Financial Planning

I came across an article and I would like to share part of it.  This article is written at a time the stock markets are falling.  As investment is one of the greatest inventions to increase the wealth of many millionaires I believe if we want to get more in life we should think and act like a millionaires with whatever resources we have.  As they say if you aim for the moon, you may end up amongst the Stars.  I like to highlight the following statements in the article:

According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book entitled The Black Swan, we should stop trying to predict anything and instead take advantage of uncertainty.

A lot of investors or analysts may spend a lot of time trying to predict the market bottom. We should not try to predict when the market will reach its bottom as we will never know until it happens.

The key thing is to focus on is whether we have already identified which good quality stocks to invest in when the market is getting nearer to the bottom. Instead of trying to catch the stock at the lowest point, we hold the principle that we would be happy if we are able to catch those stocks 20% from the low.

Looking back at history in the Asian financial crisis which is still fresh in our mind, the market took 18months to fall to the bottom.  It took 18 months for it to peak again.  Do you see it as a crisis or an opportunity?  How many investor made money from this crisis?  Only the ones that see the opportunity.  The rest was frozen with fear and wait until too late, the market has recovered.  The top guns, 20% of investors are now salivating.  Among them is Mr. Warren Buffet.  The balance 80% has fear all written over their face.  Are you the 20% taking this as an opportunity or 80% stricken by fear?

Is this the best time to start investing?  I don’t know but what I do know is this is the right time.  Using dollar cost averaging, I have started the ball rolling.  Investing into Unit Trust funds and selected blue chips.  Do not be someone that “only sees things happen or worst still do not know what happened”.  We know this story by hard now.