Dear Students of Batch 17,

It’s been a great honour and privilege to be able to conduct a 2-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you. 

So many things could have gone wrong in Batch 17.

First, we launched the ERM crowdsourcing tool, but I found out last minute that the web-hosted database will reset all recent input information whenever the website goes into sleep-mode. I had to run my web program from my personal laptop as a last-minute hack.

Second, the fundamental back-testing tool was not running properly as a code-fix made last night bungled up a data download from the provider. Fortunately, Ivan Fok, founder of Pyinvesting.com, was able to fix it 20 minutes before we started on our practice session.

This is my first taste of the ERM Masterclass as a startup where we often have to learn to eat failure for breakfast. If we survive, we will get