Day 212 on FIRE: I suck at investing in stocks, I really, seriously do!

Here is a semi rant on my stock market adventures in the past years and also what it means to be a day-trader or short term investor hoping to make it big
Personal update on short term and long term investment strategy

I started buying stocks when I was in the 10th Standard. I swear! I used to use my father’s account for trading. From then, through college and my working adult’s life I have been dabbling in stocks.

Hold your applause

Wait before you say Wow! I have lost more money in trading in stocks than I made. I did make some money. But I lost a lot more. Most of this was intra-day and day trading. I was an idiot. I tell anyone who will listen to me to not make the same mistakes I did. Intra-day trading, buy-today sell tomorrow etc have a lot of action to them. They give you so much of adrenaline and excitement. But end of the day, the market is pretty unpredictable and it becomes win some, lose more.

I love this quote from Warren Buffet, “The market takes money from the active and gives it to the patient”. Boy, is that so true in my case!

Once bitten, twice shy. Not in the stock market

The concept of once bitten, twice shy does not usually work in the stock market. Over the years, I have gone back to swing trade. I have seen a lot of others lose their shirts and still go back after a couple of months to do the same thing again.

For every Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, there are a million losers who tried to mimic him and lost. I respect Rakesh and a other big, well known investors. But, end of the day their rags to riches stories have put a lot of families into misery. How many people do you know who have tried to make it big in the stock market by selling their properties and investing? How many of them made it big?

The market has taught me a lot on investing. And it has punished me a lot too! To be clear, I have stopped short term investing. I no longer day trade or even sell stocks or mutual funds in the short or mid term. At the start of my FIRE journey, I used to sell and buy on a monthly basis. I have stopped this habit. I now follow a pure value investing and a buy and hold for long term strategy.

I humbly accept my level of knowledge

I humbly accept that I am not a wizard who can pick stocks. Even mutual funds. Or any other investments for that matter, gold, silver, sugar, bitcoins, crude oil. Whatever it is, there are so many macro and micro elements from which direction the wind blows to when Trump farts or tweets. All put together drive the markets, making it very difficult to predict short term outcome.

Conclusion

I am writing this semi-rant/disclosure for a reason. I now have over 10K followers across social media and several thousand visitors to the site. I get a lot of requests asking for stock suggestions and investment suggestions. I want to tell you clearly, I know little, perhaps even less than you on which stocks will go up or if a mutual fund will give great returns or not.

So why blog then? Well, I am most certainly not blogging about giving ideas to buy stocks or suggesting where to invest. The idea of Little Saves is to spread awareness among the mass on FIRE, Financial Independence and build a better savings culture. That is the point of this website.

So please take away and practice the good values you see here. Ignore, or if you are kind enough, feel free to point out and call out in the comments the bad things you see. Cheers!

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Abhi

Abhi is a 29 yr old Indian, on FIRE to retire by 40. He has been investing and learning Finance for the past 12 years. After completing Mechanical engineering, he started working in a multi-national Bank and grew to become an AVP. Currently with an IT MNC as a VP. He lives in Bangalore with his wife and their 1 year old daughter. In his free time, Abhi loves to game on the Xbox, watch movies, read and blog.

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