My investing journey

I've realised just recently that there are many other financial bloggers out there who are blogging about their investment journey and how they invest in the stock market. One very good blog i discovered is singaporeanstocksinvestor.blogspot.com. This blog is written by a singaporean and his blog is actually quite popular. He has been asked to be interviewed by radio and television stations but he has decided to remained anonymous. 

The purpose of me setting up this blog is also to educate people on investment and also how to manage their money. I've been investing for almost 3 years now and i have never regretted this journey thus far. My journey started during my army days when i was thinking what should i be doing for my future? I was getting a very low allowance in army and this led me to think about money indirectly. What job did i want to do? Many questions were there for me to answer. As there was a period of free time during army before i went for a major overseas deployment, i began to look for books that i could read. There was a book i found in my drawer at home titled rich dad poor dad. This book has been kept in my drawer for the past 5 years and i didn't even touch it. It was actually my uncle who lent me that book but i never liked reading when i was younger. 

When i picked up that book after 5 years, i read the subtitle on the cover of the book. It said: "What the rich teach their kids about money that the poor and middle class do not". This sparked my interest. I do not come from a rich family so i always wanted to know why the rich can become rich. What caused them to be able to get rich? When i started reading that book, I couldn't stop reading. The book talked about how the rich thinks, how they manage their money etc. This really got me excited as i thought now i found the formula to learn to be rich. 

After that, i went on to search for more books and also found successful people to be my role model. These people include Warren Buffet, George Soros, Donald Trump in the western part of the world. To have a role model closer to home, i started searching on the internet if there were indeed successful peple in singapore. In the end, i found Adam Khoo. He's Singapore's youngest millionaire who achieved his 1st milion at the age of 26. Second is Conrad Alvin Lim. He's a bankrupt but got out of bankruptcy through hard work and trading in the stock market. Thirdly, the late Dennis Ng. He's a trained accountant who quit his job in a bank and came out to be a financial advisor teaching people on proper financial planning. Sadly, he passed away last year at a relatively young age. They are all millionaires and also author of best selling books in Singapore.  

Throughout these 3 years, i've met many other people who are interested in investments. These include my current colleagues, my army friends, my cousin and also brokers and insurance agents whom i've met. It does seem like i'm meeting more like minded people who all have a passion for financial planning and investments. This is like a law of attraction. 

When i started investing, i was overly confident and lost quite a bit of money during the European crisis that happened in 2011. My worst investment was in a listed shipping company in Singapore called NOL. I bought at a high of $2.20 and this stock went all the way down to $1.04 currently. Fortunately, i've already sold this stock but the lost was still almost half of my savings. This has taught me a very hard lesson and i learned it the hard way. It was after this incident that i really started to learn and take a whole new approach to investing. 

To date, i've made a 16% return for the whole of last year as a starter and currently this year, my portfolio stands at 20%. My investment approach is to find strong undervalued companies and buy them at the right time. The analyst of some of these companies i will put up in separate blog posts after that. Everyone i meet now, i would tell them about the importance of investing their money so that we are not destroyed by the rate of inflation. Of course, the first step is to having savings. Without savings, one will not be able to invest. Many people have a common question when i tell them about investment. They ask me how do they start? This is a question i will answer in another blog post and hopefully lay out the things needed if a person wants to start investing. I hope i can contribute to the financial well being of others and learn from other experienced investors also.