Thank you for coming here.
This is going to be the third post in the "Basics" series. And I am going to briefly describe my investment journey and the path we intend to take going forward.
A bit of history
My investment journey really started from beginning of 2018.
Before that, I was buying stock based on what I heard without knowing anything else.
Not surprisingly, the stocks I bought did not perform well. One of them remains the counter with biggest loss both in percentage and absolute value after almost 3 years, even though the amount I invested was very very small compared to my portfolio now. Just an idea, the stock price has dropped 62% by end of Jan 2020.
Coming to 2017, I switched to a stable job from management consulting. After the initial few months, I started to have spare time. And the pay was enough for us to have savings every month. Combined with the fact that stock market was doing super well in 2017, we decided that it was high time for us to take investment seriously.
We started by reading quite a bit. Special thanks to "Hardware Zone" "Money Mind" forum, especially the two active "Teachers" in that forum, "BBCWatcher" and "Shiny Things". We find the theories of the two teachers agreeable given our circumstances and the time we wanted to put into investing.
So we were quick to decide on our investment strategy:
Take a long term approach and avoid timing the market.
The way we do it:
Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) into World ETFs on a monthly basis
Specifically, we decided to divide our investment into two parts based on the currency our cash was in:
- SGD: DCA into DevWorld ETF (80%) [IWDA] and SGD ETF (20%) [ES3]
- RMB (on-shore): DCA into A-share ETF
I thought the strategy was good and I still think so now. However, the execution was, well, pretty bad.
First, we first bought ES3 at the beginning of 2018 and soon afterwards, the stock market went into correction mode.
Initially, every time we saw a drop in ES3 prices, we treated it as an opportunity to buy. And the more it dropped, the bigger amount we invested, trying to bring our average price down.
Before we realized it, our war chest run dry around May 2018 and we had not started buying IWDA. By the way, May 2018 was way before the ES3 reached the bottom at the end of 2018 or the very beginning of 2019.
Then we decided that it was more important to widen our portfolio. So we stopped investing in ES3 and started in IWDA, trying to come back to 80/20 split.
So that was pretty much what happened in 2018. Our portfolio performance in 2018 was btw -13% and -1%, with no month with positive performance.
Coming to 2019, we pretty much stick to the "DCA into IWDA" plan, well for the first few months. And as the stock market started to recover, our portfolio performance finally entered into the positive area.
However, as the market continued to go up, we started to feel IWDA was getting too expensive and we again violated our strategy and stopped buying in the 2nd half of 2019. Well, the market continued to go higher.
So now we have some cash. And our portfolio time-weighted performance was ~6% for 2019.
Going forward
From a long-term perspective, we would like to stick to our strategy and benefit from the development of the world.
Coming to 2017, I switched to a stable job from management consulting. After the initial few months, I started to have spare time. And the pay was enough for us to have savings every month. Combined with the fact that stock market was doing super well in 2017, we decided that it was high time for us to take investment seriously.
We started by reading quite a bit. Special thanks to "Hardware Zone" "Money Mind" forum, especially the two active "Teachers" in that forum, "BBCWatcher" and "Shiny Things". We find the theories of the two teachers agreeable given our circumstances and the time we wanted to put into investing.
So we were quick to decide on our investment strategy:
Take a long term approach and avoid timing the market.
The way we do it:
Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) into World ETFs on a monthly basis
Specifically, we decided to divide our investment into two parts based on the currency our cash was in:
- SGD: DCA into DevWorld ETF (80%) [IWDA] and SGD ETF (20%) [ES3]
- RMB (on-shore): DCA into A-share ETF
I thought the strategy was good and I still think so now. However, the execution was, well, pretty bad.
First, we first bought ES3 at the beginning of 2018 and soon afterwards, the stock market went into correction mode.
Initially, every time we saw a drop in ES3 prices, we treated it as an opportunity to buy. And the more it dropped, the bigger amount we invested, trying to bring our average price down.
Before we realized it, our war chest run dry around May 2018 and we had not started buying IWDA. By the way, May 2018 was way before the ES3 reached the bottom at the end of 2018 or the very beginning of 2019.
Then we decided that it was more important to widen our portfolio. So we stopped investing in ES3 and started in IWDA, trying to come back to 80/20 split.
So that was pretty much what happened in 2018. Our portfolio performance in 2018 was btw -13% and -1%, with no month with positive performance.
Coming to 2019, we pretty much stick to the "DCA into IWDA" plan, well for the first few months. And as the stock market started to recover, our portfolio performance finally entered into the positive area.
However, as the market continued to go up, we started to feel IWDA was getting too expensive and we again violated our strategy and stopped buying in the 2nd half of 2019. Well, the market continued to go higher.
So now we have some cash. And our portfolio time-weighted performance was ~6% for 2019.
Going forward
From a long-term perspective, we would like to stick to our strategy and benefit from the development of the world.
Short term, I really do not know.
For a start, with all the changes and uncertainties with my career, we intend to keep some cash.
Secondly, my wife is abssessed now with some A-share active investment course. She has paid quite a bit tuition and is really eager to try. I don't know how to stop her. Guess I will just let her try it out.
However, whatever we do, you will read it in this blog.
Till next time.
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