Not good enough of a son

Sunday is a family day.

My parents are 60 years old and getting older by the day. My dad suffered a mini illness recently, which has made Sunday an even more sacred day to dedicate time for my family. We’d go “hunting” for new coffeeshops or Kopitiam that just opened in Jakarta and my Mom always has a new place in mind (Instagram victim) that inevitably offers a more attractive place to hangout and drink coffee on a Sunday. And let’s not forget that peanut butter toast with butter (extra emphasis with the butter). Please don’t tell me you have not tried that one yet, although make sure you get your exercise down too.

But obviously with every Chindo (Chinese Indonesian) family, lunch is never just a family lunch for us to chitchat happily about life and spend quality time. It is also a war zone.

The children (in other words me and my siblings) need to fight a psychological battle with my Dad in two crucial battle fields:

• Number one, who made better progress in their business (i.e. making money). How much is your revenue this month? Why does it sound low?

• Number two, who sounds more intelligent in their knowledge about geopolitics or macroeconomics. Hey, I bet that the invasion of country X to country Y is going to cause the oil prices to rally. I managed to sell put options and make a profit from the premiums!

• [Optional - sometimes discussed] Who lives a healthier lifestyle, day to day.

Boy, it is a brutal battle. And usually a losing one.

Especially for me because I run Recompound. You might be thinking, hey isn’t Recompound a good business? Well yes, but not a good one to brag to your Chindo Dad. Let me explain.

The fee structure with customers we handle is on a monthly basis. So if there’s no fee that we charge, because our customers’ portfolio don’t surpass previous all time high, there’s literally nothing to brag about. Not that I brag about our performance to people, which you will find out why later.

Furthermore, we don’t look at macro. If you are a potential customer who are hoping to get macro analysis to predict movements of the market, we will surely disappoint. So don’t come to us if you are looking for macro analysis cause-effect → prediction. Find someone else.

The last banger is that the way we do investing is hyper boring. No promises, no hype, no multibagger rallies. Just investing in earnest businesses with good quality management and healthy cashflow. Helping people hold for the long term. We lost against the index in 2025 as our performance was about 18%.

I mean, who in the right mind would brag about 18% returns to their friends over coffee? 😂 The brags I hear on coffee shops nowadays is 50% profits, minimum.

So during these psychological wars vs my Dad, I’d often stay silent. I’ll be vague about how the business is going. I will also just nod my head about money flows from US to Japan to Gold to Bitcoin and to my pocket. Not because I am an obedient son, but really because I have no idea about the development of geopolitics and international macroeconomics, unless it is a key business variables for the companies we look into. I do not want to pretend to know. Let alone make predictions out of it.

So what’s the emotion that usually come about during these conversation to me?

Well, to be frank, I’d feel that “I am not good enough”.

Now you might be thinking, but you have achieved this and that and yes I am very proud of the achievements that we have managed to earn thus far.

But feelings of being “not good enough” is as real as it gets. Feelings of fear when markets crash after the recent foreign selloffs or after seeing a long post about how the future of the country is bleak is real. Feelings of greed when everything seems up, like there’s no way that your investments are going to suffer from drawdown or there’s no way that target price is not going to get hit, such that you want to topup with more funds — is also very real.

These feelings from my experience almost cannot be controlled or suppressed. They surface whenever they want to. They never ask for permission to appear because we are only human from the way our brain is structured.

But the odd thing is that I keep doing what I do. Even when I feel that “I am not good enough” every weekend during this psychological war. Why?

Because it turns out, by investing in stocks in a conservative way, we get two things in return:

One, our customers’ and my ability to focus on our craft. Our customers are as sharp as a knife when it comes to looking our investment thesis document. They question fair payback period, industry assumptions and diligence that is done on the companies. But, once those are done, they get to focus on their work and career accordingly.

Two, we get to experience lucky breaks, during which we always practise gratitude. From day 1, we’d want our customers to have as low of an expectation as possible. Our team expects very minimal returns from capital appreciation. We carefully assess the quality of company earnings and likelihood of dividend yield. The buying opportunities become a conservative bet to get good earnings via higher dividend yields.

So when companies get appreciated through things that we don’t expect — buybacks, tender offer, or we don’t know, other people noticing how good and cheap the companies really are — we get to practice gratitude.

So yeah, not everything is about returns although returns is a very important component. But the manner in which the returns are produced turns out to be very important for these high achieving individuals.

But I suppose my experience running this thing called Recompound has made me realise that I am most proud of doing what I do because our customers can continue focus on building their career, giving value to other people through their businesses and developing their craft. I realise that feeling of being a “not good enough” son is a potent fuel to push me into action. Even though I may never be good enough of a son, I think my actions and intention allow me to say that “I am good enough” of a person 🙂

Now get your grenades ready.