What to do in a bearish market: Hibernate

These are the things I learned and observed this past weeks.

1. Anything can happen in the stock market. Nothing is for certain. I bought some shares of a blue chip company just before the price plummeted down. Before buying, I felt confident, quite certain that the price will rise. I felt stupid afterwards but then at least I definitely learned something. I made a mistake and so are all successful investors.

2.  When the market is bearish, it's the natural tendency of a beginner to worry about his/her investments especially when all the percentages are in red color. This is exactly how I feel right now because I just opened my portfolio. I definitely need to go back to my reading (now reading James Altucher) to free myself from anxiety. Now I can imagine that people can really get crazy looking at real time charts.

3. Liquidity of a stock cannot be ignored. I was amazed at how the price of MBC has risen over the past weeks. I heard people saying it's due to the Mayweather-Pacquiao fight, which is non-sense. I know someone who tried to join the madness and guess what, he could not buy even a single lot of shares. But what surprised me is that he was willing to throw money buying the stock not even knowing why its price is behaving that way. I was wondering, is the stock market a casino?

 

4. I'm now considering to trade. Why? Honestly, because I got jealous of the people I know who's making money in day trading. This is most probably not a smart reason to make a decision now so I'll occupy myself with my 50-book-challenge until my emotion can't deceive me and I can make a wise decision.

What happens when the PSEi falls and the market is bleeding

Last April 25, upon checking my portfolio, I was appalled because all of my stocks were in red. Normally, majority are in red but some are in green. I checked the news and apparently, it is because the market was down. I'm not sure what is the root cause but I do know it was a result of large foreign selling.

Upon observation, I noticed that all of my stocks fell but did not exceed 10%. I did not put a trailing stop. I was not planning to sell at all no matter what the market does because I am supposedly a long term investor.
And long term investors are shopping (and happy) when stocks are low. Unfortunately, I do not have funds to buy stocks when they suddenly hit bottom low. People are guessing that the market will remain bearish/ down until May. Well, I hope so. So that by then I can have the funds to buy again. I am planning to reduce my stocks to 3 so that I can concentrate on just 3 companies. It is indeed tiring to follow a lot of stocks/companies.

 

 I was actually planning to sell my Puregold stocks but then I was surprised that it was not affected much by the index fall. It only fell by a few percentage. I should research about why. But most probably, I will sell it once it hit my target price. What concerned me though was that the people who are supposed to be long term investors got into panic selling when the market was falling. And because of that they lost a lot of money. They probably forgot that as long as they parked their money in good companies, they should not worry about the going down because it will eventually go up again. Anyway, as I observe, there's really no logic in the stock market and in the participants. Indeed, it is more of psychology and people's emotion  that motivates them,

All Set to Invest in the Stock Market!

At first, I thought it will be easy to create an online account with my broker however, it took me some time because of the following reasons:

1. I had to decide on the type of account I will create. I made a joint "OR" account with my sister so that during emergency, she can manage my account. Because of that, I waited for her to provide valid IDs and to sign the application form with me. 

2. I had no billing statement. The customer service provided me with some alternatives.

   1) A valid government issued Id that has an address on it

   2) Copy of your Contract Employment or Certificate of Employment

   3) Any Billing statement under a relatives name as long as it has the same address on what is written on your application form

   4) Any of your latest Bank Statement

   5) Billing Statement under a Landlords name with a Letter of Certification

3. After I completed the requirements and the forms which I printed, I sent scanned copies to the customer service to check whether I missed some things. I opted to send the documents via LBC or any courier so I had to make sure that everything is complete and correct when my documents arrive in  the broker's office.

After a few days, I received a confirmation in my email.

With this account number, I was able to link my investment account to my bank online account (BPI Express Account). That means funding my investment account will just be a few taps away.

If you have any questions, you can comment below.

50-Book Challenge and My Bucket List for 2015

1. 50-book Challenge!
   1. Disturbing the Universe by Freeman Dyson
      This is a book about the memoir of Freeman Dyson, a physicist and mathematician who worked as a bomb strategist in the second world war. In this book, he tackles ethical issues of technologies such as nuclear bomb and how they should be used to make the world a better place. He was expected to be like Einstein who was a deep thinker but he knew he is not a deep thinker and pursued working on applications of theoretical science in which several projects are discussed in this book. For me, he is genius in his field but instead of being proud of his many achievements, he talked about how he could have done more for society. I learned from this book that even in the scientific community, negotiation and communication skills are also very useful and important so how much more are they useful in business and in the corporate world.

   2. How to make money Trading by Lex Van Dam 
      As I am still starting to learn investing and trading, this book is useful for learning several important market terminologies. Knowing who and what to read regarding the topic of investing and trading is very confusing at first but I was also able to do a reading plan with the help of the outline of this book.
   3.  Stock Investing For Dummies
2. Get a diploma from Instituto de Cervantes

3. Encourage someone to learn a foreign language as well

4. Get new passports for my Grandma and Mom

5. Have a business trip

6. Learn how to drive a car

7. Invest in the stock market

8. Start learning portfolio management 

9. Have a cake business partnership with my cousin

10. Have a online business partnership with my brother

Checkout my power planner for 2015 here.