By
Henry Lu
(1) Stock Market is Tough Place to Make Any Money
Consistently
NASDAQ or SP&500 averaged about -6% per year for 5 years
between 1999 and 2003. Many individual investors who made
killing in the internet bubble period got wiped out during
those 5 years. Many who trusted Wall Street experts by
investing their life savings into mutual fund had rude
awakening after the huge loss and scandals in many of the
famous fund names.
Numerous academic studies have shown that more than 90% of
mutual funds failed to beat market over the long run and
that more than 90% of individual investors lost money in the
stock market. Too many people and too many Wall Street
experts or mutual fund managers are buying and selling
stocks like madmen, with no sound strategy or any hope of
long term success. Ironically, they're the ones who create
opportunities for prudent, long term oriented investors.
To be successful in stock market, you either have to become
an expert yourself or to seek help from real successful
experts. Stock market is such a brutal place that there is
no room for half-expert or expert pretenders. The truth is
that only a small percentage of disciplined and experienced
people earn disproportionate huge amount of return, many
times at the expense of the rest. It is an insult to "Wall
Street expert" professional title when so many of such
"expert pretenders" failed to beat index or merely stay
break-even.
(2) Majority of huge performance claims in Ads by "Experts"
are not real
Too many investment newsletters or hot mutual funds touted
their huge past performance and went into disaster later on.
Who do you believe? I have been in this stock market long
enough to know that majority of their claims are not "real".
I will tell you why below.
The first reason is simply due to "cheating". Let's be
honest about many Ads. Many of them do not tell the whole
and true story of their performance. For example, they would
tout huge percentage of gains for certain winning stocks and
hide the losing stocks. If you look deeper into their whole
portfolio performance, their portfolio performance was not
impressive at all. Many investment newsletters will have
multiple portfolios in publication. In their ads, they will
only mention the performance of the winning portfolio and
hide the losing portfolio. The problem with multiple
portfolios is that when you subscribe to their newsletters,
you would not easily know which portfolio out of many will
have best performance in the long run. Which portfolio do
you follow? Most important of all, which portfolio out of
many does the newsletter author invests for his/her own
money? If the newsletter author or the mutual fund manager
does not invest into a portfolio himself or herself, how
would you trust their services?
Even if past performance of a newsletter or a mutual fund
was pretty good, it may not indicate good performance in the
future. Many hot technology mutual funds jumped up 100% or
more in the 90's and dived to their death after 90% to 99%
of loss. Certain investment methods such as growth stocks
investing are known to be risky. Momentum investing or day
trading methods are known to be extremely risky methods that
can wipe out life savings over night. There is simply no
free lunch. While a risky method can produce fabulous gain
in relative short term, over the long run, a risky method is
more likely to make people poorer rather than richer even if
a short term gain was gigantic. Gigantic short term gain is
just a dangerous stock market trap to lure the inexperienced
people into the market. Dreaming for instant satisfaction of
huge short term gain overnight with speculation is just a
recipe for disaster ahead.
(3) Value Investing is the Only Proven Safe Method
Value mutual funds are well known to have lower volatility
than growth mutual funds. Numerous industry and academic
studies have shown that value stocks as a group performed
far better than growth stocks in bear market. Many
technology and internet so called "growth stocks" lost 90%
to 99% of value in just a couple of years after 2000 while
many value stocks went up during the same time frame.
In fact, the single most important element to obtain high
investment performance over the long run is to maintain
MARGIN OF SAFETY of a portfolio. That is why the greatest
investor Warren Buffet once quote "Rule No.1: Never lose
money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.".
(4) Value Investing is the Proven Method to Make Big Money
in the Stock Market
I know that I'm going to catch a lot of flak for saying
this, and that many people will misunderstand what I'm
saying. There are certainly other methods of investing or
trading, which made people rich. There are certainly many
under- performing value mutual funds, which give people
wrong impression that value investing is equivalent of low
performance with less risk.
However, I want to emphasize that in fact value investing is
investment style that can obtain high performance with less
risk. I want to stand by my above statement for the
following reasons:
* In the early years of my investment career, I have studied
and tried all kinds of well known methods of famous
investors or traders, Short term trading, Momentum trading,
Technical Analysis, CANSLIM, growth stock long term buy and
hold, Random Walk theory, etc. I have been there and I have
done there. Evidenced by my past investment performance,
value investing is the only method that delivered gigantic
investment return consistently for me over past many years.
In 2003, I have made more than $150,000 in stock market with
value investing method. In 2004, I have made even more money
than 2003 so far. With the power of compounding, there is
really no upper limit for the investment profit with value
investing.
* In 1984, Warren Buffet gave a speech titled The
Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville, which categorized
performance of many famous value investors who beat market
year in and year out. Many of people mentioned in this
article are legendary multi-billionaire right now. It is
true that only a small percentage of investors can beat
market consistently. However, it is not by chance at all
that so many of students of Benjamin Graham became super
riches in America while other methods have not produced that
many rich people. It is also not coincident at all that the
second richest person in the world is a value investor named
Warren Buffet, a student of Benjamin Graham as well.
(5) Value investing will not distract your regular job
The nicest thing about value investing is that it will not
distract your regular job if you choose not to stare at the
stock market frequently in your office. In fact, it is quite
healthy to forget about stock market in your office and
worry about that only at your home after work.
Many newbies in the stock market still believe that if they
stare at stock price quote closely, they can obtain better
chances of winning. It will not. Staring at the stock quote
is least important part of this game. In fact, staring
closely at the stock price quote is more likely to create a
loser rather than a winner because of greed and fear in the
stock market. The more one is unable to resist the mad mood
of Mr. Market, the more likely one is unable to invest
successfully with value investment method.
I am not saying that successful value investing does not
require time. The time you will need in value investing
depends on the investment vehicle you utilize. If you invest
with a value mutual fund, you will not need much time in
stock market and you only need to follow up quarterly with
your fund's performance. If you are a passive investor of my
investment newsletter Blast Investor Real-time Plus and you
follow my model portfolio passively, you will only need to
pay attention to my infrequent trade alert closely and read
my newsletter issues every 2 weeks. If you invest by
yourself, you will certainly need hours of time every week
to look at hundreds of value stock leads and do your own due
diligence by reading 10Q or 10K SEC filling, or by listening
to conference calls, or by talking to company's management.
(6) Successful Value Investing is Hard, But You can Do It!
I certainly do not want to make you to believe that value
investing is as easy as reading couple of books. Value
investing not only requires tons of knowledge and expertise
in financial analysis, accounting, US tax law, US bankruptcy
law, etc., it also requires real life training of right
psychology to fight against greed and fear in the stock
market. It is hard to do.
However, successful investing certainly can be done and I
have done it over past decade myself. You certainly want to
look at my investing articles of this web site for more
information.
(7) You need to start early in value investing
Let's be honest about value investing, it is not a get-rich-
quick scam and it takes time to really make living with
value investing without need of your regular job. You need
large starting principle if you want to make living from
stock market investment than your salary.
By reading Warren Buffet's article above, you can pretty
much guess that successful value investors can achieve 20%
to 30% per year performance consistently over the long run
regardless of whether market is bear or bull although it is
possible to obtain significantly higher performance in
earlier investment years due to smaller fund size and luck.
20% or 30% more consistent investment return is already very
high return over the long run. Since Peter Lynch retired
from Fidelity, you can rarely find a mutual fund with that
kind of performance over past many years.
The best approach is to treat stock market investment as
side business in addition to your regular job. Your regular
job help you pay your bills and help you earn the initial
principle for value investing. Once your investment net
worth surpasses $100,000, sooner or later you will realize
that your regular job salary can hardly keep up with
compounded rate of investment return. Too many people
naively believe that they can get rich quick with
speculative trading method in stock market rather than a
hard work with a job and value investing at side. It is a
lot easier to make your first $50,000 net worth with a job
rather than speculation in stock market.
Even if you do not have large sum of money right now as
principle to make really big profit out of value investing,
you still want to start value investing early so that you
can learn in and out of value investing in your earlier
years of investing in the stock market. Successful
investment is long term process. The earlier you start
investing successfully, the better off your pocketbook will
be, and the quicker you will reach your financial freedom.
Let's do a quick math, if your starting capital for
investing is $50,000 and your annual compouned rate of
return is 30%, you will need 9 years to surpass $500,000 net
worth. However, to turn $500,000 net worth into 1 million,
you only need 3 more years, think hard!
(1) Stock Market is Tough Place to Make Any Money
Consistently
NASDAQ or SP&500 averaged about -6% per year for 5 years
between 1999 and 2003. Many individual investors who made
killing in the internet bubble period got wiped out during
those 5 years. Many who trusted Wall Street experts by
investing their life savings into mutual fund had rude
awakening after the huge loss and scandals in many of the
famous fund names.
Numerous academic studies have shown that more than 90% of
mutual funds failed to beat market over the long run and
that more than 90% of individual investors lost money in the
stock market. Too many people and too many Wall Street
experts or mutual fund managers are buying and selling
stocks like madmen, with no sound strategy or any hope of
long term success. Ironically, they're the ones who create
opportunities for prudent, long term oriented investors.
To be successful in stock market, you either have to become
an expert yourself or to seek help from real successful
experts. Stock market is such a brutal place that there is
no room for half-expert or expert pretenders. The truth is
that only a small percentage of disciplined and experienced
people earn disproportionate huge amount of return, many
times at the expense of the rest. It is an insult to "Wall
Street expert" professional title when so many of such
"expert pretenders" failed to beat index or merely stay
break-even.
(2) Majority of huge performance claims in Ads by "Experts"
are not real
Too many investment newsletters or hot mutual funds touted
their huge past performance and went into disaster later on.
Who do you believe? I have been in this stock market long
enough to know that majority of their claims are not "real".
I will tell you why below.
The first reason is simply due to "cheating". Let's be
honest about many Ads. Many of them do not tell the whole
and true story of their performance. For example, they would
tout huge percentage of gains for certain winning stocks and
hide the losing stocks. If you look deeper into their whole
portfolio performance, their portfolio performance was not
impressive at all. Many investment newsletters will have
multiple portfolios in publication. In their ads, they will
only mention the performance of the winning portfolio and
hide the losing portfolio. The problem with multiple
portfolios is that when you subscribe to their newsletters,
you would not easily know which portfolio out of many will
have best performance in the long run. Which portfolio do
you follow? Most important of all, which portfolio out of
many does the newsletter author invests for his/her own
money? If the newsletter author or the mutual fund manager
does not invest into a portfolio himself or herself, how
would you trust their services?
Even if past performance of a newsletter or a mutual fund
was pretty good, it may not indicate good performance in the
future. Many hot technology mutual funds jumped up 100% or
more in the 90's and dived to their death after 90% to 99%
of loss. Certain investment methods such as growth stocks
investing are known to be risky. Momentum investing or day
trading methods are known to be extremely risky methods that
can wipe out life savings over night. There is simply no
free lunch. While a risky method can produce fabulous gain
in relative short term, over the long run, a risky method is
more likely to make people poorer rather than richer even if
a short term gain was gigantic. Gigantic short term gain is
just a dangerous stock market trap to lure the inexperienced
people into the market. Dreaming for instant satisfaction of
huge short term gain overnight with speculation is just a
recipe for disaster ahead.
(3) Value Investing is the Only Proven Safe Method
Value mutual funds are well known to have lower volatility
than growth mutual funds. Numerous industry and academic
studies have shown that value stocks as a group performed
far better than growth stocks in bear market. Many
technology and internet so called "growth stocks" lost 90%
to 99% of value in just a couple of years after 2000 while
many value stocks went up during the same time frame.
In fact, the single most important element to obtain high
investment performance over the long run is to maintain
MARGIN OF SAFETY of a portfolio. That is why the greatest
investor Warren Buffet once quote "Rule No.1: Never lose
money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.".
(4) Value Investing is the Proven Method to Make Big Money
in the Stock Market
I know that I'm going to catch a lot of flak for saying
this, and that many people will misunderstand what I'm
saying. There are certainly other methods of investing or
trading, which made people rich. There are certainly many
under- performing value mutual funds, which give people
wrong impression that value investing is equivalent of low
performance with less risk.
However, I want to emphasize that in fact value investing is
investment style that can obtain high performance with less
risk. I want to stand by my above statement for the
following reasons:
* In the early years of my investment career, I have studied
and tried all kinds of well known methods of famous
investors or traders, Short term trading, Momentum trading,
Technical Analysis, CANSLIM, growth stock long term buy and
hold, Random Walk theory, etc. I have been there and I have
done there. Evidenced by my past investment performance,
value investing is the only method that delivered gigantic
investment return consistently for me over past many years.
In 2003, I have made more than $150,000 in stock market with
value investing method. In 2004, I have made even more money
than 2003 so far. With the power of compounding, there is
really no upper limit for the investment profit with value
investing.
* In 1984, Warren Buffet gave a speech titled The
Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville, which categorized
performance of many famous value investors who beat market
year in and year out. Many of people mentioned in this
article are legendary multi-billionaire right now. It is
true that only a small percentage of investors can beat
market consistently. However, it is not by chance at all
that so many of students of Benjamin Graham became super
riches in America while other methods have not produced that
many rich people. It is also not coincident at all that the
second richest person in the world is a value investor named
Warren Buffet, a student of Benjamin Graham as well.
(5) Value investing will not distract your regular job
The nicest thing about value investing is that it will not
distract your regular job if you choose not to stare at the
stock market frequently in your office. In fact, it is quite
healthy to forget about stock market in your office and
worry about that only at your home after work.
Many newbies in the stock market still believe that if they
stare at stock price quote closely, they can obtain better
chances of winning. It will not. Staring at the stock quote
is least important part of this game. In fact, staring
closely at the stock price quote is more likely to create a
loser rather than a winner because of greed and fear in the
stock market. The more one is unable to resist the mad mood
of Mr. Market, the more likely one is unable to invest
successfully with value investment method.
I am not saying that successful value investing does not
require time. The time you will need in value investing
depends on the investment vehicle you utilize. If you invest
with a value mutual fund, you will not need much time in
stock market and you only need to follow up quarterly with
your fund's performance. If you are a passive investor of my
investment newsletter Blast Investor Real-time Plus and you
follow my model portfolio passively, you will only need to
pay attention to my infrequent trade alert closely and read
my newsletter issues every 2 weeks. If you invest by
yourself, you will certainly need hours of time every week
to look at hundreds of value stock leads and do your own due
diligence by reading 10Q or 10K SEC filling, or by listening
to conference calls, or by talking to company's management.
(6) Successful Value Investing is Hard, But You can Do It!
I certainly do not want to make you to believe that value
investing is as easy as reading couple of books. Value
investing not only requires tons of knowledge and expertise
in financial analysis, accounting, US tax law, US bankruptcy
law, etc., it also requires real life training of right
psychology to fight against greed and fear in the stock
market. It is hard to do.
However, successful investing certainly can be done and I
have done it over past decade myself. You certainly want to
look at my investing articles of this web site for more
information.
(7) You need to start early in value investing
Let's be honest about value investing, it is not a get-rich-
quick scam and it takes time to really make living with
value investing without need of your regular job. You need
large starting principle if you want to make living from
stock market investment than your salary.
By reading Warren Buffet's article above, you can pretty
much guess that successful value investors can achieve 20%
to 30% per year performance consistently over the long run
regardless of whether market is bear or bull although it is
possible to obtain significantly higher performance in
earlier investment years due to smaller fund size and luck.
20% or 30% more consistent investment return is already very
high return over the long run. Since Peter Lynch retired
from Fidelity, you can rarely find a mutual fund with that
kind of performance over past many years.
The best approach is to treat stock market investment as
side business in addition to your regular job. Your regular
job help you pay your bills and help you earn the initial
principle for value investing. Once your investment net
worth surpasses $100,000, sooner or later you will realize
that your regular job salary can hardly keep up with
compounded rate of investment return. Too many people
naively believe that they can get rich quick with
speculative trading method in stock market rather than a
hard work with a job and value investing at side. It is a
lot easier to make your first $50,000 net worth with a job
rather than speculation in stock market.
Even if you do not have large sum of money right now as
principle to make really big profit out of value investing,
you still want to start value investing early so that you
can learn in and out of value investing in your earlier
years of investing in the stock market. Successful
investment is long term process. The earlier you start
investing successfully, the better off your pocketbook will
be, and the quicker you will reach your financial freedom.
Let's do a quick math, if your starting capital for
investing is $50,000 and your annual compouned rate of
return is 30%, you will need 9 years to surpass $500,000 net
worth. However, to turn $500,000 net worth into 1 million,
you only need 3 more years, think hard!
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You are invited to use any or all of these value investing articles in your publication or website. The only requirement is the inclusion of the following, after each article...
* Article by Henry Lu of BlastInvest LLC, a premium investment newsletter publisher in Connecticut. Visit http://www.BlastInvest.com/ for FREE "how-to" value investing assistance, web services and more.
