Review of Retirement Plan

It's been about 9 months since I started working and things have been a whirlwind. 

My company had been bought over recently and I was re-assigned into another role in the new company. It's been a few days of getting to know the new systems, new people and basically getting myself into the new work environment.

As I looked and reviewed my financial situation, it's been the nearly two years since I bought one of my first stocks in the journey to financial freedom.

The returns for the stocks has been average at best; some stock purchases have perhaps been costly to my overall portfolio, dragging it down as I previously mentioned in my other post.

My benchmark for awhile now has been the S&P, which has risen approximately 13 percent since a year ago. Unfortunately, my portfolio is nowhere near that.  This has mainly been due to three purchases that have drastically fallen, one of which being Design Studio (The new CEO has made me regret purchasing the stock) and two others (Daimler and Bank of Zhengzhou) that has been heavily affected by the trade war shenanigans and would be laggards in my portfolio overall.

Another big issue is my expenditure; I found myself taking grab a lot due to the fact that my office location was quite far away; the new office location is nearer now but in town, so I will be able to save some money on that.

Overall, I believe I have been overly optimistic on a.) my returns and b.) my ability to save.  The one lucky thing is that my new job position will possibly get me a far higher pay and bonus than I expected. I have to revise my investment plan slightly and will take a more conservative calculation from now on; this is in addition to admitting to myself that I can't just not enjoy life while going through to early retirement.

A few considerations I am planning to alter in my life is to pick up a side gig of some sort - extra cash would be good and might be a good hobby.. That is also on top of moving towards a more passive and less active picking portfolio (maybe pushing up ETFs to 30% of the portfolio for a start) , as investing has been a great pasttime and I am not willing to move to a fully passive portfolio yet; and to start looking into my expenditure to see what makes sense and what doesn't.

While there has been some setbacks, I will continue down this journey and to fully embrace the hiccups that happen in this experience.

Cheers everyone, and wishing everyone a great week ahead.

March Update

It's been a few months since my last post...

Quite a few happenings has happened on a personal level and also the recent fall in stocks the past few months had shaken me admittedly. However, I stuck to my guns and didn't sell any of my stocks, and have seen great recoveries in most of my stocks.

Notable mentions:

My dogged decision to keep buying Alibaba has netted me a great profit in just a short while. With the possible relief in the trade war, I have managed to dollar average up and down with around 25% of my portfolio concentrated in alibaba. This has net me a good overall net gain of around 20+ percent in a short while. Good stuff.

There has been some struggling stocks such as Singtel and Design Studio, with the latter committing sepukku. It has been particularly disappointing to see a once great stock such as Design Studio be ruined by the current CEO with it making a significant loss for the year, what with the crazy increase in payments to contractors accounting for a huge loss. I will probably exit around 50% of my holdings there especially because the reasons I bought it has not been validated. It is a painful mistake with the stock falling over 50% since i bought it. 

Overall, my portfolio is in the green and there has been some strong stocks supporting it, while some mistakes has led to the size of my profits being shrunk significantly.

I have also added to a chinese stock called Haier. this is the biggest appliances company in China and the stock had been at a significant discount, and a quick calculation of the free cash flow has led me to realize the huge margin of safety I had if I purchased the stock. It was one of my fastest purchases (with due diligence of course) and I have enjoyed the ride up of 6 percent in 2 short weeks. Hoping to see it climb even more what with how undervalued the stock is.

As I push on with this portfolio, I have come to understand what type of companies my investment style is suited for, and hopefully I will make less mistakes going on ahead. I remain hopeful that my career path and investment strategy will allow me to reach my financial dreams.

Cheers everyone and to a great year investing ahead.