they use CFDs which I used to use last time, but now with high interest rates, again doesn’t make sense. And some people they buy call options in order to magnify their returns. Again, I’ll explain why that may not be the best solution because when you buy call options, time is working against you and you’re suffering from time decay and call options are very expensive to buy. You’re paying a high premium which you normally will lose most of the time, all right? So using a bullish synthetic spread in a way is being able to enter an options trade at almost zero cost at almost zero cost but having the same profit and loss profile as owning 100 shares. So, I’ll cover that. Then I’ll also cover my other webinar on dividend income investing. Where I’ll talk about how I build this portfolio of again bonds and REITs and private credit that generates annual passive income for me. So, whether I wake up in the morning, I work or don’t work, I get that money every single year. And then the last webinar I normally do is on how to plan to achieve financial freedom in the next, you know, 5, 10, 15 years. And I’ll show you how to use our financial freedom calculator and how to create a step-by-step solid plan to get there. And everyone can get there. But you have to start planning now. Okay, so for those of you who are interested in signing up for this free event and joining Adam for his webinars, you click the link in the description and we’ll see you there. So, until then, keep winning.