Personal Finance and Investment Thoughts. All posts are personal opinions and thoughts.
Stocks investment strikes fear in many people because there are so many news of people getting burnt. These are people who have invested their life savings into 'sure wins' only to watch in panic when stock prices suddenly tank due to a variety of reasons. Some of them then vowed, 'once bitten, twice shy', and… Continue reading Getting Into Stocks Investing
This is the fifth post in a series of posts that talk about building up your personal finances. If you have followed the series you would learn how much to keep in your day to day savings account, why you need an emergency fund, why you should seriously consider buying a house as a home… Continue reading Expanding Your Nett Worth
This is going to be a simple post because the idea is pretty straight forward. We may all retire some day. Some aspire to do it as soon as possible (such as those in the the FIRE movement), while others choose to delay it as long as possible since there's pretty much nothing else productive… Continue reading Building The Foundation Of Your Retirement Savings
From the perspective of investments, properties have plenty of undesirable traits. It's expensive and typically you will be unable to buy it outright - you pay part of it as downpayment and then borrow the remainder from a bank. When Buying, Set Aside More Than The Downpayment The downpayment can be quite substantial - usually 20% of the purchase price… Continue reading Why You Should Consider Buying A House
On Christmas eve, the S&P 500 lost 2%. By itself it would have been an uncommon event, if weren't for the fact that year-to-date, it would be down by over 12%. It is also almost 20% down from its peak in September. Everyone was wondering if Santa has neglected the stock market investors this year.… Continue reading Long Term Trend of the S&P 500
Assuming that my 23 year old self had followed a disciplined approach to balance my income and expenses, at 25 years old I should be well into building my emergency savings. Once I have accumulated an emergency savings worth 6 months of expenses, my savings should now go into riskier investments. There will be things… Continue reading Financial Advice For My 25 Year Old Self
My first job as a telecommunications engineer paid about MYR2,300 (~USD600) a month. That's pretty reasonable for an entry level job in Malaysia but boy sometimes it seemed that I could never make any headway with my savings. If only I knew then what I know now about managing personal finances. I didn't really keep… Continue reading Financial Advice For My 23 Year Old Self
2018 is now drawing to a close but the usual year end rally is not in sight this time. The FBM KLCI is down 7% this year but if you measure from its peak in April, it's down almost 13%. A drop of 10% is technically considered a correction. If you look at the darlings… Continue reading The Bear Strikes The Market
Today the US Fed raises the rates from 2% to 2.25%. The stock market has been embroiled in a sea of red declines since October and the rising benchmark borrowing interest rate has been blamed as one of the causes. Actually the long term trajectory of the interest rates has been on decline since 1980.… Continue reading US Federal Interest Rates
About 70% of the trades in the US stock market are made by computers. That means that there are many computer programs that automatically buy and sell stocks everyday without human intervention. The programs take in a variety of inputs such as the news, analyst reports, financial performance, economic data, etc. and then make a… Continue reading It’s Not You, It’s The Machines
The Finance Durian 