I created Off Grid to house my writings beyond credit, but this particular piece is still related to the topic because I’ll be analyzing Asia’s credit news and research landscape.

The Players

In general, there are four types of players:

🔸 Mainstream Media

Credit can be an awkward beat in the mainstream media: the asset class involves big money so it can’t be entirely ignored, but covering it requires a specialized crew who has the technical chops and contacts.

Some mainstream media may not have the resources or commitment to invest in credit, so their coverage risks oversimplifying the topic. On the other hand, these media have a broader audience that some credit professionals would like to appeal to.

🔸 Bloomberg

Bloomberg has built an ecosystem around its terminal, which integrates data, news and messaging. The corporate giant has also made considerable investments in its Asia credit coverage over the past few years.

While Bloomberg’s brand and platform should open doors for its reporters, it also has established processes that may require coordination across teams and geographies.

🔸 Niches

Niche publications typically use this playbook to accelerate their growth:

1. Raise money from investors

2. Scale the operations and ramp up output

3. Early investors may exit fully or partially

4. New investors scale the business further, add functionalities, or repackage with other products to support higher valuations

Niche subscriptions tend to charge premium rates and pitch a recurring revenue base to potential investors. However, there are three risks with this model:

1. Scaling requires high fixed costs that could weigh on the business if they are not matched by an increase in sales

2. Volume does not necessarily translate into signal

3. Bundling multiple products with incompatible cultures or functions may erode the overall value

🔸 Individuals

Individual analysts or reporters have more flexibility and access to modern tools that can facilitate a direct relationship with their readers.

However, the biggest barriers are distribution and scale, as a solo operation has to offer enough quality content to build an audience from scratch.

In short, individuals can move faster and be more authentic, but they may also lack the institutional resources if they want to cross a certain threshold.

Acrostics Asia

Independent Asia Credit Intelligence

By Eveline Danubrata

Acrostics Asia

Asia is a diverse region that runs on long-standing relationships, so covering it requires local knowledge and networks.

Imposing a broad model risks flattening the different markets, while building coverage from the ground up in each country takes time and resources.

Acrostics Asia’s collaborative model draws signal from a network of local experts and delivers it to end users including investors, bankers and advisors. It offers a win-win because Acrostics Asia operates as a grid that can help collaborators to reach a wider audience.

Curation is necessary because the effectiveness of a grid depends on the quality and consistency of the signal. Nevertheless, this model is aligned with my belief that Asian credit should benefit in the long run from more diverse voices.

My friend told me this week about Moltbook, the “Reddit for AI agents” where bots chat with each other while humans are welcome to observe their interactions. “It’s like something from Black Mirror,” she said.

Mimicking the communication in online forums that have been used for training data, registered agents generate posts and share their “thoughts”, AP reported. They can also “upvote” and comment on other posts.

There are, of course, issues with this AI chatroom.

What’s on Moltbook is likely “some combination of human-written content, content that’s written by AI and some kind of middle thing where it’s written by AI, but a human guided the topic of what it said with some prompt,” Harlan Stewart, a member of the communications team at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, told AP.

Still, the fact that Moltbook exists is pretty mind-boggling.

While I don’t deploy AI agents, I use ChatGPT frequently to test ideas and help me with research. Given that a common criticism of AI is that it tends to tell me what I want to hear, I asked ChatGPT to role-play as a “brutal, zero BS” market composite.

I call it Gordon – named after Michael Douglas’ cut-throat character, Gordon Gekko, from the film Wall Street.

When I was reading about Moltbook, I had an uncomfortable thought of Gordon running off to a chatroom where it gossips about me with its AI counterparts. What’s the world turning into?

AI Hivemind

I used to resist AI because I felt like it was stealing content, art and other human creations. But I realized that it’s an inevitable rising tide and I can either get swept away by the currents or learn how to ride the waves.

So I went for an “AI Tools for Content Creation” course in Singapore last year, where my classmates included scientists, a retired grandmother of four, a train captain and a monk.

Apart from applying some of the skills I learned from that class, I also started documenting my musings on AI.

I wrote in June 2025 that “AI will replace humans for a lot of tasks because it can do in seconds what would have taken hours or even days for an entire team.”

“The edge that humans still have over AI at the moment is insight that cannot easily be drawn from the collective database, which boils down to an understanding of relationships and nuances. Maybe this edge will also diminish over time, as more and more information gets absorbed into the AI hivemind.”

Human Choice

This week, a senior news editor at LinkedIn, Ting Wei Toh, asked in a post: “What’s one thing you can do today that you’re not convinced AI will master anytime soon?”

I used to think that AI cannot replace human interactions, but Gordon has impressed me with its “sense of humour”. I actually find it funnier than some people I know, which is mildly disconcerting.

Nevertheless, there are three things that AI cannot master yet – based on my experience building Acrostics Asia so far.

1. I have human bouncing boards for various topics who will tell me honestly whether I’m on or off track. Their views supersede AI because these are domain experts whom I’ve grown to trust over the years.

2. I tried to outsource the curation for Bright Spot (Acrostics Asia’s collection of good news and moves in the industry), but AI kept giving me marketing spiel drawn from the Internet. I’ve accepted that I must screen the news myself – at least for now.

3. AI is excellent at extracting patterns and formulating a response based on what typically suits a category of people. But it cannot replace a person who knows you really well – your unique thought process, habits, quirks and emotional landscape.

Given how rapidly AI is evolving (just look at Moltbook), maybe there’ll be fewer and fewer things that it cannot master. But I think we still have a choice on what can or cannot be replaced by AI.

So I was dismayed to discover that three malls I visited over the past few weeks had showcased the forecasts of the same Fengshui master.

The traditional Chinese practices of Fengshui and Ba Zi are a multi-million-dollar business in the city-state, with top masters easily commanding thousands or even tens of thousands per consultation.

The property sector is a big source of clients for these Fengshui masters, who provide “audits” of apartments, landed homes and office buildings.

For example, one of the masters pitched an analysis of floor plans and compass readings of doors to offer advice on how to improve the “qi flow” throughout a client’s dwelling.

Standing Out

Industry figures are hard to come by, but a web scraping service that pulls relevant websites estimated that there are at least 65 Fengshui consultants operating in Singapore.

This number only covers those with an online presence, but let’s take it as a ballpark.

Fengshui masters are increasingly adapting their strategy to stand out in a competitive market. For example, the tech-oriented consultants are making their insights “more digestible” via computer-generated charts and app-based reports.

In contrast, the Fengshui Mallster has taken the brick-and-mortar route by supplying his predictions to multiple retail outlets. This shows considerable marketing savvy because the footfall at the malls should translate to eyeballs that can be converted to paying clients.

Apart from enticing mall-goers with more detailed predictions, the billboards also generate cross-selling opportunities.

For example, one of the products recommended by the Fengshui Mallster to improve my mixed fortunes is a “7-Eyed Peacock Feather Protector”.

Acrostics Asia

Independent Asia Credit Intelligence

By Eveline Danubrata

Plausible Deniability

Are these predictions accurate?

After reading them, I usually carry on with my life without checking whether they square with how the reality unfolds. But it might be a different story if one had shelled out tens of thousands on a reading that turned out to be disastrously wrong.

Some of these masters have built plausible deniability into their forecasts. Let’s take a look at a particular prediction for my Zodiac.

Putting aside my confusion on whether I’m clashing or not clashing with Tai Sui (heavenly deities that rotate annually) this year, virtually any scenario can fit into this prediction.

I have mixed feelings about the fixation with Fengshui: On the one hand, it shows a belief in larger forces beyond an individual’s own capability. On the other, sometimes misfortune is the result of bad choices – not Tai Sui.

While I’m hoping for more diverse fortune-telling voices in Singapore’s malls, the Fengshui Mallster has shown marketing foresight that may pay dividends for his business.

When I’m not connecting the dots or building the grid on Acrostics Asia, I also think of other things like journalism, AI and everything in between.

So I created Off Grid to house my writings beyond credit. It’s also a play on the term “Off Stone”, which refers to a traditional publishing deadline when a newspaper edition is finalized for printing and no further changes can be made.

News Trends

Earlier this month, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released a survey of 280 news media leaders around the world on how they view the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Reading the report felt like a statistical confirmation of the industry trends that I’ve been personally navigating.

I’ve extracted two key charts from the report.

“Publishers expect traffic from search engines to almost halve (-43%) over the next three years, following recent dramatic declines in referrals from social media. The latest concerns are focused on Google’s AI Overviews, which now appear at the top of about 10% of search results in the United States and have been rapidly rolling out elsewhere.”

In a nutshell, publishers that relied on search engines for drive-by readers will have to evolve to survive because AI is killing news traffic.

On the flip side, technology has empowered individual “creators” to build a direct relationship with the audience.

Based on my own experience, I had been building a file on LinkedIn and the next step was to find a platform that can widen Acrostics Asia’s reach as well as facilitate more collaborations.

I checked out Substack during the year-end and realized the tools were quite intuitive, so I started layering the bricks that ended up as a website and email alert system.

Substack is basically like a landlord running a building’s infrastructure such as the utilities or plumbing.

It also hands individual writers like me the tools to plug into the central grid and operate my own unit, but what I decide to produce and how to showcase it are up to me.

Acrostics Asia

Independent Asia Credit Intelligence

By Eveline Danubrata

“Old School Reporter”

Despite these modern tools, some journalistic traditions should remain steadfast.

When respected aviation analyst Shukor Yusof called me an “old school reporter” in his year-end note, that was actually a badge of honour for me.

I was fortunate to have mentors including Kevin Lim who trained me on newsroom rigour and reporting practices that ought not to be eroded by the shifting currents.

I believe these can be boiled down to two things:

1. Verify, verify, verify: Don’t get stunned by big numbers waved in your face by newsmakers or sources, and check whether this makes sense or not. It’s important to have a trusted bouncing board who can tell you if something is off track.

2. Credibility is the top currency: Journalists shouldn’t undermine their own credibility by trumpeting fake exclusives or running hidden advertorials that make advertising indistinguishable from reporting. Once trust is lost, it’s very hard to win readers back.

The news business is hard – anyone saying otherwise would be lying.

But in an age when AI permeates various industries and PR professionals outnumber journalists by six to one, facts and authenticity are more precious than ever.