TheFinance.sg » La Papillion

Noble chart

La Papillion — Wed, 02 May 2012 05:30:00 +0000

Be Brave.

La Papillion — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 10:44:00 +0000

A student of mine recently got ‘scolded’ by me. She was trying to solve a physics problem but she had no idea how to do it. I had a glimpse of her thinking when I asked her to think out loud. She said after doing this and that, she had no idea what to do. Then I realised that she is trying to figure out entirely the solution of the problem in her head before she even attempt it on paper. I told her severely that perhaps in simpler problems, the entire steps of the solution can be visualised before attempting it. That would be the ideal case, wouldn’t it? You would have the confidence to go through the entire process of writing down the solution since you already had in mind what you are going to do next.

However, I told her, that as problems get increasingly complex, it’s …

What’s the minimum salary to live comfortably?

La Papillion — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 03:23:00 +0000

I was wondering what is the salary that one would need in order to survive life here in Singapore. It would not be surprising to hear a wide range, perhaps from as low as 1k/mth to as high as 20k/mth. That’s because we want different things in life and for certain things, we really do not want to do without because if these basic comfort levels are gone, then our quality of life also decreases. After all, we do not want to merely survive; we want to live a life. Knowing that this would be a subjective topic, let’s just start with me.

Here’s some of the basic things that I need to pay on a monthly basis:

1. Food $200
2. Parents $650
3. Insurance $400
4. Mortgage for house $1000 (my part alone)
5. Phone and internet bills $80
6. Groceries $80
7. Car expenses + loan $360 …

Changing market strategy?

La Papillion — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 02:50:00 +0000

Some people follow a market strategy of being a contrarian. This means that if others are buying, then you will be selling and vice versa. I think this makes a lot of sense, at least in theory. The hard thing is not about the theory itself, but deciding when the theory is applicable. If you look at a snapshot of all the available market theory, they will work in particular situations but not in others, hence to a beginner who is bombarded by a thousand and one market strategy, he will only get more confused after reading all these.

I am saying all these because it seems like people are trying out new strategies almost like changing new clothes. Try a bit of value investing, try a bit of momentum trading, try a bit of this and a bit of that. I’m quite sure some of the advice for a particular …

Sharing my monthly ritual

La Papillion — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:55:00 +0000

I just finished tidying up my month end accounts. I’ve been doing this for quite a while, so it didn’t take too much time as all the necessary process had already been routinized and it’s just a matter of clicking the right websites and recording down some numbers. Let me share what I do every month end:

1. Open up my excel spreadsheet. There are 2 books that needed me to fill up. First is the monthly expenditure. In the past I used to record all my expenses, big or small, onto that spreadsheet daily. But these days, I tend to consolidate over a few days to a week before putting them into the spreadsheet. I realised that I don’t need such precision and accuracy now, because I already know what my spending pattern is. I take that as a reason to reduce the amount of work to do some tracking (it’s …

Don’t be obsessed over financial freedom

La Papillion — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 03:38:00 +0000

The title says it all. Do not be obsessed over financial freedom. Financial freedom is for the future, but in order to have a future, you need to have a present. What if one day, your present situation changes, would the financial freedom that you have in the future still be meaningful? For example, you planned nicely for a nice retirement at age 45 with a cash flow matching your expenses, but suddenly your life situation changes – your spouse left you, you lost control of your limbs etc – would the financial freedom that you crave for in the past still meaningful? I doubt so.

So, while it’s good to plan ahead for the future, it’s never too good to be obsessed over it. What do I mean by being obsessed? Like forecasting every bit of income that streams in to the cent, like controlling your expenses now so …

Complementary opposites

La Papillion — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:24:00 +0000

I realised, by living with my wife, that we have different ways of looking at things. She could fuss over details that I wouldn’t bat my eyelids over. Or I could crunch over the numbers before buying things while she just looks at the colours available. I think that’s the thing that makes us, as a couple, interesting. It would never do to have two person who are too similar. Wouldn’t it be boring? Of course, we cannot be too ‘interesting’, otherwise we would argue at everything and anything and living together would be near impossible. I see this differences as being complimentary opposite.

I guess in the market, the two camps of TA (technical analysis) and FA (fundamental analysis) works the same too. They are different; they see different things and do different things. You can even say they are opposite, but I think they are complementary to each …

Selling mode

La Papillion — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 02:50:00 +0000

Throughout the entirety of this week and last, I was trying to sell of a good part of my portfolio. I sold off all my aims before the run up and all my sabana and all my lippomall. Don’t be alarmed by the word ‘all’ – it means different things to different people. I sold all because the amount that I had in it is not big in the first place, so it is senseless to try to earn that extra few dollars by staggering it into multiple sell batches.

As to seller’s remorse, I believe it no longer plagues me. I conclude that it is essentially an emotional problem, you know, the twin forces of greed and fear. These days, I’m more emotionless regarding the market. Que sera sera, whatever will be will be, isn’t that what the folk songs of old taught us so?

So what’s the rationale …

Results announcement calender

La Papillion — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 02:00:00 +0000

Here’s the result announcement for this month. I’ll be paying attention to a few counters that are announcing their full year results. I wonder whether this is the thing that keeps STI awake these days and wondering what will become of STI when the excitement dies off.

The swan song of local bloggers

La Papillion — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 03:32:00 +0000

As the market transforms back and fro into a beast that is neither a bull or a bear (perhaps it had always been a hybrid chimera of sort – a bull with bear head for instance), I noticed that more and more old timer bloggers are slowly exiting the blogging scene. I say that with a tinge of heartache, because some of them had been blogging together with me since I started circa 2006 period, right near the peak of the bull market. 6 years had since passed, with each of them patiently and industrially churning out articles after articles, sometimes to an unappreciative crowd of anonymous users, and hopefully not blogging just to yourself.

I guess there’s a time and tide for everything. As we grow older, a lot of activities will exact their demands on our energy and time. Suddenly passions that you once had might have gone …

How I read (almost) 52 books a year

La Papillion — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:06:00 +0000

Since a lot of readers commented that they had only been reading 1-2 books max in a year, I thought it’ll be a good time to share what I did to read that many books. First of all, let me add that in my opinion, reading many books is not as important as reading the right books. I rather read less books but books that are important and crucial to your mental well-being, than to say, reading many many books that are just trashy. But it’s the law of diminishing returns that really makes it harder and harder to find those books that bring the right amount of inspiration and motivation to pump your hand in the air and gave a mental shout of victory. The best books are books that told you what you know internally already, in a way and mannerisms that makes it so easy for you to absorb. …

Reflection on 2011

La Papillion — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 04:02:00 +0000

After doing my end of month accounting for the Dec 2011 and thus wrap up my financial year 2011, I realised that a lot of my networth was wiped out. Okay, everyone’s definition of networth is different, so here’s mine – it’s defined as all my assets (includes cash, marked to market investment portfolio, whole life insurance cash value, mmf and cpf) but excludes my residential property. I also didn’t include debts that I owed to the hdb because of the property. I think you can roughly say that’s my investible networth since most of it is cash that I can utilize at short notice. I know you can’t use cpf anytime you want, but then again, I don’t have much of it anyway, so it doesn’t matter significantly.

With this kind of definition, I realised that my networth is whacked down to around 2008, way before I had started any kind …

Making mistakes

La Papillion — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 06:30:00 +0000

I made a couple of mistakes these few weeks as I shifted over to my new home. Most of them happened in the kitchen, because that’s the part of the home that I had least experience in. In school, we make mistakes when doing tutorials. In work, we make mistakes in handling people and other more technical stuff. At home, what kind of mistakes can I make?

Well, I’m going to list it out:

1. As I was sweeping stuff into my dustpan, I moved it over to the rubbish chute (which is inside my home) to clear it. But without concentrating on what I’m doing, I didn’t grip the brush hard enough, as a result, the whole brush fell into the chute, all the way down to the bottom. It’s so silly that when I told my wife about it, we all laugh at the kind of clumsiness we …

Taking on full responsibility

La Papillion — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:39:00 +0000

The recent mrt episodes in Singapore highlighted a couple of bias that can be equally applicable in the investment/trading mentality. I saw some report saying that since the CEO had been in the company, the company had grew its profit from xxx to yyy per annum. This implied that the CEO is responsible for creating the profits. But when the spate of incidents causing the train to breakdown happened, there’s no report saying that the CEO is responsible for it. I mean, why is it so easy to attribute good things to the CEO but not the bad things?

Will that happen to people who invests or trades too? I guess so. When the stocks that you bought went up, it was a good call or a good investment decision. You picked a stock that ran up, so you are good. But when the call turns sour, you start blaming the …

Choosing quality over quantity

La Papillion — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 02:00:00 +0000

As I get older and hopefully more mature, I realised that if I have to choose between quantity and quality, I’ll go for quality these days. It’s not always like that. There was a time that I thought more is good. For example, having more of a cheaper share is better than having less of a better one. Or eating more lousy food in buffet is better than eating less but higher quality ones. There are many many such examples where I can quote you that lets you see how I chose quantity over quality. Hopefully I will reduce such nonsense from now on.

Specifically, here are the areas that I would need to rewire my thinking regarding the choice of quantity vs quality:

1. I’ve always had a target to read 1 book a week. Initially that target was set so that I can read more. I remember the …

Hill Harper’s "The Wealth Cure"

La Papillion — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 02:00:00 +0000

If you’re looking for prescribed, step by step ways to kick start a healthy relationship with money and wealth, then Hill Harper’s “The Weath Cure” is not your type of book. Initially when I read the book, I found it rather strange because of the way the book is structured. There are 5 big parts to the book, which each part having a couple of smaller chapters that is related to the parts. But here’s the thing – I don’t see the relation at all. Perhaps I had been to used to seeing other financial related books that are usually more straightfoward. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, it’s just different.

Halfway through reading the book, I realised that this is a chicken-soup-for-the-soul kind of book. Each of the smaller chapters are actually stories written in the point of view of the author himself. I thought it’s a very refreshing …

Positive mindset vs possibility mindset

La Papillion — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 02:00:00 +0000

I was reading this book by Dr. Robert Anthony “How to make the impossible possible”, when I discovered that the author actually differentiate between positive mindset and possibility mindset . We know the usual positive thinking – if we think positive, then the outcome can also be positive. This is opposed to thinking negatively about a situation. But I’ve always wondered about the limitations of having a positive mindset and the book addresses exactly that problem.

I thought that if I think hard enough, will things really happen? For example, if I ‘will’ a book to move, will it really do so, even if I’m ultra positive about it? To the majority who don’t have special powers, I guess the book is going to stay there. So there is a limitations to how much positive thinking can do to us. It’s like if you never study hard for your exams, no …

Am I certified to trade?

La Papillion — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 15:24:00 +0000

As I logged into my poems account, I saw this screen asking me to do a test. I think it’s the new ruling that is going to take effect on 1st Jan 2012. If you do not satisfy certain criteria, you’ll be asked to take a test to determine whether you know what you are doing. If you fail, you won’t be able to buy (though you can sell your existing holdings, from what I read from the site). I don’t know who the ruling is trying to protect – the advisors or the consumers. Anyway, it seems that I do not have to take the test since I had made more than 6 trades with regards to shares. I can’t do CFD or unit trust myself though, until I take the test, that is.

Anyway, I would like to take the test and see if I ‘know’ my stuff …