The NEPSE index finished at 2,096.08 today, up 1.54 points from the previous trading day’s close. This is a 0.07% increase. Last Thursday, the index fell 22.12 points.
The index opened at 2,096.7 and reached an intraday high of 2,118.27 today. It dropped as low as 2,087.69 before closing at 2,096.08.
In 39,187 transactions, 258 scrips changed hands. A total of 5,206,370 shares were traded, totaling Rs. 1.931 Arba in activity. This is less than the previous day’s turnover of Rs. 2.096 Arba.
Everyone is looking for a quick and easy way to riches and happiness. It seems to be human nature to constantly search for a hidden key or some esoteric bit of knowledge that suddenly leads to the end of the rainbow or a winning lottery ticket.
While some people do buy winning tickets or a common stock that quadruples or more in a year, it is extremely unlikely, since relying upon luck is an investment strategy that only the foolish or most desperate would choose to follow. In our quest for success, we often overlook the most powerful tools available to us: time and the magic of compounding growth. Investing regularly, avoiding unnecessary financial risk, and letting your money work for you over a period of years and decades is a certain way to amass significant assets.
Here are several tips that should be followed by beginning investors.
Everyone is looking for a quick and easy way to riches and happiness. It seems to be human nature to constantly search for a hidden key or some esoteric bit of knowledge that suddenly leads to the end of the rainbow or a winning lottery ticket.
While some people do buy winning tickets or a common stock that quadruples or more in a year, it is extremely unlikely, since relying upon luck is an investment strategy that only the foolish or most desperate would choose to follow. In our quest for success, we often overlook the most powerful tools available to us: time and the magic of compounding growth. Investing regularly, avoiding unnecessary financial risk, and letting your money work for you over a period of years and decades is a certain way to amass significant assets.
Here are several tips that should be followed by beginning investors.
1. Set Long-Term Goals
Why are you considering investing in the stock market? Will you need your cash back in six months, a year, five years or longer? Are you saving for retirement, for future university expenses, to purchase a home, or to build an estate to leave to your beneficiaries?
Before investing, you should know your purpose and the likely time in the future you may have need of the funds. If you are likely to need your investment returned within a few months, consider another investment; the stock market with its volatility provides no certainty that all of your capital will be available when you need it.
By knowing how much capital you will need and the future point in time when you will need it, you can calculate how much you should invest and what kind of return on your investment will be needed to produce the desired result.
Remember that the growth of your portfolio depends upon three interdependent factors:
Ideally, you should start saving as soon as possible, save as much as you can, and receive the highest return possible consistent with your risk philosophy.
2. Understand Your Risk Tolerance
Risk tolerance is a psychological trait that is genetically based but positively influenced by education, income, and wealth (as these increase, risk tolerance appears to increase slightly) and negatively by age (as one gets older, risk tolerance decreases). Your risk tolerance is how you feel about risk and the degree of anxiety you feel when risk is present. In psychological terms, risk tolerance is defined as “the extent to which a person chooses to risk experiencing a less favourable outcome in the pursuit of a more favourable outcome.” In other words, would you risk NPR 1000 to win NPR 10,000? Or NPR 10,000 to win NPR 10,000? All humans vary in their risk tolerance, and there is no “right” balance.
Risk tolerance is also affected by one’s perception of risk. For example, flying in an aeroplane or riding in a car would have been perceived as very risky in the early 1900s, but less so today as flight and automobile travel are common occurrences. Conversely, most people today would feel that riding a horse might be dangerous with a good chance of falling or being bucked off because few people are around horses.
The idea of perception is important, especially in investing. As you gain more knowledge about investments – for example, how stocks are bought and sold, how much volatility (price change) is usually present, and the difficulty or ease of liquidating an investment – you are likely to consider stock investments to have less risk than you thought before making your first purchase. As a consequence, your anxiety when investing is less intense, even though your risk tolerance remains unchanged because your perception of the risk has evolved.
By understanding your risk tolerance, you can avoid those investments which are likely to make you anxious. Generally speaking, you should never own an asset which keeps you from sleeping in the night. Anxiety stimulates fear which triggers emotional responses (rather than logical responses) to the stressor. During periods of financial uncertainty, the investor who can retain a cool head and follows an analytical decision process invariably comes out ahead.
3. Control Your Emotions
The biggest obstacle to stock market profits is an inability to control one’s emotions and make logical decisions. In the short-term, the prices of companies reflect the combined emotions of the entire investment community. When a majority of investors are worried about a company, its stock price is likely to decline; when a majority feel positive about the company’s future, its stock price tends to rise.
A person who feels negative about the market is called a “bear,” while their positive counterpart is called a “bull.” During market hours, the constant battle between the bulls and the bears is reflected in the constantly changing price of securities. These short-term movements are driven by rumours, speculations, and hopes – emotions – rather than logic and systematic analysis of the company’s assets, management, and prospects.
Stock prices moving contrary to our expectations create tension and insecurity. Should I sell my position and avoid a loss? Should I keep the stock, hoping that the price will rebound? Should I buy more?
Even when the stock price has performed as expected, there are questions: Should I take a profit now before the price falls? Should I keep my position since the price is likely to go higher? Thoughts like these will flood your mind, especially if you constantly watch the price of a security, eventually building to a point that you will take action. Since emotions are the primary driver of your action, it will probably be wrong.
When you buy a stock, you should have a good reason for doing so and an expectation of what the price will do if the reason is valid. At the same time, you should establish the point at which you will liquidate your holdings, especially if your reason is proven invalid or if the stock doesn’t react as expected when your expectation has been met. In other words, have an exit strategy before you buy the security and execute that strategy unemotionally.
4. Handle Basics First
Before making your first investment, take the time to learn the basics about the stock market and the individual securities composing the market. There is an old adage: It is not a stock market, but a market of stocks. Your focus will be upon individual securities, rather than the market as a whole. There are few times when every stock moves in the same direction; even when the averages fall by 100 points or more, the securities of some companies will go higher in price.
The areas with which you should be familiar before making your first purchase include:
Knowledge and risk tolerance are linked. As Warren Buffett said, “Risk comes from not knowing what you are doing.”
5. Diversify Your Investments
Experienced investors such as Buffett eschew stock diversification in the confidence that they have performed all of the necessary research to identify and quantify their risk. They are also comfortable that they can identify any potential perils that will endanger their position, and will be able to liquidate their investments before taking a catastrophic loss.
The popular way to manage risk is to diversify your exposure. Prudent investors own stocks of different companies in different industries, sometimes in different countries, with the expectation that a single bad event will not affect all of their holdings or will otherwise affect them to different degrees.
Imagine owning stocks in five different companies, each of which you expect to continually grow profits. Unfortunately, cirplusstances change. At the end of the year, you might have two companies (A & B) that have performed well so their stocks are up 25% each. The stock of two other companies (C & D) in a different industry are up 10% each, while the fifth company’s (E) assets were liquidated to pay off a massive lawsuit.
Diversification allows you to recover from the loss of your total investment (20% of your portfolio) by gains of 10% in the two best companies (25% x 40%) and 4% in the remaining two companies (10% x 40%). Even though your overall portfolio value dropped by 6% (20% loss minus 14% gain), it is considerably better than having been invested solely in company E.
6. Avoid Leverage/Margin Loan
Leverage/Margin loan simply means the use of borrowed money to execute your stock market strategy. In a margin account, banks and brokerage firms can loan you money to buy stocks, usually 50% of the purchase value. In other words, if you wanted to buy 1000 shares of a stock trading at NPR 100 for a total cost of NPR 100,000, your brokerage firm could loan you NPR 50,000 to complete the purchase.
The use of borrowed money “levers” or exaggerates the result of price movement. Suppose the stock moves to NPR 200 a share and you sell it. If you had used your own money exclusively, your return would be 100% on your investment [(200,000 -100,000)/100,000]. If you had borrowed NPR 50,000 to buy the stock and sold at NPR 200 per share, your return would be 300 % [(200,000-50,000)/$50,000] after repaying the NPR 50,000 loan and excluding the cost of interest paid to the broker (which is usually 16% and over).
It sounds great when the stock moves up, but consider the other side. Suppose the stock fell to NPR 50 per share rather than doubling to NPR 200, your loss would be 100% of your initial investment, plus the cost of interest to the broker [(50,000-50,000)/50,000].
A margin is a tool that can go extremely bad in a stock market like Bangladesh.
Final Thoughts
Stock investments historically have enjoyed a return significantly above other types of investments while also proving easy liquidity, total visibility, and active regulation to ensure a level playing field for all. Investing in the stock market is a great opportunity to build large asset value for those who are willing to be consistent savers, make the necessary investment in time and energy to gain experience, appropriately manage their risk, and are patient, allowing the magic of compounding to work for them. The younger you begin your investing avocation, the greater the final results – just remember to walk before you begin to run.
Practice makes perfect when it comes to skills.
G. I. Joe Fallacy: the idea that knowing is half the battle. It needs to be retired not just from our theories of how the mind works, but also from our practices of trying to shape minds to work better.
As a consequence, if you want to achieve an objective, lectures alone will not suffice. You want to be more prepared. Lectures can only help you learn more. It will not provide you with the tools you need to improve your job performance.
Your objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound).
You can also use the WOOP technique (wish, result, challenge, plan) to set goals and achieve them more quickly.
In his book Originals, Wharton Organizational Psychology Professor Adam Grant suggests that the greatest input comes from fellow creators, not from the audience or managers.
We could all rely more on peer feedback and do a better job saying, “When I’ve got a new idea, I’m not necessarily going to trust my own judgment. But I’m not always going to trust … middle managers who tend to be the most risk-averse and most conservative. I’m going to go to people who are fellow creators.”
Regular practice may be mindless repetitions, whereas deliberate practice requires focused attention and is done with the explicit goal of increasing performance.
Benjamin Franklin’s father chastised him for his poor writing skills when he was a teenager. Franklin made a pledge to himself to improve his prose. He began by reading works by some of the most popular authors of the time. He then rewrote each essay in his own words before comparing it to the original.
World-class violinists only train for 90 minutes a day, but those 90 minutes are spent focusing on areas where they are weak or need to develop. They don’t practice what is easy for them. It’s pointless to do so. Deliberate practice, on the other hand, forces one to step outside of their comfort zone. You’re still focusing on what you need to work on, and once you’ve accomplished it, you move on to more challenging skills. It’s like turning your life into a game.
Carol Dweck coined the terms “fixed mentality” and “development mindset” to describe people’s beliefs about learning and intellect. Students who believe they can boost their intellect understand that perseverance pays off. As a result, they put forward more effort and commitment, resulting in increased results.
We can change someone’s perspective from fixed to development, according to studies. They become more inspired and do more as we do so. The study of brain plasticity has shown how neuronal communication changes over time. With practice, neural networks form new associations and strengthen old ones.