Good Investing Lessons

Some interesting articles about investing in current climate: Should you be scared now? http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2012/09/26/should-the-dows-down-streak-scare-you.aspx CNBC: Greece Trumps China - http://www.cnbc.com/id/49179175?__source=yahoo|headline|quote|text|&par=yahoo http://www.cnbc.com/id/49183818 - Beware of coming 25% correction Let's keep these news and monitor what happens a year later.

Some very fundamental rules that I have not be able to keep with: 1. Diversify and invest Thinly across Diversify your stock portfolio over a basket of 30 over different counters across at least 5 different sectors. Warren Buffet said Diversification is only for those people who does not know what they are doing. Let's fact it. You are not an expert. Risking too much on any stock investment is a recipe for disaster, even for the sophisticated stock market investor. Keeping your individual share investments small keeps your capital pot safe and lowers the stress that can make investing unpleasant. Once you have 30 stocks you can grow the scale of each investment, but until that day stay small.  2. Take your time and do your research Never invest your money on a share tip. Stock investing is a skill you build up over time and with improvement your returns will grow. Share tips are empty investments and many unsavoury types try and lure you into investments with bad

There is a lot of talk about Spanish sovereign debts recently. I came across a research paper which I think is very useful for me and wish to share it here. This is taken from www.fundsupermart.com, an online fund broker where you can purchase funds form various fund managers. This portal provides some research and comparisons and it is essentially a self service portal. From the chart provided, we can see that there is a problem for Spain to service their debts for the next 4-5 years if the debts are not re-structured. With this kind of risk, no sane investors would want to risk their money to buy Spanish bonds. They can only turn to European central bank for bail out. The blue arrow is a fictitious line I draw assuming re-structuring is going to happen. Essentially, they have to move the payment of capitals into next 5-20 years to be affordable. In addition to that, they can't make additional loans. This is just taking a very simplistic view of the situation. To have that hap

Have you experienced buying stocks when the market has just made major advances or the counter has just moved up higher? Only to face the selling down the next couple of days? Well that must be a lot of of regrets there. Well, the consolation is that you are not alone. I frequently made the same mistake - huh, talking about not making the same mistake twice. This is one monster inside of me that is so difficult to kill. So often, I had forgotten about the commonsense of waiting for market to pull back before entering. This kind of emotion arose from a mixture of fear and greed. Greed in wanting to chase the profit and fear is worrying that the price may go beyond comfortable purchase level. On the hindsight, this is so silly. Pure silliness and nothing else. How many times you have read in the book about where to enter and when to exit. All the theory sounded so simple and logical. But, when at the thick of things, the price movement in the market can be so powerful and dominating ov