The first myth to debunk: you got to have a degree in Finance to know how to invest....Wrong.
I learnt about the existence of stocks as an investment tool from my late father. He graduated with a Chemical Engineering degree and learnt early in his thirties that working for money is not the way to go. Making your money work for you is the the only way to retire.
There are 2 schools of thoughts in the stock investment realm; Technical versus Value investing.
My father followed the technical school of thought, and diligently tracked the stock prices for the stocks that he is interested in, for almost three decades. He would plot his graph (using just paper and ruler and pens) and use his charts to determine when to buy the stocks. Although I couldn't understand his charts, I knew that he had made money from stock investment from 1980s till 2015 when he passed away.
He was proudest of the moments when he ever made it into SPC's Annual report, as one of the few retail investors with substantial stocks holding under his name. Though there were proud moments, there were also missed opportunities as he recounted stocks that would have made him a millionaire had he hold on to them longer, which include SPC which he had accumulated 300k shares of them from as long as 30ish cents a share. He sold them too early and missed the chance when SPC share rose to 6 dollars plus.
Looking back, he would lament about the SPC but he was still filled with gratitude as he had not lost money on it.
My father deeply remembered the troubled years of 1997s when he was almost let go by his company and reminded us constantly of it. That was a close shave and a wake-up call as he has almost no cash on hand then and had a family of 5 to feed and clothe.
My father emphasized that whatever strategy we are using, there must be an exit strategy before buying a stock. And his was to make 30% profit. With this exit strategy and his self-taught technical analysis, he was able to see 4 children through university and when he retired in 2007 for good, he was able to continue to sustain his lifestyle and my mother's without the children contributing a cent to the family's expenditure.
For this, we children are eternally grateful as unlike our peers, we graduated from university with no debt (my father waived off the CPF repayment for the children) and all we need to do was to find a job that can feed us, without worrying about the family.
During his retirement days, my father was contented to have money to spend on whatever he likes (eating, books etc). His days are spent watching stock prices, reading newspapers and watching TV. He never had to worry about monies and continued to invest in stock until he pass away in Oct 2015.
To me, he was my role model in investment. Not because of his strategy, but because he opened my eyes to the world of investment and he demonstrated his success.
My blog is not to share with my father's technical analysis strategy (which remains a mystery to all the children including myself) but to journey down my investment path as I took on a totally different school of thought from my father's.
The points I would like to make, you don't need a degree to learn about stocks and regardless of the school of thought you adopt, money can be made from stocks. Period.
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