Those of you who are familiar with me on InvestingNote (you can check out my profile and follow my updates here), you will know that I have been providing company analysis write-ups, and sharing my advice about investing in the Singapore stock market since February 2019, via the same-named site – The Singaporean Investor. The only thing that is different between then and now (as far as the name of the site is concerned) is the extension – to .sg from .com previously.

In case you’re wondering what happened to the previous site (for those of you who are visiting “The Singaporean Investor” for the first time), it was shutdown unexpectedly (with all the site contents removed and unrecoverable) by the hosting company, because of some miscommunication on their side. That really caught me by surprise. After spending hours talking to a couple of representatives, I decided I had enough of the “wild goose chasing”. Instead of further wasting my time on things that produced no results, I figured I would be much better off spending this time to re-create another one from scratch – with a new domain name and hosting service.

With that, I would like to warmly welcome you to version 2 of “The Singaporean Investor.” 😊

So, how does all these relate to investing? There are lots of similarities I can draw from this issue:

1. Expect the Unexpected

I have been a customer of this hosting service provider for the past decade because of its great service in the past. I knew I could always count on them whenever I encountered any problems with my site, or hosting. What happened to the first version of “The Singaporean Investor” was totally unexpected, and I was appalled by their service when I approached them for help to restore the website.

This incident taught me an important lesson of always be prepared for the unexpected – not just in life but also in investing.

As far as our investments are concerned, even though we may have studied about the company and come to a conclusion that the business will continue to grow in the years ahead before we invest our money into it, but there will definitely come a time down the road where something unexpected happens (as a business growth over the years is never in a straight line), and the share price of the company plummeted as a result (look at what happen to the share price of many companies in the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak currently, especially those those in the aviation, tourist, and hospitality business.)

What do we do then?

2. Be Rational

No doubt I was flooded with emotions (of anger and disappointment) when I knew that my one-year worth of hard-work have went down the drain, I knew at the same time I needed to calm myself down and think of possible ways to resolve the problem rationally.

As investors, we should always do the same thing – first we need to calm ourselves down, ask ourselves why we invest in the company in the first place, and also determine if the unexpected event that just happened is a one-off (in that once the event wears itself off, it will be business as usual again), or if the event resulted in unrecoverable damages to the company’s business.

3. Plan A, Plan B, Plan C

In my opinion, plans are extremely important. In the case of my site, what I did was that I drew up a couple of plans based on the different possible outcomes – from the best to the worst case scenario.

Now, when it comes to our investments, we also need to evaluate and come up with plans at this stage to deal with the situation at hand (i.e. the unexpected event) – it could involve selling all the shares you have with the company, monitor the situation for X amount of time before you make another decision again, taking this opportunity to further increase your shareholdings in the company, or keeping everything status quo (where you ride out the entire tough period by staying invested in the company.)

Whatever it is, you should always lay out your plans with a clear frame of mind, and not let emotions affect your planning.

4. Opportunity to Review Existing Strategy and Identify Improvements

As far as the planning of a new version of “The Singaporean Investor” is concerned, I thought to myself – if I have to re-create a new one from scratch, why not I use this opportunity to re-launch it again with a fresh new look (hence a new user interface), along with introducing new features (this time round, you’ll find posts relating to technical analysis here, on top of posts relating to fundamental analysis.)

The same goes for our investment strategy – aside from having a plan to deal with the unexpected event, we should also take a moment to review our current investment strategy as well, to identify possible improvements to it.

5. Experience is Gold

Aside from learning through books, we also need the real-life experience to better ourselves.

In the case of the loss of “The Singaporean Investor”, I’ve learned the importance of maintaining our own backups the hard way. Hence, moving forward, I will be making my own backups of the entire site on a regular basis, even though my new hosting provider has provided two weeks worth of backup with my hosting package. This is so that if anything untoward were to happen, I will be able to immediately restore the entire site from my backup and have the site back up and running again in the shortest time possible (I failed to do my own backup previously.)

In investing, the same thing applies – the more time we spend on investing in the stock market, the more lessons and experiences we will pick up and the better we will get over the years, all of which will help us generate even better results from our investments.

In Conclusion

I hope you’ll like enjoy the content that I will be posting in “The Singaporean Investor” in the days, months, and even years ahead.

If you have any comments or suggestions about any of the posts here, please do not hesitate to reach out to me here.

Last but not least, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for the support you’ve given to me and “The Singaporean Investor.” It is your faith and confidence in me that kept me moving, and will continue to keep me going. 😊

Here’s wishing you the very best in your investing and trading endeavours ahead!

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