On... KEN

The bad news is I am not able to beat the market in 2020 ( ROI since inception ASX200: +8.52%, Me: +6.8% ). The good news is my return is positive this year, which is good because making money is more important than beating the market. For the latest portfolio update, see Portfolio Update . This year has been very tough for investing and trading due to the Covid 19 pandemic. The market crashed in February but rebounded strongly at the end of March. I was lucky to go to mostly cash when the sell-off started but found it hard to re-enter the market. I can still remember the fear of investing at that time. I truly thought that my investment ( about 30% invested, 70% cash ) would go to zero. The fear is real. I started to re-enter the market slowly in April but the market was too volatile and my stocks kept getting stopped out. My performance started to pick up only in the last quarter of 2020. The best performing stock ( ROI since inception ) of the year was WBT, +70.9%. This is a stock t...

The company that I used to work for, focused on Safety as a main priority. Therefore there's a Safety Day every year.  I remember one of these events had a number of booths set up in the main lobby of the office, where we can participate in Safety related 'games'. There was one where you had to simulate driving a car, controlling a toy car on a map. An instructor would give you directions for you to move your car, and at the same time another instructor would talk to you about casual stuff. This is to simulate talking on the phone while driving.  Needless to say, it was not easy to multi task. And I remember the conclusion of that game very vividly - "You will either end up in an accident, or you will have a very poor conversation". Multi tasking rarely end up with very satisfactory results. The same for driving a car or most other tasks. Of course, for very mundane tasks like listening to music while having a jog, you can multi task as it doesn't require conc...

In my early teens, I was very much into skateboarding. It was a passion that I pursued for about 10 years of my life, from the age of 15 to 25. Besides learning to stand and stabilize myself on the board and how to move, one of the very few important lessons I learned was how to fall. Arguably how to 'fall properly ' was more important than anything else because it helped me escape severe injuries, which otherwise were usually quite harmless and it also gave me the confidence to attempt more challenging tricks and obstacles.  What has learning to fall got to do with investing and trading? In my honest opinion, learning how to fall is almost similar with learning how to take a loss in investing. It seems counter-intuitive that taking a loss is one of the most important lessons to learn instead of learning how to pick stocks. Sure, picking the right stock is important, but if you invest long enough, you will certainly end up with bad picks. Even the best of the breed only gets it...

Recently a friend asked whether he should buy Telstra shares. My reply - "Short answer is no. Long answer is it depends". Generally, there are 4 types of games in my opinion; with different levels of time frame and complexity. These 4 are as follows :- Passive/index investing. These are generally for know nothing investors ( although   a lot of knowledgeable investors such as Morgan Housel do invests passively ). If you don't know where to start or are not interested in picking individual stocks, this is the best game to play. Apparently, just doing Dollar Cost Averaging into an index would beat most active fund managers out there.  Active investing. If you're interested in business and picking individual stocks - this is the game you play. Basically, buying a stock is a partial ownership of a business. Generally speaking, if you're investing in a business, it should be a quality business. You need to be able to value a company and buy it when the stock price is b...

Contrary to the title, this post is not about fishing. Having gone fishing only once, there's not much I can share about fishing.  What the post is about is the saying that goes "Give me a fish and it lasts me a day, teach me to fish and it will lasts me a lifetime, ". You see, my friend who had recently went on to the app Spaceship voyager had been sharing his equity returns with me and the results were astounding. A quick check on the Spaceship voyager  website shows that the fund has been compounding north of 20% P. A. Note that I am not recommending to invest with Spaceship voyager - I don't have an opinion for or against ( Do Your Own Research ). The question is - Why should I do my own investing?, rather than just allocate my capital to a fund manager who can compound my returns at a high rate. As a fellow investor would point out to me "Do you want to be right or do you want to make money? ". At the end of the day, of course I want to make money. But ...

How much capital should we risk? That depends on how much time we have.  Let's say we aim to achieve a million dollars ( by age 76 ) and we use 10% CAGR as an assumption for our rate of return, we can take a look at some scenarios to give us an idea. The below chart shows 3 scenarios. Red bars ( starts investing with 90,000$ at age 50 ), Yellow bars ( starts investing with 15,000$ at age 30 ) and Blue bars ( starts investing with 2,000$ at age 10 ). Note that to simplify the maths, a once off capital is used. In real life, you probably would add to your investments as you age.  I think it doesn't come as a surprise that the younger you start, the less capital you need to reach a million dollars; and the older you start, the more capital you have to risk. And that's a conundrum because the older people get, the less risk averse they become.  For example, if you're not starting at 10 years old ( and it's safe to say most people don't ), you have no choice but to r...

The purpose of trading is to earn an income. Or is it? Obviously, the final objective of trading is to earn money to support your living expenses. However, the initial objective is actually to grow your account. Because if you treat your trading profit as an income in the early stages ( and spend your profits instead of reinvesting them ), then your account will not grow or at best grow at a relatively slow rate. What's the point of trading then, if you can't spend the profits? It's a paradox. If you roll a snow ball down a slope, initially it takes a lot of effort. The longer you roll, the larger the snow ball gets. The magic happens when the snow ball reaches a certain size, and without effort it will roll downhill on its own. However, if you keep taking chunks of snow out and not allow the snow ball to grow, it will not reach the stage where it will self propel. A roller coaster requires energy to pull the coaches up in the initial stage. Once it crosses the first ...