Reflections on my past year of trading

It's been 1 yr and 1 month since I started trading in stock markets.

Overall, it's been a humbling experience. You learn about life faster through the stock market. You realise that when you're high up, you shouldn't be too smug and arrogant, because when you're up so high, you're oh-so likely to go down. When you're down in the dumps, don't worry so much, because if you're at the bottom, you can't go anywhere but up. Life's a series of cycles, constantly moving between up and down - very similar to technical oscillators for stocks.

I started buying my first share on 27th-March, 2006. It was Fibrochem Tech. I was quite naive then, because I know almost nothing about stocks and I bought 1 lot to try out. I believe you will learn things the hard way, no textbook and no mentor could teach you faster than if you dabble in it yourself. If nothing can kill me then, nothing probably will.

I was wrong. Without FA or TA, I can only rely on BA - broker's analysis. I bought stocks because certain brokerage house recommend it. I was SO WRONG. I learnt an important lesson - don't buy because brokerage houses recommend. I started reading up vastly on stock selection and the inevitable technical analysis. But I wasn't consistent and the reading up on theories doesn't really explain all the numbers and action I was seeing on my watchlist.

Without doubt, I paid my first tuition fee to the market - 18 k (paper loss + actual loss). I started recovering and I did recovered too fast by doing warrants. Imagine, trading warrants recovered most of my 18k, and I didn't know nuts about what are warrants and how to select them and all the technicals. It was AFTER I started in warrants then I knew how to look at technicals seriously. I started to link news event to stock market. I started to experience what is means to cut loss and the consequences of not cutting.

I did earn back all my losses plus an additional 3.5k last year. But I lost all and more this year because finally, warrants trading without knowledge wiped off my portfolio gains. Ouch.

As of now, I'm still in the process of recovering my 22.6k losses. It was 30k at the height of my folly but I reduced it substantially. The losses this time is much different from last year because the majority of my 22.6 k losses are actual losses. It just means I have more work to do and a longer time to recover them.

I'm really looking forward to the day that I can write here in this blog, that I've finally wiped off all my losses! Hopefully when that day comes, I'll be much wiser. Let me go through all this, it'll only strengthen me.

A million thanks to people who supported me when I'm not feeling the most happy, another million thanks to people who helped me along this journey of self discovery in the stock market.