The Evolution of an Investor

Everyone's journey is different. It's about evolving along the way.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

A few weeks ago, I had a chat with my colleague about my investment journey. He suggested I share my experiences, and I couldn't agree more.

I've always wanted to reflect on my growth as an investor since I started investing in 2009.

So here goes.

Rolling Back Time

2007: My personal finance journey started during my National Service days when I wanted to learn how to budget my allowance. I chanced upon the “Rich Dad Poor Dad” book by Robert Kiyosaki and the money concepts discussed there made me view money in an entirely different light. (Side note: I re-read the book a few months back and it was good to reinforce the concepts about wealth after many years.)

2008 to early 2009: Lots of reading up and learning about investments and the stock market. I also dabbled in forex, losing a couple of thousand dollars, which was a lot of money for me then. Looking at technical charts didn’t make sense to me.

I also went for a personal finance and investing course that accelerated my learning and gave me the investing foundations to build upon. Realised that analysing listed businesses compared to wiggly charts for trading made more sense.

Mid-2009: I put my first dollar to work in the stock market in June 2009. It was really lucky timing as the market bottomed out in March of that year after the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). I started my journey investing in individual stocks with Warren Buffett as my teacher.

2010: Started my blog to journal my investing journey and the mistakes made as an investor to learn from them. I started my blog at financiallyfreenow.wordpress.com and have since bought my own domain — SudhanP.com.

And oh boy, have I made so many mistakes (such as market timing, focusing too much on a company’s dividend yield and not digging deeper into its dividend sustainability, selling off S&P 500 exchange-traded funds prematurely due to US dollar fears, etc).

One good thing about starting investing early is that you have a longer runway to make mistakes, learn from them, and not make the same mistakes again (hopefully!) to allow compounding to happen.

2011 to 2013: I got to know two guys through another common friend and we went on to write one of Singapore’s best-selling investment books, “Invest Lah! The Average Joe’s Guide to Investing”. (Side note: It’s been 10 years since we published the book and the three of us are coming together to release a new edition. Stay tuned!)

It was around this time that one of my co-authors, Chong Ser Jing (who now runs The Good Investors blog and Compounder Fund) asked me to write for The Motley Fool Singapore when the local office opened. The blog that I started in 2010 was really helpful to serve as a brochure of my work.

2014 to 2019: Over the years, my investing style evolved from looking only at undervalued companies to companies that are fairly valued but have more growth potential. I also ventured outside of Singapore stocks to the US to capture growth there.

I realised that I had to get out of my comfort zone and invest internationally since there are many growth companies in other parts of the world as well. Local companies, after all, are limited by their total addressable market in Singapore.

Markets-wise, I also learnt the psychology of how market participants work and could practically understand that markets move in cycles. Saw lots of stock market rallies and corrections along the way due to many reasons such as the European debt crisis, the US credit downgrade for the first time, US debt ceiling uncertainty, interest rate increases from near-zero, and so on.

I also met a lot of good friends along the way who have made me a better investor and person.

In 2019, when The Motley Fool Singapore closed down, I moved on to Seedly to lead the investment content arm there.

2020 to 2021: Early 2020 was an interesting period due to the Covid-led stock market crash. Because I started investing early and had the chance to go through various past market sell-offs, I intuitively knew that “this too shall pass”. This gave me the confidence through my experience to share with my readers that they should focus on the long term and tune out the media noise. I had the conviction to invest more in stocks myself in March 2020 and I did.

After a hyper-quick bear market, stocks started rallying up till the end of 2021. It was also during this time when I loaded up more on the pandemic darlings like Zoom, Fiverr, and Shopify.

2022 to 2023: Of course, such tech stocks didn’t end up doing well and many were underwater. It was also this time in my life when I was reflecting upon my career and the next steps. I took up a short gig with Google that was not related to investing at all and that was when I realised that I didn’t have time to concentrate on many things at a go (family, researching stocks, work, etc).

When I looked at the annualised returns from 2009 when I started my investing journey to the end of 2023, even though my portfolio was in an overall positive position, I was underperforming the general market.

While researching companies and learning about new industries was intellectually stimulating, I realised I could be better off investing passively in broad-market funds to free up my time to focus on things that matter to me more. When I first started investing in 2009, I had ample free time on my side to analyse companies, but I don’t have the luxury of time during the current stage of my life.

It was then that I seriously explored investing through well-diversified exchange traded funds (ETFs) such as the iShares Core MSCI World UCITS ETF (IWDA) and the like.

Another interesting thing to watch during this time was how higher-than-normal inflation and increasing interest rates play out in terms of stock valuations. It was my first time experiencing this as an investor.

2024: As of now, most of my stock investments are passively managed after having shifted out mostly from individual stocks. I still have some Singapore companies but I might move out of them entirely in due course. Guess this is my own rite of passage to discover and grow myself as an investor.

Lessons Learnt Over the Past 15 Years

• The best investors always talk about constantly upgrading themselves. Be a learning machine.

• Be adaptable to changing circumstances. Have strong opinions, but hold them loosely.

• Markets move in cycles. Keep history by your side as your companion. History doesn’t repeat, but it indeed rhymes.

• Making mistakes is part of the investing journey. The key is to be resilient and not to give up on your financial goals.

• Always be in permanent beta. Every stumbling block is a data point to improve yourself and get better.

This has been my journey thus far. Of course, it’s an evolving one. Perhaps 10 years down the road I may have something entirely different to tell you.

Thank you for staying till the end to read my post.

(P.S. Dear reader, how have you evolved as an investor? Comment down below to share if you would like.)