Open Your Eyes To Financial Freedom

Adding one more year to my investing and trading journey... 60% more to go! After 4 years of wins and losses, I have to say that I am still very much in the red. Could I have done better after 4 years of losses? A resounding YES!!! Will I ever see my portfolio go green? I certainly want it... if time can help me to learn and experience, I have 100% gone leaps and bounds from where I first started. We learn and we earn! It seems apparent that I am still at the learning stage and at some point, I will have to reach the earning part. While all of these can be easier said than done, I have set my sights beyond a mere 4 years. When I first started this journey, I wanted it to be a 10 years trip. Without a doubt, I sincerely hope to end this trip earlier and turn my losses into wins but there is just so much to pick up in the financial world. Hopefully one day, if I stay long enough, I will also be able to live enough to spend the wins! Fingers crossed. Happy 4th Year Anniversary, Ben. 4 yea...

Tarek El Sombati | E+ | Getty Images To err is human! We all make mistakes, that's how we learnt. Albert Einstein once said "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new" There is some truth to this. Personally, I do agree that human learn from mistakes, in fact learning from mistakes started way younger when we were in adolescence than we can ever remember, it's just that as we grow older, we tend to made careful considerations before we commit to a mistake. For example, I learnt how to cycle after a couple of falls, I picked up swimming after swallowing a few gallons of water, I learnt how to walk from crawling after a few tumbles and the list goes on. Humans are programmed to make mistakes! It is how we pick ourselves up mistakes after mistakes that we actually learn. And well yes, there are talented people around us but most of us belong to the majority if we are to follow the universal 80:20 rule. When I first embarked on my investment journey...

After close to 4 years,  I would like to take this opportunity to Thank You, Mr. Market for giving me this opportunity to know you better. Knowing how your greatness and holiness way of mastering the economics of the universe, you can have the entire world at your feet. The world revolves around how you handle the microeconomics leading to the nitty gritty of life, down to the essence of food, transport, income and even taxes. I have decided to write you a note to express my enormous gratitude for allowing me to know you on a deeper level. When I was young, I have always noticed you on television and on newspapers but I had never really understood who you were until several years ago when I started to look at my financial health. I used to wonder if those reported numbers were really important and if everyone else were as clueless as me. DOW, SPY, NASDAQ... what the F*** were these? How are they even related to my life? When the newscaster read out the numbers in percentages with e...

Since we are all going to die one day, then what is the meaning of life? Meaningless... some may say. I hope that this article will change your perception to the meaning of life. I chanced upon an amazing video which took away my reflective mind. I thought it is very meaningful and I would like to share this with everyone but it is duped in Mandarin so I had to translate it to English. This is definitely not a one size fits all formula... but well, sharing is always caring, so here it goes! When we look upon this big universe and ask ourselves this question: "What is the actual meaning of life?" Is it your career? Is it love? Or is it your money? We need to understand that in this realm of life, we are just a periodic swift wanderer who embarked on this motherland. A wanderer who wants the best of himself in this life while searching for happiness but at the same time realizing that the best is yet so far from the actual reality and always in a pursuit. When you get out into ...

Don't want to beat the dead horse again but as I have always preached "everyone should be invested!" Gone are the days where one can hold a job diligently and work till retirement. These days, it is common to find side hustles or some form of passive income to fund your regular salary. Investing happens to be a great choice. I am saying this because I have done it, experienced it and I profited from the returns so I know what I am saying and it can really work. According to the many market predictions from financial articles, 2024 is supposedly going to be a year of volatility just because the Federal Reserves (Fed) has announced in November 2023 that interest rate hike will pause and eventually cut.  With volatility, the stock market will present an opportunity! History has shown that whenever something "huge" has happened to the stock market, there was always a counter effect. What goes up must come down and what goes down must come up! With the Fed declaring ...

This is a rather bold header... and you would be stupid to think that you can be rich by reading this blog post. Rich can be defined in so many ways depending on the individual as every human being develops their own perspective of the meaning of being rich. Many years ago while working in the education sector, I remember this conversation which I had with an ex-colleague named Alex S. Alex S is an Indonesian, both him and I worked in the same department which would required us to handle any matters relating to student sports. One night, we had to work into overtime and we were both extremely exhausted. Feeling worn out and at the same time taking the road of self pity, I asked Alex S: "What is the meaning of happiness?" It was a casual question and I was not expecting Alex S to reply in such detail. It was one of those questions where you start questioning your existence in this world. To my surprise, Alex S gave me an answer which I remember till this day. "Happiness i...