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As I see more and more newbies coming in to the market, I thought it'll be only right to warn them that the market is not their mother to give them money, but to take it away from them. I must have repeated this countless times in previous post, but it seems I only see more clueless newbies coming in to participate in the market.
Some of the gripes I had with newbies are:
1. I'm in it for the long term
I cringed whenever I heard the word investing for the long term. It shows a few things - firstly, the person saying it believes that in the long term, every mother father stock in the market will rise. How long is long? From historical data, if you invest in STI, you won't lose any money after putting it there for 14 yrs. If you look at Joseph's theory in cycles, you also need around 12 yrs before we can say that we're peaking. All these are related to STI only, so if you're investing in individual companies, then you also assume the individual company's risk, which may not be correlated to STI at all.
So, the ultimate question is - are you prepared to hold it for the really long term - 10-15 yrs - all the time while your stock is bleeding, your capital locked up and seeing light only after that time period had passed? If you do not have the conviction, don't tell me you're buying for the long term.
2. While the attitude is to hold it for long term, there is no corresponding attitude to learn the market properly for the long term.
First deserve, then desire. If you do not wish to learn more about the market, yet wish to profit consistently in it, then you're like the weekend jogger who wants to compete with an Olympian athlete in a race. You might win him occasionally when he's not paying attention but when he does, you're dead. The odds are so against retail investors already, so why make it worse by not learning it properly? Read more...
