Back to school - SGX academy

Yoz! Am back from Taiwan. Since now I am so free and officially a slacker, I thought I would sign up for course or two at SGX academy. Good to be student again once in a while.

My advise for this is don't attend FOC preview courses, because most of the time you will be listening to just-some-ideas and much self-selling (to make you attend the actual course). For better learning experience and not waste time, go for the paid courses that suit your level.

The recent course I went for is on technical trend trading for beginners (3 hours). Prior to this I have had some knowledge on technical analysis but going for live talk on it was far more entertaining and enriching than book-reading I feel. Reasons being:

- Case studies on Singapore stocks
- Some experience sharing by speaker
- Gist of the books summarized in slides format
- No distractions of wanting to do other things or skip chapters

The basic trading principles and best practices coincide neatly with what I have learnt over the years from reading blogs and books. Those information I have gathered earlier through reading are like jigsaw puzzles - I got to slowly sort them out and piece them together forming various pictures over a long period. Some of blog posts I came across was too 'cheem' for me when I was an investment novice and I simply got tuned out as I couldn't make sense of them. The course on the other hand, would paint an organized picture right away for the learners without a need to piece any puzzle. Key points I took years to realize suddenly stared at me in bold.

Amidst a revision of the main TA principles, I also managed to catch some other useful pointers like on risk management, where to set stop-loss and position sizing. A little more advanced thinkers or hybrid lovers would start to think of strategies to marry TA and FA nicely thereafter. No, no such course yet.

Some people would say why go for talks or courses, isn't it better to learn by experience? My answer to that is yes and no. Use the knowledge and understanding to experience - yes definitely.

Last but not least, one very important thing I learnt lately about investment is to PLAN. As the saying goes "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." Same goes for investment. Entry, exit, time horizon, trade size...

Then it goes on to the battle with the mind. Because the hardest part is always the ACTION or plan execution. Now we need some ninja discipline here.

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"The fastest way to go broke in the stock market is to prove that you are right and the market is wrong."

No matter whether we are using TA or FA, ultimately we are utilizing past data to help us extrapolate the future so as to estimate the potential returns of an investment. But who can truly predict the future? That is why risk management and minimization of bias are important.