A relatively quiet week for the markets as the US had a long Memorial day weekend. The only excitement was the release of Fauci’s emails from last year and accusations of more conspiracies from the usual GOP suspects.
With mounting legal battles ahead, the orange one once again made a desperate attempt to rally his troops with a promise that he will be back in the White House in Aug. This was after being kicked out in Nov and also for inciting the 06 Jan riots to stop a “stolen” election result. Incredible and defying logic, yet many still love a new conspiracy theory and want to live in an alternate lah-lah land reality.
The continued discovery of new unlinked Covid cases around the island is still a worrying sign as we entered into the 3rd week of the new lockdown restrictions. With higher testing capabilities (from 4k/day last year to about 73k now), it is inevitable that we will discover more positive cases with a greater amount of testing. Coupled with the use of real-time contact tracing tokens via Bluetooth by all citizens, the automation of manual tracing would tempt the authorities to quarantine as many people as possible to be on the safe side of caution. More housing blocks have been targeted for testing to isolate and arrest unlinked clusters. This had been a very successful method used in HK for residential areas as tightly packed as S’pore.
This is a continuous learning curve as we learn to adapt to the new normal. Each day does feel the same as we get into a standard routine to pass the day without getting mad. Weekends and weekdays look the same now too. To keep sane, I go for a run every morning and spend the rest of the day in front of the computer either to attend my online classes or to do my homework/read about investments. More useless hours also spend watching youtube videos. Many evenings are usually accompanied by a welcoming happy hour drink before dinner and finally some readings/TikTok before bedtime.
An event like going out of the house to the wet market on Sat morning becomes something to look forward to. It helps to break the monotony. I travelled all the way to Sentosa midweek to have lunch at a friend’s place to comply with the 2 visitors per household per day restrictions. Given that there is no dine-in at all food outlets, I bought lunch at the food court to bring it to his apartment. We had a good 4 hours of food and discussion about life and discussed his future plans (his last day of work was on Mon).
Little things we take for granted in a normal world seems like treasured moments now. We may get so used to this lifestyle after more than a year that we might not know how to get back to the old normal again if we ever get back there.
The virus mutates as the world plays catch up every now and then. The promise of vaccines as a cure also creates new headaches for each country to try to reach herd immunity. We stumble along and try to react in the best possible way, but mistakes are bound to occur with insufficient past data to learn from. And it only takes one mistake in one part of the world to affect everyone across the world. Never have I experienced an event like this that affects every living human being on planet earth before. The 2008 GFC probably affected only less than 10% of the world population then. Stars of last month can suddenly become failures over a matter of weeks – S’pore, Vietnam, Taiwan as examples.
On the personal front, my Data Science class moved towards the project stage and our team finally decided on the dataset to use. Next week will be mostly group discussions via Zoom to use IBM cloud tools to build upon our project presentation.
I had also finalized my new Myanmar Treasury consultancy contract. I shorten it to 6 months as I am still very bearish about the country after the Feb military coup. My course ends in Aug and maybe that is the right time to seriously consider pivoting into the AI industry to get some real hands-on experience. The Banking /Treasury sector seems to have become sunset industries with the aggressive push of Fintech and AI into this space very soon.
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