22-03-2016, 09:37 PM
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23-03-2016, 08:17 PM
Although I was born into a middle-class family, I did not have a memorable childhood.
Unlike my brothers, I was not allowed to use hot water when I showered and
hence, every morning, when I showered with cold water, I was reminded of the
inequalities of life.
When I was sent overseas to study, I had to find work to support myself during the
long school holidays. While waiting for my ‘A’ level results, I traveled to Ayr, Scotland,
to work as a dishwasher in the Butlin’s Holiday camp. I worked there for three months
and learnt the value of money. I was paid 36 pounds for 39 hours of work weekly,
with lodging and food provided for. I also worked overtime as a security guard and
pub assistant during the nights as the overtime pay was much better than the basic pay.
Most of what I earned was then used to pay for part of my school fees.
When I entered university in Belfast, I tried to spend as little as I could.
I lived in a house with a very nice but eccentric elderly Irish lady who provided
free food and lodging to overseas students.
Many students did not want to live in her house as it was very cluttered.
However, as Mary was one of the nicest people anyone could ever meet,
I decided otherwise and stayed in her house for many years.
Mary made her money from the stock market.
Not only did she provide me with food and shelter, she taught me the principles of investing.
Many of my investing principles today have been influenced by her.
When she passed away many years ago, she left a huge fortune to charity.
No one could have guessed that Mary was a multi-millionaire as she lived life very simply.
Life is full of twists and turns.
If you find life tough or unfair, do not give up.
Fight on as your life can only get better.
If I were to have been well-blessed during my childhood, I would not have learnt
the value of money early in my life and I would not have met up with Mary.
I would then not have the chance of learning how to invest successfully
from a lady who started from nothing and amassed a fortune,
yet lived very humbly and simply.
Mary has influenced my life and those of you who see me in Orchard Road
wearing an old T-shirt will know where that trait came from.
Yes, when I was younger, I too had been frustrated with life as
I felt that I had been unfairly treated.
However, as I age,
I realise that life is a journey and the earlier one suffers,
the more likely that he will succeed in life.
Hence, having less earlier is having more later.
page 186 "Having less is having more"
Your First Million - Making it in stocks" There are 100 copies in NLB, go grab it!
Love Compassion
Unlike my brothers, I was not allowed to use hot water when I showered and
hence, every morning, when I showered with cold water, I was reminded of the
inequalities of life.
When I was sent overseas to study, I had to find work to support myself during the
long school holidays. While waiting for my ‘A’ level results, I traveled to Ayr, Scotland,
to work as a dishwasher in the Butlin’s Holiday camp. I worked there for three months
and learnt the value of money. I was paid 36 pounds for 39 hours of work weekly,
with lodging and food provided for. I also worked overtime as a security guard and
pub assistant during the nights as the overtime pay was much better than the basic pay.
Most of what I earned was then used to pay for part of my school fees.
When I entered university in Belfast, I tried to spend as little as I could.
I lived in a house with a very nice but eccentric elderly Irish lady who provided
free food and lodging to overseas students.
Many students did not want to live in her house as it was very cluttered.
However, as Mary was one of the nicest people anyone could ever meet,
I decided otherwise and stayed in her house for many years.
Mary made her money from the stock market.
Not only did she provide me with food and shelter, she taught me the principles of investing.
Many of my investing principles today have been influenced by her.
When she passed away many years ago, she left a huge fortune to charity.
No one could have guessed that Mary was a multi-millionaire as she lived life very simply.
Life is full of twists and turns.
If you find life tough or unfair, do not give up.
Fight on as your life can only get better.
If I were to have been well-blessed during my childhood, I would not have learnt
the value of money early in my life and I would not have met up with Mary.
I would then not have the chance of learning how to invest successfully
from a lady who started from nothing and amassed a fortune,
yet lived very humbly and simply.
Mary has influenced my life and those of you who see me in Orchard Road
wearing an old T-shirt will know where that trait came from.
Yes, when I was younger, I too had been frustrated with life as
I felt that I had been unfairly treated.
However, as I age,
I realise that life is a journey and the earlier one suffers,
the more likely that he will succeed in life.
Hence, having less earlier is having more later.
page 186 "Having less is having more"
Your First Million - Making it in stocks" There are 100 copies in NLB, go grab it!
Love Compassion
25-03-2016, 10:40 PM
OLDMAN: My Investing Journey
I think most of us were not born with silver spoons in our mouths.
Hence, most of us started life as an investor with just $1,000 or less
as initial capital. At least I did! When I began, I speculated a lot, as I
too wanted to grow this initial sum as fast as possible. Yes, I went
through the good times and the bad times and I lost most of what I
made twice in my “investment” career.
It was only later that I realised the foolishness of how I “invested” in
the early years. I started with $1,000 and as the bull market was in
full swing I grew this to $20,000 within two years, which made me
think that I must be one hell of an investor. Well, the bear then came
and took away most of my profits.
If I looked back, what I did was to increase the size of my bets as I
gained more money. Sooner or later, my luck will run out and when
that happens, the size of my bets will be at its largest. Common sense
will tell you that I was simply gambling and the way I was doing it
was not very smart, as no crystal ball is needed to see what will
happen if I continued gambling that way.
Fortunately, when the market collapsed, I was still working as a
doctor. Over the next few years, I started saving up capital to go into
the market again – wiser but poorer from that initial episode. Since
then, I learnt a lot more about investing, as well as about how
industries develop and how companies are run. From practising
medicine, I went on to join IBM. There, I rose from ground up to lead
a regional division. Then, I headed a regional SME (small and
medium-sized enterprise) and only after that did I have enough
courage to start up ShareInvestor.
In starting up ShareInvestor, I had to fund the company for over a
year. During this period, I had no salary for the first time in my life.
Believe me, the feeling was one-of-a-kind. Earning a salary provides
a safety net, but all of a sudden, you do not have that safety net
anymore. My wife was also not working and I had a daughter to
support as well.
To help stretch the capital that I had set aside, I started trading for a
living. All I can say now is that when you have all these pressures of
life and business, you cannot trade well. Your emotions will affect the
way you trade. You are also more averse to risk because you really
cannot afford to lose any part of your capital, even though you know
that investing involves risk.
It is with this background that I wish to share with you what I feel are
the main requirements if you wish to invest for a living:
1. Access to capital. If you don’t have enough capital, you will worry
day and night how you are going to make enough and this will affect
the way you trade or invest. I think most good full-time investors
should be able to make at least 20% profit regardless of market
conditions. Hence, if you need $100,000 a year to live on, you would
need a starting capital of at least $500,000.
Ignore the line you would get from margin accounts, as this is just one
of the tools that you can use to get your 20% return on your capital.
Ideally too, you would have been in the market for at least 10 years,
as during this time you are likely to have gone through bull and bear
markets. Only then would you be able to know if you can also make
20% return during bear markets. It is fair to say too that in a bull
market, seasoned investors usually make hundreds of percent gains.
2. Ability & Foresight. Ability comes with experience not only in trading
stocks but also in any other job. You need to know how businesses
are run and ideally, you have ran businesses before. After all, the
stock market is really about businesses and your view on them. If you
want to invest successfully, you have to be able to delve into their
future. The only way to do that is to know how businesses are run,
the intricacies of each of the industries and how they affect one
another.
Running small businesses can be very different from running multi
national corporations and ideally, you should have the experience of
running both before you quit to become a full-time trader or investor.
Knowledge of the industries is equally important, as different
industries have different characteristics. With ability and experience,
you are also able to control your emotions of fear and greed better.To
develop foresight, an investor should have the experience of running
successful and not so successful businesses. I think one of the reasons
renowned investor Warren Buffett did so well in his investments is that
he had a bad time trying to turn around his original business, so much
so that in the end he sold it, but in the process he gleaned a lot of
insight.
To me, experience in business can only be gained by running one’s
own business. Some time back, I was running a regional division for
IBM andI thought that I had acquired all the skills for running a
business when I left IBM. I was dead wrong. Running a division within
a multi national company does not give one a full picture of what it
takes to run a private enterprise.
Believe me, one has another 90% to learn when one gets out into the
‘real world’. Without being out in the ‘real business world’, one may
not truly understand what it takes to run a successful private business.
Without this understanding, one may not be able to identify issues
that a business may face in the future.
I see investing as the next step after entrepreneurship. But one needs
to be an entrepreneur first to understand the issues that small and
medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) face in the real world. After all, most
of our investments are in real world SME companies and what we are
trying to do is to identify the high flyers of the future.
3. Passion for stocks. To invest successful, you have to sweat it out.
An investor has to spend a lot of time researching the company that
he wants to invest in. He scrutinises years of annual reports, talks to
customers and suppliers, and keeps abreast of developments in the
industry, while also keeping an eye on competitors in the business.
That’s why investing is a full-time job that you can only do well if you
are passionate about it and do for the fun of it, rather than strictly for
the money.
4. Understanding financial statements. This is where those trained in
accountancy may have an upper hand. However, this ability is not
that difficult to pick up. One of the first stops for any fundamental
investor must surely be the annual report. Successful investors have
an ability to read in between the lines of a financial statement, so
much so that he can foresee many of the issues that may surface in
the years ahead. Reading the notes in an annual report can
sometimes give one a better picture than the headlines.
5. Control of emotions. In general, we are not wired to be successful
investors. We suffer from the emotions of greed, fear and wishful
thinking. To succeed as an investor, one has to suppress these
feelings, and yet be able to use his knowledge of these feelings to
predict what the general investing public would do, so as to position
himself accordingly. Successful traders and investors have full mastery
of their emotions of greed, fear and wishful thinking.
6. Patience. Too many investors seek immediate gratification from
their investments. If they bought into a stock and it did not go up
within a day or week ormonth, they are likely to switch stocks,
thinking that they have made a bad investment. My best investments
are those stocks I picked up during bear markets when no one wants
them. I then sell them in a bull market when demand is best
described as crazy.
To be a successful investor, one has to have a long investment
horizon measured in years.You may find it odd that I say nothing
about the ability to identify and rate management integrity. This is
because I find all CEOs such good sales people that I really cannot tell
the difference just by talking to them. In fact, the better I know the
CEOs, the more likely that I will be taken in by their personalities and
charm.
Many CEOs have asked me to manage some of their funds. My
answer to all of them is NO. Although I may be successful as an
investor, the traits required for managing other people’s money is very
different from the skills that I have.
When you start managing other people’s money, you can be overly
cautious because the money is now not your own. Or you may be
overly risky for the same reason that the money is now not your own.
It really depends on your personality.
When you are too cautious, you will tend to sell too early or buy too
late. One way or the other, your timing on any investment will be
affected by the additional baggage of having to take care of other
people’s money. In the hierarchy of needs, money is very important
to practically all of us. Relationships and friendships can be broken
over money. Hence, as far aspossible, I like to keep money and
relationships as far apart as possible.
Moreover, if you consistently make over 20% a year, why manage a
fund when you can borrow money for much less and make all the
money for yourself? So, when my friends ask, I just let them know
what stocks I am buying. Then, it is really up to them to do their own
research and follow me if they wish. This way, I can invest the way I
like, as I am still investing just my own money. My friends remain my
friends, as I am not directly investing for them.
Mixing money and friendship is a dangerous recipe. All of us have
different personalities, circumstances and expectations. To be able to
invest successfully, we have to be at one with ourselves. We must
firstly understand ourselves. We must understand how we would
respond in times of fear and greed.
If we succumb to greed, we are more likely to hold our stocks forever,
inthe hope that the stocks will continue to rise, even though most of
us know that very few stocks will rise forever.
For those of us who succumb to fear, it is most likely that we would
be selling too early in any bull-run. We would take our profits
prematurely, only to see our shares zooming into outer space and
regret our decision to take profit too early. We must learn to
overcome this element of fear by not taking profit on our fundamental
stocks too early. In order not be too involved in the market, we
should view our fundamental portfolio only once a week, instead of
every minute.
For those of us who are more easily swayed by both greed and fear,
with hindsight we will realise that we often do so at the wrong time.
When the stocks are near their peak, our greed holds us back from
selling at the peak and we end up carrying the baby. On the other
hand, when stocks crash, our fear takes over and deters us from
buying, even though the share prices are at ridiculously low levels.
To overcome our fear and greed, we need to put an investment
system in place. For those of us who trade, this would mean putting a
trading system in place. The systems that you use should be tailored
specifically to your circumstances, expectations and the way you
handle fear and greed.
I have my own trading and investment systems, but they may not be
applicable to you, given that your circumstances and expectations
may be different. For me, I can park my money for a long time.
However, I have high expectations for my investments and I want to
multiply these. Hence, I am willing to take more risks.
Moreover, as I have gone through over 20 years of investing, I am
more able to control my fear and greed. All of us should develop our
own styles of investing that fit our character. Yes, it is good to learn
from others how they invest, but do bear in mind that everyone’s
circumstances, expectations and ability to control fear and greed are
different.
Although I invest in only a handful of companies, I spend a lot of time
covering at least 100 other companies. These are companies that may
be close to fulfilling my investment criteria but I may have concerns
with some aspects of their operations. I monitor these companies in
the hope that some of these companies may have sorted out the
issues that I am concerned with.
Also, I monitor the stock prices of these companies as there may
come a time when the market capitalisation of these companies are at
such a discount that it offers me a good margin of safety such that I
can overlook some of the minor issues of the company that I was
concerned with.
Mr Market is a strange creature as sometimes, a big seller may appear
and the share price will be depressed. Once a big seller appears, a lot
of small sellers will also appear and there will be an avalanche of sell
orders which will drive the share price down. If one has not done this
background work,it will not be easy to buy these shares when they
keep falling. One needs a lot of confidence to buy when everyone else
is selling.
My confidence as an investor is because of the many hours of hard
work that I put in before the opportunity arose. Without this amount
of hardwork, I do not think I will have the courage to buy in a falling
market. This is why when the market is quiet, I will spend my time
doing all the necessary research and when the market is moving up or
down, I will be ready to take advantage of what Mr Market offers.
Investing is certainly not a stroll in the park. One has to put in a lot of
hardwork in preparation for the opportunities that Mr Market throws at
you.
I was once at a broker’s office when he and his colleagues asked me
about my portfolio. When I told them some of the shares that I was
looking at, I could sense that they were wondering whether I would
be selling if they were to buy those stocks. Such a reaction is not
unusual, as everyone is sniffing for opportunities and no one expects a
free lunch.
For me, I am actually quite reluctant to shed light on the stocks I am
looking at, as it becomes a burden to me if the shares do not perform.
When I do mention a stock, it is not to encourage others to buy but
really to find out what others think about the stock. Problem with us
human beings is that we can be quite myopic in the way we see a
certain stock. When we like it, we read what we want to read.
Hearing the opinions of others will help moderate this myopic
tendency.There are many folks who want me to manage their
investments for them but my standard answer is, no thanks.
Somehow, I feel more at ease managing my own money. If I lose
money from my investments, I take it as part of investing. Nowadays
even when I lose money, my pulse rate remains much the same, as I
have already accepted the fact that investing means you will lose
money at times. So long as you make money overall, you are fine.
Telling your friend that you have lost some of their money is a totally
different matter!
Also, when someone rides an investment with me, I become extra
cautious and often extra nervous as well. This does affect my gut feel
and confidencein the stock. This is especially true if a close friend
invested in the same stock.
Investing is really about spending time researching stocks and shares,
going through their fundamentals, technicals and annual reports
many times over the years.
This is very time consuming and is a very lonely occupation.
But I have not found any shortcuts to making investments work for me.
When it gets a bit too lonely, it is good to talk to fellow investors and
this is why,every now and then, you will see me in the stock forums.
Glad that in the forum, we know each other only by our pseudonyms,
as I think I would not be able to share so openly if I knew the other
person too well. I find that in sharing, I too will benefit, as it is always
good to hear other points of view.Investing is a lonely occupation and
I am glad that there are these forums to make it less lonely than it
was in the past. Nevertheless, it still means spending a lot of time
alone poring through reports, figures, charts and postings.
I think it is fair to say that the average lifespan for humans is around
80 years, while retirement age is around 60 years old. This gives most
of us an additional 20 years of life beyond retirement. If we are
trained as a doctor or in any other profession, it is unlikely that we will
continue practicing beyond the age of 60.
Hence, it is good for all of us to be able to plan ahead and do
something that we can continue doing for the rest of our lives.
However, there are lots of things that we cannot do past the age of
60. Physically many of us would have aged by then, but mentally I
believe many of us will remain quite sharp.
This is why I believe that investing is probably the one career that a
person can practise right up to when one’s time is up. In fact, I believe
that as we age we would have a lot more experience in business. As
well as that, we should be able to control our emotions better with a
lot more experience in life.
Added together, that means we should become better investors with
age. This is why I encourage all my friends, whether they are
professionals or employees, to consider investing as a hobby while
they are still working.
Investing is an art that is refined with age, much like wine. One is
bound to make many mistakes in his early investing days. So, the
earlier one starts on this journey, the more likely he will become a
better investor in later years.
From page 200 of "Your First Million - Making it in Stocks"
Love Compassion
31-03-2016, 10:15 PM
感恩
01-04-2016, 10:10 PM
感恩
02-04-2016, 11:42 PM
感恩
05-04-2016, 12:34 PM
(02-04-2016, 11:42 PM)chialc88 Wrote: [ -> ]congratulations!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Wed 2pm.
My phone rang and I noticed that it's an oversea call.
"LC?"
"Speaking, can I help you?"
"Yes. I'm from XX and I would like to engage you for a project in KL."
"Mmm, are you aware that I had left XX 2 weeks ago?"
"Yes. I am aware. All expenses will be pay for, plus your PS charges too."
"ok. When should we start?"
"What about this Friday? meet in KL"
"Sure. BTW, who recommended me to you?"
"Your boss."
I am speechless.
As the saying goes, the rest is history.
Other than KL, I also kana projects from different country too.
Life is beautiful and I must quickly learn how to set up my company.
Love Compassion
09-04-2016, 12:13 PM
感恩
09-04-2016, 02:43 PM
Chialcc88 san
Congratulations too! Incidentally, what kind of business are you in?
Congratulations too! Incidentally, what kind of business are you in?
23-04-2016, 11:17 PM
感恩