Dear Students of Batch 26, It’s been a great honour and privilege to conduct a 5-Day Early Retirement Workshop for you. Batch 26 is one of the luckiest batches to graduate from the ERM programme, just a tad less lucky compared to Batch 12, which managed to buy right at the market bottom of the pandemic crisis. Batch 12 bought the stocks in March 2020 and constructed a dividend portfolio that generated 7% per year. At the time of writing, they still managed an XIRR of 16% when the rest of ERM was plugging along with an XIRR of just 4%. This can be considered the wrong time to invest for many people. The US had just completed two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. China is bogged down by the demon of its own design, otherwise known as the Zero COVID policy. Russia is still trying to invade Ukraine. The...