I Got Invited as a “Star Trader” Guest Lecturer at Nanyang Business School — 10 Months Later (and following up on 3 Bottom Picks)

Hello everyone, this is going to be a peculiar post.

It’s peculiar because some might think this post is almost 10 months late!

Last year, I had the privilege of being invited to the Nanyang Business School to lecture as the “star trader” in the PB6404 Simulations and Decision Making module for the Professional MBA program.

I was chosen as a guest lecturer in part because I utilized a mixture of fundamental, technical, and sentiment analysis, with a little quant, and guided the QuantZombie Alpha fund (with third-party validation) to a stellar performance of 35% CAGR vs the STI benchmark of 11%, with no leverage, no shorting, and mostly buy-and-hold, with trading/investment decisions made on a weekly/monthly frequency.

My expertise was picking deep-value stocks that had a higher probability of bottoming, while mixing in cash-flow-rich stocks that usually paid good dividends. I had a conservative strategy with a maximum downside of < 10%.

The invitation letter used the term "your distinguished track record," and it is difficult for me to express how those words made me feel at the time, so I am writing this blog to attempt to explain the significance.

It was a little intimidating being given 45 minutes because my audience had an average age in the late 30s and consisted of actual traders, project managers, fund managers and bank management.

During my presentation, I spoke about 4 of my best investment analyses or trades that were publicly validated. These consisted of official reports to my brokerage clients that can be found in

the public domain, or work done on this QuantZombie blog.

It was somewhat… strange and cathartic that I got into professional finance very late in life because almost a decade of my life was lost struggling with erythrodermic eczema, one of the worst cases in Singapore, and by extension, the world. No one knew how much time I spent “imprisoned” in my bedroom, pumped full of strong immunosuppressants, steroids or antihistamines that did not cure me, but left me in a strange equilibrium where I was not sick enough to die, but too sickly and in too much constant pain to live. I’d had worsening eczema for 2 decades by that point. I’d seen almost 8 of the best doctors in Singapore. No cure. Only increasing pain and a shortening life expectancy.

It was in that bedroom, around 2007, age 32, that I realized NO ONE might ever hire me again because I was too old and too sickly, and I embarked on a quest to succeed in the stock market with no prior experience. What does a 2-year engineer and 3 year physics teacher know about the stock market? Everything I learned was in that bedroom. The dozens of books I didn’t understand at the time. The phone calls to my fund manager friend for advice. The experimentation with my savings. I was scuttlebutting, trying to make it work… I didn’t know what I would do if I couldn’t make it work.

Fast forward almost 16 years.

Somehow, not only have I averaged about 19% CAGR (beating the S&P 500 benchmark, which was about 11%) during the almost 8 years I have actively managed portfolios outside of my own, but by God’s living grace, a power I have yet to comprehend, my immune system reversed around 2017, when I was aged 42. Perhaps that breakthrough was more amazing than a self-taught person beating the market by a significant margin. Because the doctors couldn’t explain the mechanism of how my eczema, which had worsened for almost 3 decades, reversed at the late age of 42.

It was more than diet, or lifestyle changes, or location.

I had been doing the “good” things to help eczema for years before but never got good results.

Suddenly, a switch occurred. It coincided with doubling down on my belief in God and trying one more time to be unified with His purpose despite great disappointment. So, this is the best advice I would give anybody. Give Christ a try, a real try. Seek Him on His terms, not yours. The Bible says, “taste and see that the Lord is good” (Psalm 34:8).

I can testify that without Christ, I would never have had the breakthrough ideas in my investment journey, the transformation of my character to be clear-minded when others were fearful, and cautious when others were euphoric, and the sudden surge of improvement in my health when most had given up on me.

In 2009, I thought I’d have a life expectancy that would expire by 2025.

You see, the risk of organ dysfunction is high after taking strong immunosuppressants at big doses for more than 10 years. I started taking max doses of ciclosporin in 2001. So, I gave myself 20 years before organ failure would occur. That’s 2021.

But, in 2017, suddenly, things reversed, and by 2020, I was able to live a somewhat normal life (the last time I was “normal” was at the age of 9), with only 30% of the max dose. I was able to drop the dose by 70% and into the “safe” zone.

And so, here I am. Still standing and in front of a room of my professional peers, sharing some ways of thinking about getting alpha that you cannot find in textbooks. When I probed the audience, I found that there were a few ways of thinking about how to locate the bottom of a stock that they had not heard before. That’s when I felt so humbled that ideas God inspired in me in that bedroom still work today.

I had not been posting over the last year because I was focused on my health, a series of books about God and Victory, and the Deeper Mechanism of Biblical Truths in the face of Impossible Constraints and Prolonged Suffering. Every day, I had to recall and distill the darkest experiences in my life and exposit biblical truth in a way that a person mired in fatalism might read. I hope my book really speaks to those who are under not just difficult problems (as many of us have), but impossible ones; not just big suffering, but prolonged suffering. I want to speak to those who have tried too hard and ended up worse than when they started, who have seen too many doctors and experts and are still struggling to build a foundation for a meaningful life. I want to speak to those whom normal folks cannot or don’t want to understand, and tell them that God can sustain the outlier until the breakthroughs become visible to all.

So, I have been writing almost every day for months.

I have been distilling theological mechanisms and biblical truths because my first book is not only about what happened to me, but all the things I learnt that “hacked” my brain and allowed me to still participate with God’s redemptive plan even when almost everything was bleak and I was isolated from the world for years. I asked myself what book I would have wanted to read back when I was in the Abyss but could not find, and sought to write that book. That’s why the book is taking so long. I am probing as deeply as I can into the mysteries of God’s hesed, and how that interacts with someone whose psychology might already be fractured because of prolonged stress that others may not be able to understand.

I’ve been developing a theological companion—a kind of foundational operating system consisting of biblical, theological, and psychological concepts that undergird the larger project I’m currently writing, tentatively titled 10,000 Days of Sickness: A Christian Memoir and Survival Manual through Prolonged Suffering and the Impossible Constraints of the Abyss.

So, partly as an update—and partly as proof that I’m still alive—here’s Section 6.2 of that companion volume.

https://letterstoamoderndayjob.com/2026/08/16/the-predictive-mind-under-prolonged-suffering/

Back to this post.

Here’s a link to access the presentation I gave then.

20251026 NTU PMBA Trader Talk v7 wo port.pdf

Download PDF • 7.87MB

It will give you a sense of my earlier expertise, and some of the tools I use for market timing. Some are a little proprietary, and some are not evergreen, in the sense that the parameters used for some technical analysis are optimized for that particular time period and may not work the same going forward.

But, towards the end of the presentation, after sharing the biggest hits of the past (in bottom catching), of course they would ask me if there were any bottoming candidates NOW (as in 26 Oct 2025).

Well, I gave them 3 candidates at that time.

COO, Marvell, and ZD.

You can ask any of the attendees for validation.

The main reason I wrote this post is actually not to let people know I presented at the Professional MBA program; it is to follow up on those 3 candidates my quant bottom model SPAT out then.

Historically, the performance of the Quant bottom model is such that approximately 65% of the candidates work out well, with at least a 20% gain within 6 months. Risk management is needed to determine how to cut away candidates that lag or drift lower. The performance of those 3 is typical of the model.

Here they are:

COO.

Price (26 Oct 2025) was $69.5.

Peaked at almost $90 within 1 month (~28% gain) before fundamentals took the share price down to a new bottom around $60, where a new signal hit. This is why even with quant bottom candidates, a fund manager needs a strategy for when to scale out.

MRVL

Price (26 Oct 2025) was $85.

The price continued its bottoming pattern for 5 months before surging to a high of $330 by June 2026, ~250%+ gain.

ZD

Price (26 Oct 2025) was $34.

The price was volatile in a bottoming pattern before value was unlocked in the stock and it spiked to $50 in Mar 2026. After a pullback, it is still creeping higher to its high of $55, for an approximately 60% gain.

Some caveats.

The quant bottom spits out bottoming candidates based on valuation and/or sentiment. There is a layer of my own analysis to understand the company to see if there is a good possibility that an undervalued stock can turn around, or that value can be unlocked. The key thing is that the potential downsides are usually not as high as the upside rewards. So, although some candidates can be volatile to various degrees depending on the nature and circumstances of the stock, this gives you an idea that these picks have asymmetric rewards. This is what we need for Alpha.

Oh. If you really need another candidate… there aren’t that many in this somewhat expensive market. So some might not want to bother. But if you really need to analyze one, one to consider is BSX. (Boston Scientific)

It may be a slow turnaround story. It’s cheap for a medtech company (but not dirt cheap), and has some irons in the fire that, if management executes, could bear fruit before 2028. There may or may not be a short-term pullback; it wouldn't surprise me. Don't expect this to surge 50% in a month, it's not that kind of stock.. but this could be a bottoming process.

After the 45 minutes was over, I told them I was willing to stay back to discuss any idea further.

When I saw that a small group had huddled around and my total time there exceeded 1.5 hours, that's when I realized a quiet, serendipitous resonance in my soul, with a tinge of sadness at all the time lost in my life, that somehow, God was still faithful.

I didn't expect to still be well enough for travel and presentations, and I certainly didn't expect people to still pay attention to me.

Thanks for joining me for my update.

Everyone, stay safe.

Blessings to all,

Ken