First of all, you must truthfully examine your own track record to see your performance in share investment. If have not been successful, you must change your method of selecting shares. If your selected shares continually cannot go up in price, it means that you do not even know the basic fundamentals in share selection. You must read all my articles I posted in i3investors.com, bearing in mind that there are a few failures whose commentaries are abusive and senseless. They cannot even write without some grammatical errors. They must seriously examine their own track record.
Most important share selection criteria:
There are many stock selection criteria such as NTA, dividend yield, cash flow etc. The most important is profit growth prospect. Earning per share, EPS growth is the most powerful catalyst to move share price. The reason why Latitude Tree went up from Rm 1.00 to above Rm 7.00 in the last 26 months is because its quarterly profit as announced in Bursa has been increasing continuously. It went up yesterday when KLCI drop 28 points.
Now you must check all your current holdings. You must make sure that they can make more profit this year than last year, otherwise the price will drop when they announce reduced profit for the year. If you are not sure that some of your holdings will make more profit this year than last year, you must not be afraid to sell and cut loss.
Emotion overtakes logical thinking:
If you have been selecting shares with good fundamental qualities and yet you could not make money, you have to examine your behavior when the market is up or when the market is down. Do you dare to buy now when the market is plunging? Yesterday, 10th Aug 2015, the KLCI dropped 28 points. Are you selling your shares even they are really good shares?
Did you sell to make profit when the market was euphoric, people were buying like crazy? If you did not, you have to seriously control your emotion. You must make sure that your emotion will not control your logical thinking.
With most major decisions in life, emotion overtakes logical thinking. As a result, most investors including professionals cannot perform. They are called “irrational investors”.
To be a successful investor, you must overcome your emotion and be able to think logically. You must have the guts to go against the crowd and be a contrarian investor. You must dare to buy while others are selling desperately and you must dare to sell when others are eager to buy aggressively.
Share prices move up and down like a yoyo:
Finally, the most important and rarest quality of all, is the ability to live through volatility without changing your investment thought process. This is almost impossible for most people to do. When the chips are down they find it hard to sell their stocks at a loss. They find it difficult to average down or to even put any money into stocks at all when the market is going down. People don’t like short term pain even if it would result in better long-term gain. Very few investors can handle the volatility required for high portfolio returns. They equate short-term volatility with risk. This is irrational. Risk means that if you are wrong about a bet you make, you lose money. A swing up or down over a relatively short time period is not a loss and therefore not risk, unless you are prone to panicking at the bottom and locking in the loss. But most people just can’t see it that way. Their brains won’t let them. Their panic instinct steps in and shuts down the normal brain function. Their emotion controls their logical thinking process.
My advice: You should not invest in shares
- if you cannot control your emotion and sell desperately now as if the market cannot rebound.
- If you cannot understand the quarterly report announcement in Bursa.
- If you cannot understand the company annual balance sheet.
- If you cannot afford to lose some money because share investment is risky.
- If you are always too busy and have no time to review your share holdings.
- If you cannot understand what is P/E ratio, NTA, Cash flow, dividend yield etc.
- If you appreciate all my articles I posted in i3investor.com.
