Sept. 2017
I started to interest in investing around 2005 and opened my first investment account in that year. I took a gradual approach to try out different things step by step. I invested in balance fund, equity fund, value-based fund, index fund etc. Even bought some bonds at one point. However, there were not much I have learned from those type of investments.
Started in the middle of 2007 I bought my first stock and gradually I switched to stocks. Now after 10 years I am mostly on stocks( there are some closed funds I invested as well) and was able to achieve around 17% annualized returns. However, at 2008, I have invested just a very small portion of my fund in stock. So technically I have never been through a bear market. It is too early to declare that I have beat the market.
I view myself as a value investor. I did read the book "Intelligent Investor". However, mostly, I learned to invest from the mistakes I made. I did take online accounting courses which were really helpful. I pay attention to management, balance sheet, industry and growth potential etc.
After several years of investing, I also realize that portfolio management is as important as the stock ideas itself. The traditional buy and hold style is not good enough. I spent quite some effort trying to find an optimized way to calculate when to buy and when to sell, how much to buy and to sell. Still working to optimize my system.
My investment space is mostly on microcap. If studied well, it is the place that often you can find value. I am trying to hold half Canadian stock and half US stock. I used to hold more US stocks than Canadian's. However, now I am holding more CAD microcaps simple because my registered accounts can't hold US OTC stocks but they have no problem to hold TSX venture stocks.
One good practice I kept since the beginning was writing down the ideas I have. There is seldom any stocks that I bought without first writing about it. Since 2014, I force myself to find at least one idea per month. This year I decided to double that number since I have more time to do that.
Michael
my email: michael@angoe.com
