Dear Students of Batch 8,It’s been a great honour and privilege to be able to conduct a 2-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you. We’re seeing some really interesting twists and turns for this particular batch of students ever since I decided to make the course more democratic and gave students the chance to select the strategy to perform the screening on. The hallmark of a good DIY investor is autonomy – the ability to make your own decisions to invest in something regardless of what was taught. In this batch, you were presented with two possible strategies for REIT investing – a “high dividend strategy” and a “strong sponsor strategy”. Students initially voted to select a strategy with good sponsors after reviewing the quantitative metrics but proceeded to reject 50% of REIT counters after one session of qualitative analysis (largely due to the fact that yields are so low). You...