How did you started?

[SGxiaosin]

Hi all investors and traders.

I created this thread in hopes of helping beginners like myself to look at how the experienced began and hopefully learn from their footsteps.

This thread would then serve as a compiled list of experiences of how you started out and improve yourself along the way.

Hopefully the lao jiaos here could share your experiences as a beginner?

Thanks in advance!

 

[kebinu]

initial idea is to invest. then contra then trade. win, lose more, win more, lose more, win more, win win win win win lose win win win lose win win lose win lose lose win win win win win win win

Something like this. Trading mind has to be grown together with the capital to improve.

 

[Shiny Things]

My first investing experience was a terrible one!

I was a naive 16-year-old, and my parents gave me $2k and said "go make us rich". (Pro tip: parents, do not do this, it will not work.) I plowed it all into the Telstra 2 share offering, wherein the Australian government stuffed nearly every single retail investor in the country with shares in Australia's former monopoly telco at the ding-dong high of the dotcom bubble.

I chose... poorly.

They got the IPO away on a 7 handle and it never traded there again. It took thirteen years for anyone who bought Telstra 2 at the IPO to get back to flat, including dividends. Let this be a lesson: stagging IPOs is occasionally a terrible idea.

So that sort of scared me off investing for a long time, and scared me off single stocks forever: my working assumption now is that I suck at stockpicking so I should resist the temptation to trade single stocks. I basically kept all my cash in the bank from 2000 to 2008, which in hindsight was dumb - I'd have done better to buy and hold through the GFC.

That said, it was pure dumb luck that I wasn't BOLIVIAN long when everything fell out of bed in 2007/08; when everything dumped 30% I thought "gee maybe I'd better get around to opening a brokerage account like I've been meaning to". I bought a bunch of index ETFs in October 2008, and then everything went another 20% in my face over the next six months.

But I'd been doing plenty of reading, and had to persuade myself that dollar-cost averaging - buying a steady amount each month - was the right thing to do. My absolute ding-dong low purchase was a clip of SPY at $71.02 in March 2009... and now it's about to crack $200. I still have those SPYs.

(The confo from that SPY trade is one of my favourite trophies. I still have a copy of it, along with my Reuters ticket for a clip of AUDUSD I sold at 1.0000 when it traded there for the first time in three decades. Took a LONG time for that one to go my way.)

That was how I got started with boring, sensible, low-cost, buy-and-hold index investing. I diversified over the next few years, jumping into an asset class whenever it got cheap - European stocks in 2011-2012 after the peripherals blowup; muni bonds in 2013 after Meredith Whitney shot her mouth off; emerging markets earlier this year after the Russia/Ukraine shenanigans kicked off. (I'm still looking for an opportunity to get long Aussie stocks - I'm technically underweight those, because I might end up retiring over there. I think it'll come when AUDUSD trades back to 70 cents.)

 

[frenchbriefs]

wrong.the number 1 lesson is never trade with other people's money.

this is boring,everyone knows how index investing works....theres only a number of indexs that u buy and thats about it,buy and hold....maybe u can mix and match a little according to the market valuation or maybe u can market time a little during a major crash but what else is there?u cant even squeeze out a few extra percentage points with ur intelligence...that is like the dummy's guide to investing,everyone gets the same result no matter how smart or stupid u are.....the whole point of index investing boils down to starting as early as u can and how much money u can stuff into ur portfolio as fast as possible since u are never going to get more than 7 to 9% returns over the long run.....

i agree we should probably put 90% of our networth into index investing but we should also speculate a little.....there has to be a way we can invest like warren buffet or option trade like anton kriel or invest like dragons den or sharktank....

My first investing experience was a terrible one!

I was a naive 16-year-old, and my parents gave me $2k and said "go make us rich". (Pro tip: parents, do not do this, it will not work.) I plowed it all into the Telstra 2 share offering, wherein the Australian government stuffed nearly every single retail investor in the country with shares in Australia's former monopoly telco at the ding-dong high of the dotcom bubble.

I chose... poorly.

They got the IPO away on a 7 handle and it never traded there again. It took thirteen years for anyone who bought Telstra 2 at the IPO to get back to flat, including dividends. Let this be a lesson: stagging IPOs is occasionally a terrible idea.

So that sort of scared me off investing for a long time, and scared me off single stocks forever: my working assumption now is that I suck at stockpicking so I should resist the temptation to trade single stocks. I basically kept all my cash in the bank from 2000 to 2008, which in hindsight was dumb - I'd have done better to buy and hold through the GFC.

That said, it was pure dumb luck that I wasn't BOLIVIAN long when everything fell out of bed in 2007/08; when everything dumped 30% I thought "gee maybe I'd better get around to opening a brokerage account like I've been meaning to". I bought a bunch of index ETFs in October 2008, and then everything went another 20% in my face over the next six months.

But I'd been doing plenty of reading, and had to persuade myself that dollar-cost averaging - buying a steady amount each month - was the right thing to do. My absolute ding-dong low purchase was a clip of SPY at $71.02 in March 2009... and now it's about to crack $200. I still have those SPYs.

(The confo from that SPY trade is one of my favourite trophies. I still have a copy of it, along with my Reuters ticket for a clip of AUDUSD I sold at 1.0000 when it traded there for the first time in three decades. Took a LONG time for that one to go my way.)

That was how I got started with boring, sensible, low-cost, buy-and-hold index investing. I diversified over the next few years, jumping into an asset class whenever it got cheap - European stocks in 2011-2012 after the peripherals blowup; muni bonds in 2013 after Meredith Whitney shot her mouth off; emerging markets earlier this year after the Russia/Ukraine shenanigans kicked off. (I'm still looking for an opportunity to get long Aussie stocks - I'm technically underweight those, because I might end up retiring over there. I think it'll come when AUDUSD trades back to 70 cents.)

 

[wahkao3]

i started by following analysts reports. They say buy i buy. They say sell i sell. Analysts from brokerage houses like OCBC and Philips surely have good reputation right?
Thought i very clever until i realized they ish bluff chewren one. Lost money overnight.

Since then,been researching so many methods. I ended up with computer simulations for TA, and financial analysis for FA. Works pretty good. The idea is to invest into low risk, high return stocks.

=======================================

I do not know why a lot of ppl condemn me for preaching low risk, high return investment method. They rather go for high risk high return or low risk low return.
To find low risk high return, use both TA and FA. Both say buy, then you buy. Its perfect sense right? haizz

 

[kebinu]

It's so perfect but then you did not give any real example. It becomes bad.

 

[w1rbelw1nd]

wrong.the number 1 lesson is never trade with other people's money.

this is boring,everyone knows how index investing works....theres only a number of indexs that u buy and thats about it,buy and hold....maybe u can mix and match a little according to the market valuation or maybe u can market time a little during a major crash but what else is there?u cant even squeeze out a few extra percentage points with ur intelligence...that is like the dummy's guide to investing,everyone gets the same result no matter how smart or stupid u are.....the whole point of index investing boils down to starting as early as u can and how much money u can stuff into ur portfolio as fast as possible since u are never going to get more than 7 to 9% returns over the long run.....

i agree we should probably put 90% of our networth into index investing but we should also speculate a little.....there has to be a way we can invest like warren buffet or option trade like anton kriel or invest like dragons den or sharktank....

Hmmm but then do we NEED a return that is higher that is projected from index investing? Seems to me that it is treating it more like a game/challenge than anything else (disclaimer: I am guilty of that as well)

 

[w1rbelw1nd]

Well for me, started off when I was around 18, got my mom to invest in a few overseas stocks and local stocks. Mixed bag of results.

After I went to business school, one of the first things that I learned was how monkeys throwing darts would make match stock picks of analysts. I tried anyhow whacking a few counters on the sgx, in the end have to take a 20-30% loss in my investments.

After getting my hands burned, I started to be more careful and find out more about dividend investing. At that point of time (2009 I think) reits were very cheap and I got into many of those counters using my trusty SCB account. Made some pretty good capital gains (50% thereabouts) on top of dividends.

As I started to have a better understanding of how companies work from my modules in school, learning about corporate governance,biz strategy, a lot of small things here and there, I tried to analyze corporate actions and company annoucenments more closely... It initially paid off for some of my investments. But some of the investments, despite all the favorable conditions still languish because of market changes...

I came to the conclusion, why not I just screw all this active investment BS, and just believe what research has shown. That on average we cannot beat the market index. That we should focus on minimizing our costs to maximize profit.

From then on, I have been selling a fixed dollar value of my single stock investments and investing in etfs thereafter. I think I enjoyed and treasure my investment journey because it trained me to be convinced that index investing is the way to go for me, and is something that I can commit to, even if naysayers around me can say the earn XYZ returns from some investment techniques or speculating penny stocks.

Anyway, I am still reading up on how to increase my returns beyond the 7-9% cap from index investing. Would share with the bros here if I have any ideas that can be explored...

 

[Shiny Things]

this is boring,everyone knows how index investing works....theres only a number of indexs that u buy and thats about it,buy and hold....

That's the point. Investing is supposed to be set-and-forget, buy and hold and look at it in 20 years. But that all said:

i agree we should probably put 90% of our networth into index investing but we should also speculate a little.....

I actually agree with this!

Look, sitting on your hands is frustrating, and you want to get your hands a bit dirty, see if it's really possible to make some extra money. So once you've got some decent money under your belt - you've got your emergency fund, you've bought a few clips of ES3 and A35, you're following the plan.

At this point - not before, but at this point - it's OK to put 5-10% of your investment portfolio into a side account and trade it. Think of it as a reward for being so diligent with your regular investment portfolio. The vast majority of the time, you'll realise you'd have been better off leaving it in the index, but at least you've tried.

And I do this! I've got my little side-pocket at Interactive Brokers, and I put on occasional macro trades - never more than 1-2% of my account on any one trade. I do FX vol (my old stomping ground); rates and rate vol; and commodities occasionally (the Brent-WTI spread compression trade was good to me last year); the one time I dabbled in single stocks was an unwise merger-arb punt that I was lucky to get out of at flat before the merger imploded. Basically anywhere I think there's a bit of money being left on the table.

(What I'd really like is for IBKR to let me trade Singaporean bank prefs - there's been a couple of situations where you can pick them up just before the call date yielding 3-6% to call, so if you can fund at 1.5% or less that's basically free money. I can't do those trades, though - so that's a free trade idea for y'all.)

 

[wahkao3]

It's so perfect but then you did not give any real example. It becomes bad.

tell your story also leh
you are the most elite. 1 month can earn 20%-30%
I ish 1 year can earn 20% i happie liao

 

[peterchan75]

Couldn't recalled clearly. That time no on-line so must called broker for every trade. Dabble US share through Prudential-Bache(babe). Transaction cost was very very expensive. Starting is not important. The end result is i.e. still have the capital + some more. Learn anything in the process ?

 

[archcherub]

That's the point. Investing is supposed to be set-and-forget, buy and hold and look at it in 20 years. But that all said:



I actually agree with this!

Look, sitting on your hands is frustrating, and you want to get your hands a bit dirty, see if it's really possible to make some extra money. So once you've got some decent money under your belt - you've got your emergency fund, you've bought a few clips of ES3 and A35, you're following the plan.

At this point - not before, but at this point - it's OK to put 5-10% of your investment portfolio into a side account and trade it. Think of it as a reward for being so diligent with your regular investment portfolio. The vast majority of the time, you'll realise you'd have been better off leaving it in the index, but at least you've tried.

And I do this! I've got my little side-pocket at Interactive Brokers, and I put on occasional macro trades - never more than 1-2% of my account on any one trade. I do FX vol (my old stomping ground); rates and rate vol; and commodities occasionally (the Brent-WTI spread compression trade was good to me last year); the one time I dabbled in single stocks was an unwise merger-arb punt that I was lucky to get out of at flat before the merger imploded. Basically anywhere I think there's a bit of money being left on the table.

(What I'd really like is for IBKR to let me trade Singaporean bank prefs - there's been a couple of situations where you can pick them up just before the call date yielding 3-6% to call, so if you can fund at 1.5% or less that's basically free money. I can't do those trades, though - so that's a free trade idea for y'all.)

everytime i read stuff by u, i wish i could have started my career doing trading or bank operations so I could have learnt a lot more than all these piecemeal i get from "schools" and "gurus".

i am 30s and in the middle of nowhere financially... short of getting 10-20% of my income to save and invest for the long term, how can I get a job where the side benefit is learning all these trading stuff?

it seems sooooo useful in life. and good to share with siblings and friends too.

thanks Shiny.

 

[SGxiaosin]

Thanks for all the posts!

Unfortunately, still can't quite understand what are some on the terms used as I'm still learning the ropes of investments haha.

Hope to learn them soon and please do continue posting how you all started with! Would be glad to learn more from you!

 

[kazejin]

I started off very badly, somewhat a similar situation to Shiny Things.

My parents had ~300k cash stashed up over the years and i gave them suggestions on what stocks to buy.
The stocks all crashed badly. my parents hanged on to them hoping that it will go back to the original price before selling them.
1 or 2 of them did got back to their original price.
Some got delisted.
Huge losses overall.

Thats how i started.
Heh.

 

[wahkao3]

I started off very badly, somewhat a similar situation to Shiny Things.

My parents had ~300k cash stashed up over the years and i gave them suggestions on what stocks to buy.
The stocks all crashed badly. my parents hanged on to them hoping that it will go back to the original price before selling them.
1 or 2 of them did got back to their original price.
Some got delisted.
Huge losses overall.

Thats how i started.
Heh.

got turn around story with happy ending?

 

[icicic]

Unfortunately I've always been working in sensitive sectors so buying and selling is a PITA. What I can do is keep my eyes on select stocks and buy when I think they look cheap. Lesson over the years is to do my own work and not blindly listen to others
VOW was good to me (doubled money in about a year) but also got hit by some others (NOL on a economy recovery play). All have winners and losers, just hope to get more of the former and get dividends in the meantime which over the years does make a pretty big difference to portfolio value. Long term bond allocation I use the 4% cpf (not earning enough to hit min sum yet). Tax deduction plus an amazing risk free rate is awesome assuming you can give up some liquidity. Can't trade actively and I like to sleep in peace so gave up after a short stint with fx!

 

[Shiny Things]

everytime i read stuff by u, i wish i could have started my career doing trading or bank operations so I could have learnt a lot more than all these piecemeal i get from "schools" and "gurus".

i am 30s and in the middle of nowhere financially... short of getting 10-20% of my income to save and invest for the long term, how can I get a job where the side benefit is learning all these trading stuff?

it seems sooooo useful in life. and good to share with siblings and friends too.

thanks Shiny.

Cheers mate. Unfortunately I don't have a good answer for you - unless you move into back-office at a bank or something like that? One of the things I most enjoyed about the trading job was teaching the mid- and back-office staff about what we do in the front office; they can do their job a lot better if they understand what we're doing up front. Not all traders will be like that, but if you get a good one you can learn a lot.

Seriously, though - saving 10-20% of your income and using that to invest is about the best thing you can do to set yourself on the right track.

 

[frenchbriefs]

Cheers mate. Unfortunately I don't have a good answer for you - unless you move into back-office at a bank or something like that? One of the things I most enjoyed about the trading job was teaching the mid- and back-office staff about what we do in the front office; they can do their job a lot better if they understand what we're doing up front. Not all traders will be like that, but if you get a good one you can learn a lot.

Seriously, though - saving 10-20% of your income and using that to invest is about the best thing you can do to set yourself on the right track.

just curious....whats ur networth?

 

[Shiny Things]

just curious....whats ur networth?

Not really any of your business mate, but suffice to say it's not fuçk-you money. Not yet, anyway.

 

[frenchbriefs]

Not really any of your business mate, but suffice to say it's not fuçk-you money. Not yet, anyway.

it is our business,in the world of wall street u need street cred and money is credibility.....the correct answer should be i have 500k in my roth account,i have 400k in my 401k and xxxk in my IRA account....then breakdown on what funds or etfs u hold,vanguard,barclays,ishares,emerging markets,corporate high yield,small value,large value,growth,international whatnot,tips,treasuries.

no one's asking how much is in ur savings bank,thats rude but we need to know whats in ur portfolio and ur track record and whether u has street cred and nigga's got fonk.