Photo by Gabriel M.

When I was younger, I was quite idealistic. This kind of idealism must have come from a limited world view due to underexposure to reality, or simple a sheltered kind of environment. As I get older, I realised that things don’t always go according to what I think. Here are some things that was idealistic about:

1. I wanted to get 10-12% returns from the market per year, because I read from books that the equity returns over the long term is around 8% for average investors. And I’m above the average investors.

2. I thought that the market only have two kinds of stocks – dividends or growth stocks. Dividend stocks means that there is no growth anymore while growth stocks means that there is a huge chance of capital gains. I used to like growth and detest dividend stocks. Read more…