Tuesday, August 27, 2013

What is happening to the market?

I'm back from my holidays and time for me to start writing again. It has been a good trip and Taiwan was really fun. Every country i go to, i'll notice that each has its own culture and national identity. You could recognise who are the resident people there. Apparently, it is most obvious from the way they talk. Taiwan people have their own style and tone of chinese. China people have their own different set of style and tone of chinese. Even Singaporeans have their own style of chinese. One common language but different identity.

Just only one week of my holidays and the stock market has declined so much. Today the STI is dropping more than 50 points. Am i worried about my current stocks position? I would say i am not. I could still enjoy my holidays even though i saw the markets declining (well, i still checked the stock market when i'm overseas). This year, i've not invested a lot of my capital in the markets. I still have money to buy in when the opportunity arise. Thus, if it keeps on dropping, i can still accumulate more.

Yesterday, the most talked about stock was china minzhong. It dropped 50% and caused trading to halt on the counter itself. What is happening to this stock? There is a report by Glaucus Research accusing china minzhong of financial irregularities. How true is this report? I have no idea and i'm sure every investor will be clueless as well. We'll have to wait for the official explanation by china minzhong themselves. I do not have any shares in china minzhong as of now. Will i risk to accumulate shares of it? If i calculate my risk appetite, it could be worth it to risk a small amount of money to buy into it. This is money that i would be willing to lose. China Minzhong has been a good company thus far so if the report is not true, the stock price will recover quickly.

The current weakness in the stock market presents an opportunity to buy good companies at lower prices. Value investors do like the stock market to decline. When is a good time to buy? As an investor, i would say there is no perfect time to buy. Nobody can predict the bottom perfectly. You could learn some technical analysis which is chart reading to determine better entry points. But however, technical analysis has its shortfalls too. Losing money is part of investing. But you have to know why you're losing money. If you don't know why, then most likely you're investing blindly.

Related Posts:
1. Why people lose their money during crisis?
2. How to pick stocks (Part 2) - The profitability of a business

2 comments:

  1. When to buy? When the share price is undervalued and there is a margin of safety - even if the prices falls further, you know it will come back higher than what you bought.
    Do you buy all at one go? No, spread out - once value is there, can start buying a bit and buy more when drop further.
    For me, I am doing above plus keep some ammunition for a big crash if it happens. (once in a lifetime opportunity - except it happened already in 2008 and now greedy, hoping another round when QE tapering starts).

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Anonymous,

    You got it spot on! Always have a few tranche of your "war chest". Ready to deploy in batches.

    ReplyDelete