The Amateur Investor. Ep 2: Meeting the Mockingbirds
I tossed my dirty climbing gear in the boot, it had been a hard session. My back was sore and my hands were basically useless. But I needed to blow off steam. Most of the day had been spent staring at any number of investment blogs and looking at a variety of companies ranging from financial tech to the minerals sector. None of it made any sense to me and by two in the afternoon, my eyelids were starting to droop.
Freshly invigorated from the session, I was ready for the next part of the day, meeting the crew. Hsuan was fast becoming a permanent fixture in my investing crash course, though soon enough he would be joined by others. Ten minutes and a few streets later, I found myself perched in the back of a small bar, nursing a ginger beer and scribbling furiously on a legal pad. We talked about TMC to GDP Ratios, the dissolution of the Panasonic-Tesla joint solar panel production and its possible links to Tesla’s instability that Panasonic was unwilling to cope with (don’t quote me on that, it’s just spitballing), the slow loss of cash in the Singaporean stock market (relative to GDP) over the last 10 years, among a number of other mind-boggling concepts.
About halfway through a conversation on investment theses, the rest of Mockingbird started to turn up. First to arrive was Bill, the resident mining specialist who based a majority of his investments on the volatile gold market. Then came Nicho, who worked in the tech sector and was focused on value stocks. We were down a man, Adnan, another new member was unable to attend. The next few hours were a blur of jargon as I sat, drank, scribbled, and tried desperately to keep up as the group recapped in broad strokes where their various investments were tracking and what their prospective new theories were, especially in light of the oncoming COVID-19 hysteria.
The atmosphere was jovial, but filled with a lot of technical jargon that I only just understood. However, there were a few takeaways that I gleaned, which if you’re in the same position I’m in, might be helpful. Something I noticed relatively quickly was the fact that no one actually talked about their financial position in dollars, all of it was done in terms of percentages of investment capital. For someone who is completely new to investing, this is great. It takes away a lot of the comparison in terms of how much money each of us is playing with, leaving us to focus on what actually makes a good company to invest in.
That was more or less my only takeaway, the rest is homework I need to look over before I’m confident enough to start talking about here. I will say that I’m starting to get my bearings on and am starting to develop an investment thesis and an overall plan for what I want to be doing with the capital that I have. I’ll close with this advice that Bill gave me, midway through a glass of the house ale.
Go slow, play small, learn the process.
