Buy and hold (December effect)

Value investing is a frustrating yet rewarding hobby. It is easy to understand but immensely difficult to implement.
Persistance in working hard to filter out the most promising companies which might be undervalued at certain price levels.
Patience to wait out the hype and resist joining the crowd and do nothing until price fall below target level.
Courage to buy when prices are falling and believing in your thesis of the company.
Confidence that your company will do well irregardless of market noise.

The December effect touted by academics and fund managers is prevalent in us markets. Fund managers will window dress their portfolio by dumping under performing and buy the outperformers, to make themselves look like the winner when investors look at their portfolio constituents. Mere mortals cash in and sell their stocks to raise money for Christmas gift shopping and portfolio rebalancing. Regardless, there will theoretically be a mini crash of temporary under performing stocks and high volatility of those stock prices. For 2017, the Sti was boring until the last 2 weeks, where singtel price crashed due to ex-dividend, others taking their 'bonus dividend' and dumping the stock, and the entire stock market mini-crashed just because the Sti fell.

Throughout these 3 months,  I was hawkishly eyeing the looming bitcoin bubble and hoping the December effect will drag down temporary under performing stocks. It is a deary and boring wait. On the upside, I managed to accumulate a sizeable cash pile from literally doing nothing. The best part is that singtel this week literally crashed from 3.75 to 3.63, the best news I had for the past 3 months. I am not sure which fund / institutional investor dumped their position but I take it as an early Christmas gift. Then again, it crashed continually 3.58, and I missed the low. Regardless if it hits 3.48, I will continue to accumulate if no change in fundamentals.

I am going to play this game of patience with Mr market. I am going to save up and wait indefinitely for any lucky surprises, may it be 3-6 months or longer. My main objective now is to patiently build up cash reserves and set up price alerts for the stocks I deem most valuable. Meanwhile, I hope to put more time in improving my work competency and maybe blog about toastmasters speeches (which I have also been putting off indefinitely).

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