Interloper View

Over the years I have been evaluating and evolving my approach to equity investment. Mutual Fund I started off by investing in mutual fund but closed out all my funds after following articles in www.fool.com . I was lucky because most of the funds I invested in made money. That is not true for everybody, the funds my wife invested in never made any money even though it is more than ten years. Most fund managers would like you to believe that if you invest in mutual fund for at least five years, you will at least be in the black but that is not always the case. It helps if you get help from someone who are familiar with the funds and are not just pushing the funds to earn commission from the sale. Capital Gain My parents approach to investment was to focus on capital gain and not on dividend. To them, capital loss and gain is a lot more significant compared to dividend. Consequently, they feel that dividend is not significant. I tried this approach for a while. I had some successe...

I recently came across the following presentation in fool.com. It is a good reminder of how to approach investment. What makes us bad investors? from morganhousel

It is a pretty interesting speech by Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway .   The text of the speech can be found here . The table of content is as follow: TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction by Rajnish Mehra ...................................................................................................... 1 Munger’s Opening Remarks:......................................................................................................... 1 Non-use of Efficient Market Theory at Berkshire ............................................................. 2 Personal Multidisciplinary Education................................................................................ 3 The Obvious Strengths of Academic Economics .............................................................. 4 What’s Wrong with Economics......................................................................................... 5 1) Fatal Unconnectedness, Leading To “Man With A Hammer Syndrome,” Often Causing ...

This is a snippet from the following url  which I thought may be useful for those dealing with Stock Market.  The summary of the article is as follow: Trading Do not wait for a reason for price movement. Do not trade when conditions are not favorable. Do not blame the market. Learn from losses. Find the path of least resistance Lose small and win big Be patient and sit tight through the bull run. Do not try to pick market top and bottom Average up not down. Do not have a position too large for your psychology Reverse your instincts. You cannot beat the market. Do not focus on how much money you are going to make. Do not listen to others. Do not trade the market to clear your debts. Know yourself Booms and bust will always happen because human nature does not change Sell after a reaction Do not follow or give tips Learn how to diagnose the market Manipulation Find an appropriate time to unload a large position. Make a stock active during the bull run. ...

With the current financial crisis happening globally, the stock market has dropped significantly.  It is true that some of the shares have recovered but majority have not. Now that a lot of people are trying to find safe haven for whatever funds they have left, it may be a time to buy shares. I used to subscribe to the notion of buy and hold but that has caused me to lose a significant amount of funds. Maybe, investment should be a mixture of technical analysis and fundamental analysis. A lot of books and sites have been written on both topics. So the question remains, how do you start. For the U.S. share market a lot of sites provide tools to perform such analysis but in other countries, there isn't as much. So what is the alternative. One of the tools I found that can be obtained for free to help learn / self study technical analysis is chartNexus . You can download and install the tool and it provides a daily update (End Of Day) data for a lot of different countries. Th...