Another thought piece on a Tuesday evening to reach out to you guys out there looking for someone to provoke your thoughts. As investors, we are usually obsessed with our investment yields, the latest news and how our strategy is working for our portfolios. While all of that is important, we should always take a step back and spend some time thinking about how we are as individuals in the financial markets. The purpose of doing self-reflection is to ensure that we are not overly critical with our underperforming counters or boastful about our better picks thus far because at the end of the day, we might just be beneficiaries of our circumstances or worse, perhaps even “lucky”. In this post, I would like to share more about my personal weekly ritual when I think about investing and my investment portfolio.

Investing is not productive in nature

Even though investing is one of the many dream jobs available in reality, it is sadly unproductive for the most part. What most investors are basically doing is to own a small portion of a company which they feel will reward them with dividends or that it would increase in value over time. That is honestly quite troubling when an investor flaunts his or her skills when they happen to make a killing off the market because all they did was to bet on companies. Therefore, as investors, we should never take this opportunity for granted and flaunt our unproductive “successes” but instead find ways to contribute to others and give back to society.

Our yields are a result of mistakes made by others

How often do we make a quick buck out of an overreaction in the market? I think most of us will agree that the market is usually too reactive for its own good. If you have done trading for a while, you will realise patterns that are less apparent but are in fact lucrative if you took action. Even so, making that extra percent or two does not mean that you should be feeling smug or good about yourself. Instead, we should be humble enough to admit that this issues can be avoided if more people are educated about investments and trading. That would in turn result in lower volatility and a more stable market for people to invest in.

The lessons learned will always worth more than the dollars earned

At the end of the day, the only valuable assets that we really gain from the stock market are the lessons learned rather than the actual gains. Sure enough, we are all motivated by the money and yields but if we really want to make our gains sustainable, we will have no choice but to continuously learn and build up our own investment wisdom. That accumulation can only be accomplished by accepting our mistakes humbly and learning from them to prevent future occurrences. Besides that, we should also be wise enough to understand even when we are earning, we might not actually be learning as well.

Closing Thoughts

After investing for a few years, I realise that my performance in the market is nothing but a result of lessons that I have been through from the beginning. After doing many reflections, I think the most valuable lesson that I have learned is that I should never feel overly confident or fearful at any given period of time in the market. This is because staying calm and collected is the only way we can keep our yields consistent and our emotions intact.