Investing Your First $20,000

This is going to be my first post for the new year 2016. Thinking back when I first started investing, it wasn't a really smooth sailing journey. I read lots of books on how to start investing but never really got an idea of what it really is until I experience it myself. Most were too theoretical and to be successful in investing, it is not as easy as following a set of rules.

There were very few real life examples of how people really invested their money especially in Singapore. So, a few other blogger friends and I made an effort to write and share our experiences on investing and compiled it into an Ebook. Hopefully, this will make it easier for most of you to start investing. We have named title of the book as "Investing your first $20,000"

This book is going to be given free to all my readers here as a gift for the new year. It took months to compile and bring together all the thoughts and ideas to give you a complete picture of how each of us invest our money. Feel free to download and share it around with your friends.

You can download the Ebook here

Happy new year and wishing all a wonderful year ahead!

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5 Elements of successful investors [Book review]

The book: "5 elements of successful investors" is a book on how different personality types can affect the behaviour of investors and how we should discover our own personalities and find the investing style that suits us. There are many instruments and many styles of both investment and trading. I discovered that most people will start with trading in Forex, stocks, Options as it looks really attractive to make more money. Young people want the fast pace and hype in trading these products and many think that they can learn and succeed in it just because they are young. Then there will be older people who also want to have a try in trading and think that they too can succeed in it with their experience and maturity that they have. However, this is often not the case and most lose money in trading.

A copy of the book I read

Why people lose or make money?

Some of us may think why do some people make money while some lose money? The answer lies deeply in the understanding of our own personalities. In the book "5 elements of successful investors", the authors, Xeo Lye and Jonathan Quek, will give you 4 + 1 personality types to let you understand yourself better. The 4 elements they have are Fire, Earth, Air and Water. The last element is the Spirit which is quite interesting. They even have a check list questionnaire to determine which personality type you most likely belong to.


About the Authors

Xeo Lye Co-authored the book with Jonathan Quek. Xeo is known for his speaking role in Singapore's national financial literacy program "Moneysense" as well as his involvement in a series of financial talk shows with Singapore's Mediacorp Radio. He is the co-founder of Capitalgainsgroup.com which is a financial games design company that aims to help people understand the complex world of finance through gaming workshops, board games and mobile applications. He's passionate in educating the public on financial matters.

Jonathan Quek is active in educating the public on financial education. He has been featured in various financial summits and expos in Singapore and Malaysia. Just recently, he was a speaker at financial growth summit and invest fair in Malaysia. He's the founder of SilverMalaysia.com, a financial youth intelligence and wealth insider group.


More about the book

The book continues to talk about financial literacy in our society. Family background and social pressures will affect our financial decisions and habits in life. This in turn affects our personality. It even teaches you how to find the right financial advisor and warns you on some of the deceptions that so called "Gurus" communicate to us. The thing I like about the book is it also has a history of the world economy and how markets performed over the years since the early 1900s. An understanding of history and economics is important in investment as it helps us to learn from past trends which creates a cycle of boom and bust.

The book is already sold in book stores in Singapore. It will be beneficial for investors who want to understand their investment personality better. This is my personal opinion after reading the book sponsored by the authors themselves. Thank you Xeo and Jonathan for the book!

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Book review: Winning Psychology of Defensive Traders

I have just finished reading the book titled Winning psychology of defensive traders by Conrad Alvin Lim. Adam Khoo learning technologies group (AKLTG) contacted me and they were kind enough to give a complimentary copy of the book to me. I've read a few other books by Conrad and Adam Khoo seperately and its always inspirational to me.

I came to know AKLTG as an organisation 3 years back when I just started out my investing journey. I was searching on the internet to find if there were successful investors or traders in Singapore. That's where I stumbled upon the profile of Adam Khoo and Conrad. I was drawn by the wealth academy trader tutorial conducted by Conrad and so I went for a preview session. I was lost in my own financial journey and had lost some money during the European crisis a few years back. I needed some guidance and was desperately finding some help.

Defensive in trading

When I attended the preview session of Conrad, I learnt how tough being a trader was and what it takes to become successful in trading. This was the main point which the new book, "Winning psychology of defensive traders", was trying to bring across to readers too. Its about having the psychology to be defensive and not lose money in trading. Contrary to what we've heard or seen on newspaper advertisement about how a particular person has earned XX amount of $$ through trading forex or whatsoever in a short time, Conrad tells the hard truths of making money from trading. In his new book, there is also the story of his life on how he got out of bankruptcy and did whatever it takes to become a successful trader, author and educator today.


The importance of economics and financial risk management

To be a successful trader, one needs to learn macroeconomics. This is the essence of how money flows from one asset to another and how it affects the economy as a whole as well as individual companies. Some finance and economics concepts are discussed in the book as well. It was also mentioned that if successful traders at wall street attend the best universities in the world to learn about finance and economics and later on undergo years of intensive training and mentorship, what makes ordinary people like us think that we can make money easily through trading?

Thus, if we really want to succeed in trading, it takes hard work and also we need to be defensive in order to stay in the game. The book discusses on risk management, how to manage your psychology in trading and I particularly like the section on the pyramid system of financial management. This is a book not only about trading but the principles discussed can be applied into your life in general too.

Back to my story. After attending the preview session by Conrad, I signed up and attended the whole 8 lessons of tutorial taught by Conrad himself. This inspired me to go further to university to study economics which I'm graduating soon in August this year. I discovered my own passion for finance and started my own blog to help others learn more on finance and investments. Reading this new book by Conrad reminds me of the days when i just started out in my journey. It's truly an inspiration to learn from Conrad. This book will definitely inspire you too.

The book "Winning Psychology of defensive traders" is now available at all major bookstores islandwide in Singapore.

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