InvestmentMoats: Advice For Singaporeans Starting On Their Investment Journey
Ming Fengâ—Ź
Over 13 Years Of Experience
If you have successfully cultivated the good habit of reading personal finance content regularly, InvestmentMoats should be no stranger to you. Having been around since the year 2005, InvestmentMoats aims to share his experiences making sense of money, how money works and ways to grow his money. It hopes that by sharing his experiences, be it good or bad.
InvestmentMoats is also part of the Seedly Personal Finance Facebook Group where members can feel free get his point of view on personal finance issues.
What Percentage Of Your Monthly Income Do You Invest?
What Are Some Of The Areas You Look Out For When Choosing The Right Instrument To Invest In?
The investment must have positive expected returns over the short or long run. This means that given the probability of what you think will happen, and those scenarios where things might not happen, you end up being positive. Investments that do not have a positive expected return is gambling with the odds against you.
You can check out my expected return model here.With that in mind, the next factor is valuation. Don’t buy too expensive. There is an intrinsic value to every investment, and there is a price you pay for them. Try to pay the price below intrinsic value. The difficulty lies in valuing things.
The instrument that suits you should depend on:
- Your competency in that wealth building method
- Your tolerance of volatility
- The amount of upfront capital and recurring capital required
- How much time you have to focus on building wealth
Can You Share With Us A Quick Overview Of Your Portfolio?
It is a combination of individual stocks, cash and Singapore Savings Bonds. stocks and cash are split equally at 50% 50% currently.
One can check out a really detailed portfolio of InvestmentMoats here, where he is transparent about his stock portfolio.
Readers who have a rather huge portfolio or are serious about keeping track of his stocks investment can also find a format of this excel sheet for your personal use. – Seedly
Any Advice For Singaporeans Who Are Just Getting Started On Their Investment Journey?
Build up a brain to spot value. Read a lot. You will hurt yourself and lose money if you do not know what you are doing.
The way to overcome this is to know what you are doing. And that is to read, watch videos and be like a sponge in absorbing knowledge. Gaining knowledge alone is not enough, you got to execute, and reflect on failures and success.
Further Reading: More advice for fresh graduates
This is an excerpt from the longer article on fresh graduate advice, where we talk to SGBudgetBabe, InvestmentMoats, 15HWW and Xeo to figure out their advice for the newbies!
What are your Best money habits to cultivate?
- Identify your insecurities and address them. There will be insecurities as a young adult that graduate. Your friends tell you a certain way the world works. Is all these fears and hearsay correct?
- Get to a place where you understand them better. How this helps is that all these insecurities will somehow bite you in your career and building wealth.
- If you can work through them it will be great. To know your insecurities and fear, you need time and space to reflect upon them.
- Calendar your wealth building time slots.There are a lot of people touting passive income, trying to make it seem that building wealth is an “I learn this formula then I can step down my effort to near zero”. People underestimate the actual level of effort that is required most of the time. To be a competent wealth builder, time is required. To get time, you need to set time aside. Make an appointment with yourself to read during a commute or 1 hour each night for the wealth building stuff.
- Read and Reflect more. Most of the great wealth builders are also people with humility and they read a lot. In modern times, reading is in the form of listening to podcasts and watching videos.
- You have some questions, find some answers for them. Then reflect upon whether they fit into your life or your wealth system. Don’t just read and then don’t reflect.
