On... KEN

Recently, my wife asked whether I'm making money in investing. If I am, then it's easy money and I should continue? Otherwise, quit?  How soon should you be investing before you conclude that you're making money or not? Sure you can invest for a week and see if you're up or down. But does it carry any conclusions whether you're a profitable investor? To the layman, if you tell them you're making money after a week, the conclusion might be investing is easy money and you should continue investing. Or if you're not making money, investing is hard and you should quit.  In my "previous life", I was a geophysicist. My degree took 3 years, and after that I took 1 year masters before I got a job. Even after joining the workforce, I was in the graduate program for 3 years. That is a total of 7 years before I was considered a "fully trained " geophysicist by my company.  A doctor takes many years of education before they can practice medicine. Wou...

 Last post , I wrote that trading should be done like you're running a business. If so, what kind of business would I be running?  The business model that I best want to replicate is a casino business ( see this video , if you want to skip the rest of the blog post ). Most people that I talk to, thinks that investing or trading is a form of gambling. Is trading or investing really gambling? This topic is rather divisive and it depends on who you ask. Well if it truly is gambling, I would want to play the part of the casino, because as they say, the house always wins.  How does the casino make money? By having a positive expectancy.  They don't have to make money on every bet, but over large number of bets, the profit has to be bigger than the loss. In terms of trading, my winning percentage is not really that great but as long as the average winners are bigger than the average losers, that is good enough. Year to date for 2021 ( over 133 number of trades ), my winnin...

Trade like you're running a business, not like it's a hobby. Because business makes money and hobby costs money.  Well, to be honest, a lot of business don't make money and they go bankrup, but that's not how we want our trading/investing to end. So what is the criteria of running a successful business? To me, three things come to mind. 1.Money, 2.Time and 3.Luck. 1.Money. Every business require money. Capital Expenditure to start the business and Operating Expenditure to keep the business running. So, if we want to run our trading as a business we should be prepared to fork out some capital to get it started and also to expect some monthly expenses to keep our trading business running. Example of Operating Expenditure can be our trading losses. If we're not prepared to take losses, then we can't run our trading as a business. Of course we would like the profit to more than the losses over a long period of time, but in the short term, losses are inevitable.  2.T...

There is always some sort of respect and admiration in my family for people who runs a business.  Business people surely deserve our respect for stepping out of their comfort zone and taking risk in pursuit of their goals ( usually that goal = to make lots of money  ). However, there is often a stereotype when it comes to defining what a business is. Usually when you say someone is running a business, the first thought is of someone who 1) employs people, 2) is selling something and 3) is making lots of money. Although we know all 3 criteria is not necessary for someone to be labeled a businessman.  Why not? Perhaps I would use a money changer as an example. In Malaysia ( and I believe in most developing countries  ), you don't have to change your money at a bank or a money exchange chain. There are small private businesses where you can exchange currencies. So most of these small money exchange business 1) employs people, 2) is selling currencies and 3) are making l...

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...