Cory Diary : Summary of my thought process in investment

Investment to me is fun. I will do a lot of adjustments to my portfolio to get it feel right. Obviously I am in this learning curve process and after more than 15 years there is still a lot to be learn and unlearn. I could be an historian that record my own success or failure, and have it shared. Surely the end goals will be to maintain our wealth and if possible grow them safely to support our family lifestyle.

Nevertheless, I do have regular job and my compensation is at different level from my market returns. Hence, the confidence in executing all the trades I need to do. Even then what I do is try not to lose money. Occasionally I would make the mistake and learn from it.  There is always wish to have more money that I am willing to "play" that I am comfortable with. No one in practical sense will be ok mentally to lose a sizable portion of their fortune. And this jolly well be in my mind always else is the first step towards investment pitfall.

This year the key learning experience is again making sure every bullets count no matter big or small. I realize the outcome is much better if I put more due diligence and thought process into each trade I made. Another is to do small bites. Never-mind the trading cost as long we are not doing micro-trading. It will be painful to fall into penny wise pound foolish mistake. That's doesn't mean we should not chew bigger if we are confident. It does save a little.

The other thing I would be careful is Over-Exposure. This can works deep and bad into our psychology. So far I try to stay around 10% max per counter. I could go lower if I can manage. Once a position hit this level, the hope is the stock is flying or above water to avoid the tendency to average down. And I wouldn't want to re-evaluate my position at this point in time. Is the wrong process unless there is fundamental change. And cut loss could be an alternative option.

Recently I have been trying MACD, Bollinger Bands and Moving Average to time my trades. And this is usually after I am comfortable with the fundamental. However I am not so FA in a few of my counters. There is some anchoring reasoning into the current price. For such, this is really TA. Quite an amount of calculated risks decision being made into my thought process but is another fun learning experience.

Singapore market has been listless to me. Not exactly if you have been hitting jackpots. And in my continue search for investment opportunity I see US market opens up. Ability to tap on global market is quite attractive. The growth potential is huge therefore capital appreciation as well. And this is good for segment where I want to invest for growth as this can last for much longer period compared to regional or local market. What this mean is lesser focus on local growth short stories muddled with manipulated risks. Even with recent Facebook mega correction, I am still positive in the counter. While I anticipate large price movement volatility with gains in recent months, the market bring the largest in recent history to throw at me. Who says market is not watching you ? I blinked once maybe twice and then move on with my daily life.

Lastly, I have to keep in mind of Holding Cost. One easy way to understand is to use a stable reit dpu to estimate. Since First Reit announced their result, I could use 8.7 cents or 6.5% yield assuming minimal risk from sponsor situation. At current $1.32 price, I could absorb price down to $1.23 for the first year of holding the shares without losses. One year is not really a long time. If I leave money in the bank, it could be just a blink in the eye for time to lapse. I could also saved a lot more from income and my cost of doing nothing will build up significantly. As such if I think I could stomach this level of losses, and potential to lock in amount for dividend play, this could be an attractive counter and margin of safety will not be worthy a wait. Then what level will I consider ? Maybe at least 2 years of dividends. If can achieve 3 will be awesome as this will be almost 20% correction. We aren't see nothing yet to use war chest.

Some people and specifically analysts have been expecting Reits much larger correction with constant rate increases. Clearly this is not happening. More reits record positive dpu in recent quarter results. This could be implied that we need to see events on multiple fronts and dimensions. Not just increasing rates mean lower profits. That's completely absurd. Surely Reits will crash one day. The question is how long the wait  and how much ? After we have compute the total compounded then we can clearly comment.

Last I heard this month SBB allocation is in the range of 15K to 15.5K. Hope I hit the later which means I max out my switch. This segment is one of my housing installment supports. I still hear friends saying Government is running out of money and need to issue bonds to retailers like me. If that is the case, issuing bond at high rate than needed, limiting them to S$100k while expanding the funding size run contrary to their opinion. I hope this do not make their friends poorer but if they do not have much in their "Piggy" bank it doesn't really matter much probably.

Cory

20180729