In this newsletter, I share content to help you become more financially savvy.

This is not financial advice. It's just education. Please think through your situation before applying anything you read here.

Here's a couple of articles I wrote for the Manila Bulletin in the last month, along with some additional commentary:

What Deepseek Can Teach Us About Investing

https://mb.com.ph/2025/2/12/what-deepseek-can-teach-us-about-investing

This article briefly analyzes the recent AI arms race between Google, OpenAI, and other companies. It highlights how the business landscape can quickly change, and how today's winners can be tomorrow's laggards.

Since writing this article, I've canceled my ChatGPT subscription and am currently using Gemini as my primary AI tool. While ChatGPT is superior at writing content and IT/coding help, Gemini's huge context window has been great for condensing massive amounts of information.

With Gemini, I've been able to do things like upload multiple PDFs of Republic Acts and regulations for an industry, then have Gemini make summaries and answer my questions. I'm also a fan of the Gemini Deep Research function, where you can have Gemini make a research report for any topic with full citations.

Still, despite Gemini's excellent fit for my current use cases, I fully expect to change my main AI over time as the industry evolves. In business, the leaders are always changing!

How a Rumor Made My Aunt Lose Over 50% of Her Investment

https://mb.com.ph/2025/2/26/when-investing-avoid-rumors

This piece is about how rumors can derail your investments. When you hear a financial rumor, always assume that the person on the other side has an agenda. In business and in investing, never assume that people are so generous that they'll give you good advice for free.

An additional anecdote. Around a decade ago, I took an internship in a stock brokerage. I was seated in the office where all the brokers were, typing away at their keyboards with charts on their screens, calling clients about buy and sell orders.

I suspect there was a day when I witnessed actual market manipulation. Two brokers with two different ultra-wealthy clients were, I think, coordinating to pump up the volume on an illiquid stock.

Person A would first buy a lot of shares and then sell them. Usually, there would be no buyers because this was an illiquid penny stock, but in this case, Person B would swoop in and buy all of Person A's shares. They would then swap roles so that B would sell and A would buy. Rinse and repeat.

The net effect of this was that most of their cash was preserved (sans frictional costs like brokerage fees and taxes), but the volume of the stock shot up like crazy alongside a noticeable price uptick, making it look like something big was happening behind the scenes.

I didn't see exactly what happened after these transactions, but you can imagine the rest: People start talking – "Look at the action on this stock! I bet something big is happening behind the scenes – we should buy!" Then, after the stock price rises from all the commotion, A and B both sell all their shares and make a considerable profit, splitting the gains.

The brokers, of course, would be ecstatic about such an arrangement. Imagine all the commissions!

As a general rule of thumb, people invest and go into business to make money, not to be charitable. When somebody gives you a stock tip, ask yourself: How will they profit by giving me this information? If you don't find a good answer to that question, you might find yourself on the wrong end of the deal.

- KEITH LIM