Quora Answer: As a Police Officer, What is Something Small That Raises Your Suspicion?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “As a police officer, what is something small, someone can do, that makes you immediately suspicious?”

It is very suspicious when people remember certain things in great detail without being able to explain why.  For example, if you ask the average person what they had for lunch yesterday, they would have to pause and think.  It is the same when you ask what they wore last week, or any random detail of an activity we take for granted.  Our brain does not deem these details important, and they are not immediately recalled.

When somebody is able to give a lot of specific details as a witness, I am immediately suspicious, because there is a likelihood that the story is rehearsed.  Most people do not have that sort of memory.  When we have several witnesses, and they all tend to get very minor details congruent, I would immediately investigate the relationship between them, and look for collusion.

Human witnesses for crimes are extremely unreliable.  They are a useful starting point to gather clues, and point us in the correct direction, but getting a human witness to stand up to cross examination is a great challenge, and often inadequate.  People’s recollection is notoriously unreliable.  When groups of people are able to corroborate specific details, it must be because the details are very significant, or they colluded.

Club Growth in Singapore Toastmasters: Observations from a Year on the Ground

The following reflections come from a year of club visits, conversations with committee members and rank-and-file Toastmasters across Singapore, and my own preliminary observations as Area Director, Area A2.  Toastmasters International, founded by Dr. Ralph C. Smedley in 1924, has grown globally to roughly 265,261 members across 13,833 clubs in 149 countries as of 2025.  That is a decline from the 345,000 members and 16,000 clubs the organisation counted in 2016.  A global membership organisation does not shrink by accident, and Singapore’s District 80, spanning 194 clubs, is not immune to the same structural pressures playing out at street level.

Singapore’s Toastmasters clubs fall broadly into three categories: school, community centre, and corporate.  School clubs deserve little strategic attention here, constrained as they are by academic calendars.  Members treat them as networking and personal development vehicles, and turnover runs high by design, since students graduate and leave, unless the club functions as an alumni body resembling a corporate club.  Long-term strategic planning has limited scope in a club whose entire membership base refreshes every few years regardless of what the committee does.

The Chartering Problem

One recurring problem across all club types is the tendency to charter new clubs with insufficient regard for their long-term sustainability.  Incumbent officers focus on hitting immediate chartering milestones, and the resulting structural weaknesses become the successor’s problem to solve, usually after the original officer has already claimed credit and moved on.  Formal tracking of new clubs, with specific reward structures for clubs surviving past the three-year mark, would address this directly.  The finance industry’s persistency guidelines, tracking whether a policy remains in force years after being sold rather than merely counting the initial sale, offer an obvious model.  We cannot implement that model wholesale, since district officers rotate annually, which limits exactly the kind of multi-year accountability the finance industry takes for granted.

Community Clubs and the Cannibalisation Problem

Community clubs draw an inclusive, geographically bound catchment, and vary considerably in vibrancy and sustainability as a result.  The core problem here is proximity: clubs sitting near one another cannibalise the same limited membership pool, benefiting nobody.  A common and corrosive practice compounds this.  Members join multiple clubs purely to help a friend hit a charter member quota, producing what I call zombie clubs, technically chartered, functionally hollow, and entirely unsustainable.  District 80’s own retention data shows an annual retention rate of 68.8% across the district as of May 2025, a respectable figure on paper that nonetheless masks considerable variance between genuinely thriving clubs and clubs kept alive purely on paper by members with no real intention of attending.  The real danger is not simply zombie clubs closing.  It is the members propping them up growing jaded and abandoning Toastmasters altogether, having never experienced a functioning club in the first place.  We spend far too much energy on recruitment and nowhere near enough on retention, when retention is the metric that actually determines whether any of this recruitment was worthwhile.

The fix requires area and division-level coordination on marketing and branding, raising both awareness and credibility of Toastmasters as an institution.  The target should be a one-percentage-point increase in membership relative to Singapore’s population.  Toastmasters needs to be positioned as prestigious, a genuine form of corporate training equipping people for career mobility, rather than a hobbyist speaking circle we merely talk about being valuable.  Integrating this positioning into community club programmes tied to workforce skills retraining initiatives would open a genuine funding avenue through Singapore’s existing skills programmes, rather than relying on membership fees alone to keep the lights on.

Corporate Clubs and the Fragility of Management Buy-In

Corporate clubs face an entirely different vulnerability: they exist at the mercy of management sentiment and market conditions.  Too many genuinely vibrant clubs die the moment company executives decide the programme lacks demonstrable worth.  AIA Toastmasters offers the counterexample worth replicating.  Management support runs deep enough that the CEO himself is a member, alongside a considerable portion of the executive team, achieved because successive Executive Committees made deliberate presentations to leadership on how effective communication training advances corporate goals directly.  Management, as a result, treats Toastmasters as integral internal training, allocating budget and support accordingly rather than tolerating it as an employee perk.  Replicating that outcome elsewhere requires the same deliberate, direct engagement with management, not the passive hope that executives will eventually notice the club’s value on their own.

The Leadership Training Gap Hiding Behind the Slogan

Toastmasters markets itself as “Where Leaders Are Made,” and yet meaningful leadership or management training is largely absent from actual club programming.  This is a genuine waste, given how many qualified, experienced members sit inside the membership rolls with real leadership credentials to offer.  Programming beyond conventional speeches deserves more initiative.  Panel discussions, already embedded in the Pathways Level 5 project, offer one underused format.  I tested this directly last term with two panels.  The first, held immediately after contest season, examined the ethics of judging contests and how the process could improve, drawing on past winners and chief judges to test audience reaction.  The second, more general in scope, addressed having a vision for the club.  Feedback from both sessions revealed something uncomfortable: we have not successfully translated what Toastmasters actually offers into measurable, real-world professional application for members.  That gap deserves considerably more scrutiny than it currently receives.

Toastmasters, as a programme, suits one specific category of person particularly well: someone who wants to speak publicly for the explicit purpose of gaining professional or public recognition.  One category of organisation is disproportionately full of exactly these people, with both the catchment and the budget to sustain new clubs: Voluntary Welfare Organisations.

People rarely join Toastmasters purely to speak well in public as an abstract goal.  They join to become good speakers in service of a specific personal agenda.  Sometimes that agenda is as modest as impressing a romantic interest.  Sometimes it is career advancement.  Within VWOs specifically, the agenda frequently runs considerably higher: impressing enough people to eventually run for public office.  This is, in effect, the natural catchment of parliamentary hopefuls, a demographic already primed to value rhetoric as a professional necessity rather than a nice-to-have.  Having served fourteen years on the board of one such organisation, rising to Vice-President, I can confirm board service grants direct access to ministers and ministerial staff, people for whom public speaking is not optional but a daily operational requirement.  These organisations already run debate clubs.  None, to my knowledge, run a club actually teaching rhetoric as a discipline.  That gap is the opportunity.

Conclusion

We succeed together, or we do not meaningfully succeed at all.  Fostering a genuine culture of growth and idea-sharing requires setting that example openly, which is precisely why these observations are offered here, in public, inviting legitimate criticism so the ideas can be refined rather than quietly shelved.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters

Q1 2020 Market Outlook: Covid-19 & What It Means for Your Investments

This was written in March 2020.  The analysis that follows reflects the information and market conditions available at that time.  It is reproduced here as a record of the thinking — and as evidence that clear-headed analysis, even in a genuine crisis, produces more useful conclusions than panic.

The Human Reality and the Market Reality

These are two different things.  They interact, but they are not the same.

Inadequate quarantine enforcement, insufficient testing, and overstretched healthcare systems across Europe and North America will produce significant casualties.  This is a human tragedy.  It is also not the primary variable in determining long-term investment value.  Market sentiment and consumer confidence are short-term effects.  Underlying asset values are a longer-term question.  The two should not be confused.  Confusing them produces the wrong decisions at the wrong time.

The Pandemic Trajectory

Since the outbreak began in Wuhan in early December 2019, East Asian economies — Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan — demonstrated early and effective responses.  China has ceased reporting domestic cases.  All new Chinese cases are imported.  The East Asian experience indicates the trajectory: domestic infections peak, flatten, and are replaced by imported cases as the domestic situation stabilises.

Europe and North America are not yet at this stage.  They are the new epicentres.  The race between containment measures and infection spread is ongoing and, at the time of writing, not clearly won by either side.

The Policy Response

Central banks have responded aggressively.  The US Federal Reserve cut policy rates by 50 basis points in an unscheduled meeting.  The European Central Bank launched an emergency bond-buying programme of €750 billion — approximately US$820 billion — to calm sovereign debt markets in Italy and Spain, the most vulnerable Euro-area economies.  Further quantitative easing and rate cuts are expected across major economies.  The US government is proposing a trillion-dollar stimulus package.  Similar measures will follow globally.

These Keynesian interventions are designed to prop up the sectors most affected by quarantine and depressed demand.  They will eventually support equity markets — though the timing is uncertain and the path through the crisis is not linear.

The Recession

Certain major economies will enter recession for at least 18 months.  This is not a catastrophe.  It is an opportunity.  Recessions produce structural changes in government spending priorities, in consumer behaviour, and in the competitive landscape of industries.  Economies facing elections in the next 18 months — the United States and Singapore among them — face additional political pressure to implement social welfare measures that would otherwise be deferred.  Recessions also produce asset prices that do not reflect underlying long-term value.  This is where the investor’s opportunity lies.

The Oil Shock

The timing is unfortunate.  A price war between OPEC — led by Saudi Arabia — and Russia has driven crude prices down 26% to an 18-year low.  Both sides are maximising production to grab market share and force the other to capitulate.  This playbook is from the 1970s and is inadequate for the current environment.  Saudi Arabia’s economy depends on oil for approximately 80% of its revenues.  Russia's economy is more diversified, and its sovereign wealth fund provides reserve capacity to wait out the Saudis.  US shale producers will cut production at current prices and resume it when prices recover, which they will.  The price war will end.  The damage it causes in the interim deepens the recessionary pressure in oil-dependent economies and adds volatility to global markets that already have enough of their own.  The United States has pledged to purchase 30 million barrels for its strategic petroleum reserve — taking advantage of low prices and providing a degree of market certainty that partially offsets the price war’s destabilising effect.

What the Market is Actually Telling You

On 12^th March 2020, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its largest single-day drop since 1987, entering bear market territory.  The flight to safety drove US Treasury yields to historic lows — the 10-year Treasury touched below 0.4%.  This is not primarily a signal about the underlying value of the assets being sold.  It is a signal about fear.  Market selloffs of this magnitude in crisis conditions are driven by sentiment and panic — the forced liquidation of positions, the flight to cash, the suspension of long-term thinking in favour of immediate risk reduction.

The resultant divergence between market price and underlying value creates the opportunity.  Equities have been pushed to relative valuations that are attractive compared to bonds at sub-0.4% yields.  The question for the investor is not whether the underlying businesses have value.  Most of them do.  The question is whether the investor has the discipline and the time horizon to hold through the volatility.

Where the Opportunities Are

Several sectors present specific opportunities at current prices.

Healthcare and pharmaceuticals are the most obvious.  The pandemic has created immediate demand for sanitisers, masks, healthcare products, and pharmaceutical development.  Healthcare stocks are relatively low despite the sector being among the most structurally important in the current environment.  This disconnection between demand fundamentals and stock price is the opportunity.

Technology is a compelling case.  The explosion in remote working, online retail, digital entertainment, and home connectivity driven by quarantine conditions is accelerating structural shifts in consumer behaviour that were already underway.  Technology counters at current prices represent long-term value for investors with an appropriate time horizon.

Asian manufacturing is recovering.  China is reopening production lines.  Major financial centres — Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo — are in materially better condition than their European and North American counterparts.  East Asia will drive the early stages of the global recovery.

Hospitality is a contrarian position.  Hotels, airlines, and travel businesses are suffering the most acute short-term pain of any sector.  They will also benefit most dramatically from the recovery — when travel resumes, it will do so with pent-up demand that had been suppressed for months.  The investor who takes positions in quality hospitality names at current distressed prices with an 18-month-plus horizon will be positioned for that recovery.

The Approach

Dollar-cost averaging into positions across these sectors makes sense for investors who cannot time the market bottom — which is everyone, including the people who claim otherwise.  Maintaining a higher-than-average cash balance provides optionality to deploy capital when specific opportunities present themselves at attractive prices.

The market will recover.  East Asian economies are already showing the trajectory.  Policy support from central banks and governments globally will accelerate the process.  The duration of the pandemic and its ultimate severity remain the primary unknown, but neither changes the fundamental case for quality assets acquired at depressed prices with a long investment horizon.  The investor who panics and sells at the bottom locks in the loss permanently.  The investor who buys at the bottom when everyone else is selling is the investor who benefits from the recovery.

These are not new observations.  Every major market dislocation in history has produced the same pattern and the same opportunity.  The discipline to act on it when the noise is loudest is the differentiator between the investor and the speculator.  The noise is currently very loud.  The opportunity is accordingly significant.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code

Language Evaluation (Leng Kee Advanced TMC, 15th May 2019)

The following is a recording of my language evaluation, at Leng Kee Advanced Toastmasters Club, on the 15^th May 2019.