Edmond Chan

This is what my perfect restaurant experience would look like

chanman · Oct 22, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Following from my last post and continuing my new series on Making Things Better, here is my perfect restaurant experience:

I’d come across it through a recommendation, from a trusted foodie friend or from a newspaper column by a food person that I liked such as Nicolas Lander in the FT.
I’d look up the restaurant + reviews and see what Tripadvisor says. If it’s above 4.5 stars out of 5, then I’m going to look closer.
Next, I’d go on the restaurant’s website. It should be clearly laid out and the menu would be easy to find.
The menu would be fairly short (one page) and clear and to the point. No words like ‘nestled on a bed of crushed new potatoes and crowned with a foamy jus’.
The wine list would be short as well (one page), with well selected red and whites and fortified wines. Good red and whites should be available by the glass and by carafe as well as by the bottle.
Next I look at its booking policy. I don’t mind no reservation as long as the queue on arrival is no more than 10 mins. If able to book, then I would like to use a hosted and embedded platform like Opentable so that I don’t have to call the restaurant.
If I have to call, then I would like the conversation to go:
- Good morning, this is <restaurant>, this is <name> speaking. How can I help you?
- I would like to make a booking please.
- Yes of course. When would you like to book for?
- Next Thursday at 7.30pm if possible?
- How many in your party please?
- 2 in total.
- I’ve just checked and we are unfortunately fully booked at that time but would 8pm work for you instead?
- Yes that would be good thank you.
- Excellent. If I could please take your name, telephone number and email address, I will then send you a text and email confirmation of your booking for next Thursday. Is there anything else that I can help with you today?
- No thank you.
- Perfect, thank you very much and we look forward to seeing you next Thursday Mr Chan.
I receive a clear email notification within 10 seconds of ending the call as well as a text.
On the evening itself, I get there with my wife and the front door person greets me with a warm smile and asks if I have a reservation. I say I do and they say ‘Of course. Could I take your coat or bag please? Please follow my colleague to your table.’
The tables aren’t too close to each other.
There are white table cloths and nice cutlery with white linen napkins.
There is a nice hubbub from the other diners
There’s an excited atmosphere of what’s to come
The wait staff pulls out the chair for my wife and then for me.
They present my wife with the wine list and we have a menu each.
They ask if we’re hungry. If so, they recommend starters and their favourite main courses but of course they follow our lead on what we want
Then they suggest considered wines to accompany each dish or they follow our lead with our choice of wine. The wines are good value and not too much above what I would expect those wines to cost.
5 minutes later, they return with a free drink, something like an interesting apertif
Our starters arrive with some complimentary fresh bread and proper butter at room temperature, as well as with our wines. They are equally delicious, with neither of us feeling like they missed out.
Our plates are cleared within 2 minutes of us finishing and our tables are wiped down discreetly of any mess and crumbs
Our main dishes arrive with their own wines.They are equally delicious, with neither of us feeling like they missed out.
And again our plates are cleared within 2 minutes of us finishing and our tables are wiped down discreetly of any mess and crumbs
The toilets are spacious and spotless and smells fresh. There are nice plants and flowers with good music playing but not too loudly. There are ample urinals which have detergent blocks inside them. There are huge mirrors and nice soaps with the choice of real hand towels or air dry.
We are offered the dessert menu and when we decline, we are offered complimentary teas and coffees.
When we leave, we are helped into our coats and the door is opened for us and they shake our hands goodbye and they say ‘Thank you very much for coming. We hope to see you very soon.’
The next day, they send a nice email to say thanks again for our visit and that on our next visit, we would have a complimentary glass of wine.

Bitcoin at USD 5,500. Is it too late to get in?

chanman · Oct 18, 2017 · Leave a Comment

I’m a buy and holder (a HODL) of cryptocurrencies.

I don’t use leverage.

I buy the underlying asset and I hold it.

I don’t trade in and out of crypto.

This means that I don’t look at the price on a daily basis.

I hadn’t looked at Bitcoin’s price since early October when it was in the early USD 4,000s.

I looked two day ago and it had breached USD 5,500.

This really is a wonderful journey.

What other financial instrument do you know that is this volatile?!

I’m happy that it’s gone up but I wish that it had held at the lower level for a while longer. I haven’t finished buying enough of what I want yet. It looks like the price is going to keep getting away from me so all I can do is follow my own advice and dollar cost average my Bitcoin buys.

Three questions to ask yourself when considering whether it’s too late to buy in at this price

1) What could push the price lower than this price in the future?

Destructive forks
Other coins winning the battle for cryptocurrency dominance (assuming that only one can win)
A serious problem with the code that hasn’t been discovered yet
A massive hack to a major exchange like Coinbase
An inability to scale Bitcoin on the current blockchain

2) What is the potential upside?

It’s a limited supply resource. There’ll only ever be 21m Bitcoins. But people are waking up to it and more people want in. And even now, it’s not easy to buy and store Bitcoin.

This demand has already taken BTC from USD 800 in Jan 2017 to USD 5,500 in Oct 2017.

It could get to USD 10,000 by the end of 2017. Why not?

It could get to USD 50,000 by the end of 2018. Why not?

If the normal man on the street wants some Bitcoin, why couldn’t the demand massively exceed supply? In which case, it could get to absolutely crazy numbers. Crazy good for holders (HODLs).

3) What is the likelihood of achieving this potential upside?

Who knows?

Anyone who says they’re sure it’s going to go wildly up or crash to zero is chatting bullshit.

Nobody knows.

The wisest man in the room knows that he doesn’t know.

All you can do is to position yourself correctly for each eventuality and weight your position to lean towards the outcome you favour. Edmond Chan Oct 2017 🙂

For me, that means not betting more than I can afford to lose but betting enough that the pay-off becomes life-changingly meaningful.

My friends ask me now, is it too late at these levels? I say that it might look toppy but you’ve got to be in it to win it. I’m still buying. (Obviously the usual disclaimers apply. Do your own research before risking any money.)

This is what my perfect bank would look like

chanman · Oct 7, 2017 · Leave a Comment

There’s a lot of buzz around challenger banks at the moment. You’ve got Monzo, Starling, Atom and Revolut. As part of a new series on my blog called Making Things Better or If Carlsberg Did (I haven’t decided yet), here is what my perfect bank would look like:

It would be free to have an account
The savings rate would be better than any competitor
The overdrawn rate would be lower than any other competitor
It would be online
It would have a physical branch in every town
It had a free customer phone line where my call would be answered in 10 seconds or less by a person who knew how to solve my problem
It would be free to withdraw money from ATMs
It would be free to withdraw money from overseas ATMs and when paying for stuff overseas
It would be demonstrably more financially secure than any competitor
- Ideally no lending, but if it did lend, then it would never endanger the bank’s health and lend at friendly rates to small businesses and start ups
It would have name recognition so that it wasn’t viewed as a Mickey Mouse bank
It would invest in good causes
The app would:
- Give me text notifications as to what I’m spending and where, and the timing of the notification would be customisable (daily, weekly, monthly etc)
- List all my subscriptions/services that I pay for on my card without knowing it
- Tell me when pay day is
- Tell me when I’m spending more than the limit I wanted and told the app
I’d be able to hold multi currencies in my account
It would link to an integrated investment platform that guided me to make wise decisions

So that’s my perfect bank.

It’s another question as to how to make this happen.

For example, how will this bank make money if it doesn’t lend or doesn’t lend aggressively?

One possibility is that it invests in bonds with different time horizons that are reasonably safe and pay okay coupons. Would this be enough to cover the cost base and expenses of this bank?

Let me know what your perfect bank would like in the comments below!

The easiest way for you to get into Bitcoin right now

chanman · Oct 4, 2017 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been in the cryptocurrency rabbit hole for a few months now, and people ask me how I’d recommend they buy Bitcoin.

It’s just two steps:

First, you need a wallet to receive your Bitcoins into

The easiest one I’d recommend you use is Exodus.

The safest one I’d recommend is a hardware wallet like Trezor.

But for your first Bitcoins, I’d recommend using Exodus.

Check out my previous post on how to set up Exodus on your machine

Second, you need to buy Bitcoins and send them to your wallet

In the UK, I’d recommend Bittylicious. It’s a bit more expensive than other exchanges, but it has the benefit of requiring less ID verification. You just need to enter your Bitcoin address (from your Exodus wallet) into Bittylicious, confirm the amount of Bitcoin you want to buy, and transfer GBP from your bank account to the Bitcoin seller’s bank account. The seller will then send the Bitcoin to your Exodus Bitcoin wallet.

And that’s it! You now have some Bitcoin! Easy!

Let me know if you buy some this way in the comments below. How do you buy yours?

Should you ever buy ICO tokens on the secondary market?

chanman · Sep 26, 2017 · Leave a Comment

So recently I’ve bought small nibbles of OmiseGo and Augur. Primarily because they were so easy to buy using ShapeShift within my Exodus wallet.

However, I’ve begun questioning whether that was a good idea and whether I’m losing my investing discipline by buying ICO tokens that are on the secondary market.

First off, what is an ICO?

An ICO is an Initial Coin Offering. This is not the same as an IPO or (Initial Public Offering).

In an IPO, you get shares in a company.

In an ICO, you are being asked to crowdfund an interesting project that in all likelihood hasn’t come to even an alpha release yet. Instead of shares, you get tokens.

Now investing in these tokens is not the same as investing in a coin (whether Bitcoin or an altcoin) and it’s important that we don’t lose our heads in the huge range of possible cryptocurrency investments.

Secondly, what is the secondary market in an ICO?

The primary market is where you participate in the first issue of ICO tokens. I.e. the project issues the tokens in return for money (usually Ether). This is the primary market.

If you then want to sell the tokens to me, then the tokens are said to be trading on the secondary market. The key difference is for the issuer (the project) of the token. In the first case (primary), the issuer gets capital. In the second case, the issuer does not get capital.

Let’s get back to basics.

A good coin investment has certain characteristics:

It has limited supply
It has respected code
It has been around for a few years at least
It has its own unique differentiating features like enhanced privacy
It has a strong market cap

Our ultimate aim in this blog is to make money speculating in cryptocurrencies and make as much of it as possible.

So firstly, to make money, we have to our overall investments/speculations have to make positive returns. So we aim to lose as little money as possible.

And secondly, to make as much of it as possible, we aim to have the greatest upside we can have.

This could play out in a few ways:

Say we were investing £10,000.

£10,000 into Bitcoin and zero elsewhere.
£5,000 into BTC and £5,000 into Ethereum (ETH)
£5,000 into BTC, £2,500 into ETH and £2,500 Monero (XMR)
or £1,000 equally into BTC, ETH, XMR, Litecoin, Dash, OmiseGo, Augur, Aragon, Verge, Decred.

Which of the above do you think will make more money in the long run?

Which scenario do you think has more chance of losing money?

Which has more potential upside?

It’s not easy to answer those questions.

If you’re thinking that Bitcoin has had most of its multiples of growth, then you’re less likely to go with option 1, because, you might fancy that you’d find that growth in another instead.

If you think that most altcoins/tokens (like OmiseGo, Augur (REP), Aragon) are not going to be worth anything in the long term, then you’re not going to go with option 4, because you would lose £3,000 of your £10,000 investment (30%).

I think that there’s a strong chance that these tokens and other ICO tokens, whilst having some great projects that they’re funding, will not be tradable or worth anything in 5 to 10 years time. This is because they don’t stack up well against the characteristics that we highlighted above that good coin investments share such as limited supply.

Remember the last post on OmiseGo? They don’t think they’ll increase the supply. That really isn’t the same as not having guaranteed limited supply like Bitcoin does. Bitcoin will never go above 21 million coins because that’s what’s written in the code.

Remember the post on Augur (REP)? What do you get for your REP? You get some platform fees but that isn’t the same as having a fungible, privacy enabled cryptocurrency like Monero.

What will these ICO tokens be worth in a few years?

So should you never trade ICO tokens?

I’m not saying never. I just don’t think you should hold on for forever, because in the majority of cases, I don’t think they’re going to be worth a great deal, if anything at all.

Sure, you may pick a couple of winners, but how are you going to pick ICO token winners from the 1,000 that are already on coinmarketcap.com?

That being said, I don’t think that there may be good time to risk some money on the secondary ICO token market.

That’s when there’s been a good run-in to the ICO, where there’s heavyweight support for the project (like Augur, Golem etc) and there is real appetite to fund the project for the good of the future.

After the ICO, there may be a run-up to a price many multiples of the ICO price.

Look at the below chart of OmiseGo (OMG):

The ICO in late June has seen a huge run up in price, from around USD 1 to USD 12. That’s an astonishing 1200% return in a couple of months.

With ICO tokens on the secondary market ie post-ICO, I think there’s potential plays where:

The project is supported and well-backed by respected figures in the community like Vitalik Buterin.
You enter near to the ICO date and hopefully price.
You exit this position (or at least some of it to crystallise gains) within a couple of months.

Look at the below chart of Augur (REP):

This play may have worked here:

Well supported project

Enter in late Nov 2015 and exit in Feb 2016 or Mar 2016

So the question is: what are the recent or upcoming ICOs that are well-supported projects where we can try out this strategy?

Let me know what you think in the comments below!