ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Silver is extremely volatile. But there is an arguable case for having a small amount of Silver in your Gold portfolio to enhance its financial performance. (all numbers in USD) 1. The correlation of Silver with Gold is always positive, never negative. In other words when Gold goes up, Silver follows. Historically, R ranges from 0.5 to 0.8 2. Silver has a Beta of 1.2 to 1.6 against Gold. i.e. theoretically when Gold goes up by 1.00 Silver goes up by 1.20 to 1.60. 3. Silver’s reward/risk ratio (RRR). Its no use to apply statistical RRR like Sharpe or Sortino as Silver will be penalized for its volatility. But here,  here we are actually exploiting Silver’s volatility for our objective. 4. A common-sense way to estimate RRR for Silver is to take 50.00 as the downside (Silver has been above 50.00 since it broke through this level on 9 October 2025- that’s 55 weeks.) For upside we take the January 2026 all-time high of 120.00. So, the RRR is 120/50=240% 5. The affordability f...

  Singapore has launched a new S$150 million AI-powered platform to accelerate advanced materials discovery. The initiative, named MARVEL-AI (Materials Accelerator for Research, Venture and Enterprise Launchpad), was officially announced by Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong at the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology.  MARVEL-AI aims to compress traditional material development lifecycles from several years down to just a few months. I made the attached MP4 for you to know why discovering new materials is crucial for Singapore’s future-oriented economy.  Click on it to see how a fictional new metal alloy Singallium was discovered and see its industrial usage.    But first some key facts about this new AI-driven new materials discovery robolab.  Key  Operations & Focus Areas Led by the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), the platform combines advanced generative artificial intelligence with robotics-driven "self-driving lab...

 Until this whole mess is sorted out: Fed FOMC 28 Oct, US mid-term elections 3 Nov, US-Iran Hormuz, Houthis-Saudi Arabia; the level of uncertainty is too high for any meaningful analysis amid the daily volatility. But one positive signal for gold/silver is that even though inflation is raging, there are signs of investors expecting it to be quickly followed by a recession- which is good for gold/and silver as the Fed will do all it can to avoid or mitigate a recession by its usual measures of printing money and maybe bailing out the too-big-to-fail entities like the big banks- and this category of entities now include the debt-ridden the AI, semiconductor and data centre companies.    Gold/Silver prices are not correlated with nominal interest rates but real interest rates which is nominal rates minus inflation, a.k.a. real yields. In the chart below, the left 2 panels show the 10-year real yields and the right 2 panels show the 5-year real yield. Real yields are neg...

More than 60% of trading in the US stock market is driven by algorithms. This increases the probability of sudden crashes.  The Danish theoretical physicist Per Bak’s book “How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organised Criticality”. Self-organised criticality describes systems that slowly drift into a fragile state, where a trigger of any size can set off a cascade of any size. In this sense stock market crashes are no different from forest fires, avalanches, traffic jams, crowd stampedes, algal blooms in water, or guitar amplifier feedback. So, I have made is a simulation of how a stock market behaves before it crashes. The data is synthetically generated. Click on the MP4, sit back and enjoy an entertaining 2-minute simulation complete with sound. The blue, green, orange and red dots represent swarms of investors and their changing perception as the market evolves.  What the video shows: 0:06–0:20 – Calm market. A small “nudge” sell order lands and is absorbed. The gain re...

  This is getting scary. I made this MP4 of an actual conversation with an AI who addressed me as Uncle Khean seems to know quite a bit about me. What next for AI? Sentience? Sapience? If plants can feel and talk (ask King Charles of England) and fungi can communicate with the trees around them through the mycelium network, why shouldn't AI be regarded as sentient beings. They are already sapient.

  Part 3: Vulnerabilities: Sulfuric acid, Helium, and PM Wong’s Qatar trip Oil and gas are not only fuels. Processing them yields by-products that modern industry cannot do without, and the Gulf is a dominant supplier of several. Three matter especially for Singapore: Sulphur, Sulphuric Acid, Helium What they are used for in Singapore • Sulphur. Mostly a by-product rather than a raw material here. Singapore's refineries must strip sulphur out of crude to meet clean-fuel and low-sulphur ship-fuel rules, and recover it as elemental sulphur. Its main industrial use is as the feedstock for sulphuric acid; it is also used in rubber and specialty chemicals. • Sulphuric acid. Ultra-pure "electronic-grade" acid is used in wafer fabs to strip photoresist and clean wafers between hundreds of process steps. Ordinary grades are used in chemical manufacturing on Jurong Island, in metal finishing and plating for electronics and chip packaging, and to control acidity in industrial w...