#52

Hans Chan -

What I’m Watching

If you plan to get into writing with fountain pens, the Gourmet Pens YouTube channel is the best resource I’ve come across. It’s clear she’s passionate about writing and it shows in her videos whereas you get a lot of YouTubers are more focused on pen collecting but it’s clear they don’t actually do much writing.

Resource of the week

Honestly, I am just in love with these Midori recycled leather mini flip-top notebooks. I got one this week, I feel like a detective carrying one around!

Quote

This is a principle I’ve started living by in the last few years and I think it’s by far the most effective way to be to achieve results. (Credit to the James Clear newsletter).

"It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

Grace Hopper, a pioneer in computer programming and a US Navy rear admiral, on being bold.

  • TikTok banned on UK and US government phones as well as on US college campuses. This is a very interesting one, we’ve all read the articles on this with the government citing security concerns. But I don’t think that is the full story.
    In Ray Dalio’s new world order book, he talks about how there are 5 types of wars: 1) trade/economic wars, 2) technology wars, 3) capital wars, 4) geopolitical wars, and 5) military wars. Before every military war or ‘hot war’, there is always some mix of the other types leading up to it throughout history. The west is undoubtedly already engaged in every other type with China and Russia right now.
    Is the primary concern spying? Maybe, maybe not, but the fact is there has been no direct evidence be it Huawei or TikTok. The fact is, Chinese technologies have become increasingly competitive in specific sectors such as telecommunications and the reach potential of platforms like TikTok. Restricting them is a way of weaponising market access for these companies. Afterall, it would be political suicide for the US (or UK) government to admit that Chinese technologies have become too competitive so they are having to prevent them from moving too far ahead in the technology war.
    Just a thought, not saying the spying argument has no merit but even if the competitiveness argument were true there would be no way the government would admit it.
  • Corporation tax going up to 25%, with small profits rate at 19%.
  • Go to any property event and you’ll come across someone working on a ‘commercial to resi’ project. There has been a large increase in empty commercial building since COVID, which has led investors to capitalise. It seems there may be more regulation in this space on the horizon.

Thoughts

This week I started the process of searching for my next BTL investment. It’s clear in the current situation, yields are significantly lower than they were before last year. For me, it has always been a long-term play, but now, even more so. Yields are very slim in the usual areas I’m looking at in the North West, places like Liverpool and Greater Manchester.

In London, even with the way rents are, the yields would be non-existent to negative unless the investor-owned the property outright or has a lot of equity. I think unless there is some government intervention soon we’ll continue to see the rental crisis worsen.

GPT is all the rave currently and for good reason. GPT4 got released! As always with these things, it’s easy to get carried away but it’s staggering what it can already do. It seems like we are still in the early stages of these AI tools and now that OpenAI has thrown down the gauntlet, the likes of Google are going to have to respond. It’s a very exciting time as I think we’re going to see huge progress in the coming years. Nothing drives progress more than fierce competition.

Personally, I would love to see it streamline the mortgage industry and especially the ridiculously archaic property legal process in England. It baffles me that it can take 8 months to do a straight transaction. None of it makes any sense, in that you place an offer, and it gets accepted before any legal investigation is carried out. Also how it’s not legally binding. Offer accepted is more like: ‘we’ll see how I feel in 3 months’. Don’t get me started on why it’s so hard for solicitors to ascertain who is waiting for an email from who. Hopefully, with smarter AI we can streamline these things.

While the world is moving at breakneck speed with all this AI talk, I’m taking things much slower with my handwriting class. Filming should start next week and I’ll be including some teasers here.

Have a good week!

Hans