Caveat Emptor

How to avoid doing dumb things   Investment blogging isn't interesting when there is deficient undervalued opportunities. Even if I came out with potential ideas to explore, the present valuations are undesirable with insufficient margin of safety. All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. After sitting through 2 bear markets, reviewing investment performance data and coming to a conclusion that my best results are made from placing my bets in market stress conditions, I will strife to trend towards disciplined accumulation. Per portfolio management rules, I need to build up a larger war-chest to match my larger portfolio sizing. On a completely unrelated and separate note on people doing dumb things   Reflecting on the recent COI inquiry regarding the recent deceased servicemen , there is significant furor over the most recent NS related deaths , whereby a Singapore celebrity is killed and MINDEF have to scr...

Are you enclosed in a closed system (mobius slip) or an open feedback loop?  The importance of maintaining an open feedback loop when prospecting for investments cannot be downplayed. Often then not, investors simply attend conference calls (mostly schmoozing sessions between analysts and management), look at analyst reports (misalignment of incentives and remuneration ) and look at the investor presentations slides, which are designed to sell rather than present the pros and cons of the company. Different perspectives are often celebrated in western societies whereby there is no wrong answer, leading to fuzzy thinking and lack of focus on pertinent points. Chinese and Singaporean societies focus on preaching the official line and using official publiactions as gospels of truth, leading to potential massive delusions about the preached gospel in contrast with market reality. What is considered propaganda at the national context could easily be the same at the com...

January is a month of turmoil and unexpected outcomes.  As professional and retail investors proclaimed the death of equity markets, the detrimental effects of US government shutdown on US economy, Br-exit fears, China economic slowdown as well as trade war concerns, my portfolio had an unexpected recovery largely boosted by the recovery of STI ETF, Singtel, Ascendas India trust, Silverlake Axis, Tencent and to a smaller extent Apple stock. In the parlance of professional classic investor -speak, I should be considered cautiously optimistic of the year ahead. In layman terms, I actually have no idea what is going on. The only thing I am acutely aware is that on 28 Dec 2018 , the market sentiment is ruled by extreme fear.At this current time however, market sentiment recovered and there is no change in economic and bottom up fundamentals throughout the course of 1month. https://money.cnn.com/data/fear-and-greed/ The reason why I created this post with a click-bait title,...