Rigid Investor

An unexpected and quick rebound was staged by the STI. T he market came back alive with the index climbing up from the lows of 2200 levels to the 2500 levels last week. From another perspective, YTD returns went from -30% and recovered to -20%. This bounce returned 10% in 4 weeks as volatility receded. Did you catch the full range of returns? Maybe half of it? Or possibly much more? If you stayed the course and held tight without selling, you would have caught the full rebound. If you sold something during the plunge, you would have lost some returns presented by the turn in market direction. If you have bought on the way down, continuing at levels below 2600, you would have recouped more than 10% because your base cost was lowered when averaging down. No one knows if this market action is a dead cat bounce. It may or may not retest 2200 levels. It may go lower from here. The economy does feel bad with an extension of SG's circuit breaker, but the stock market is not pe...

Naturally, people gets interested in investment when the stock market plunge hits the news on TV and newspapers. It's simply logical to deduce that when the mainstream media says the market has fallen by this much, it also means this is a good time to invest. In my opinion, this might be true. The best time to start from zero is always now. And if one has already started, consider progressively putting more spare cash to work. The next question for investment newbies is what to buy? I hope to write about this in future. However, for investors already knee deep or appropriately neck deep in the markets, this question is probably no longer relevant. He would already own a carefully constructed portfolio, whose formation is likely on the basis of the investor's view of having the best growth, income, value or undertaking of the most comfortable risk level he can stomach. Recently, I've read that for an investor who spends such great effort to curate the list of stocks...

What a start to 2020. With the impact of COVID-19 on the world, almost no country is spared. The economy is tanking for sure, although data is not published as fast as how the virus is spreading, so the picture is not clear to all. Nonetheless, the confirmation of a global recession is just a matter of time. The stock market volatility reached levels last seem during the GFC a decade ago. At the first few weeks of the plunge, it scared me to be frank. I'm about 80% invested and my portfolio hit a draw down of 33% at the trough around 23rd Mar. It has recovered to -23% YTD as of end of this week, but the loses are still painful to bear. It's quite a strange feeling over the past weeks of the market's fall. My emotions went from being feeling opportunistic of the initial drop, to fear, to relieve and now feeling slight immunity to further market actions. It somehow numbs the mind to see the portfolio values dropping everyday. I'm sure precious lessons will be learnt f...