Monthly Archives: January 2024

I came from a country where "not knowing" is frowned upon but you're kind-of worshipped if you've known something that others don't--same concept applies to tenured employees and "just because" politicians. As I become more aware and less pretentious (lol), I find the culture ridiculous, it builds a false facade of strength on a weak foundation. How can you possibly know everything or worse pretend to know a plethora of topic without any help? I strive to learn everyday, but learning also entails asking questions. You grow by asking them too, it's not weakness, it is actually a strength. Coming from the culture that I was raised, asking someone about a topic I don't know is quite a challenging task. One great illustration of this is if you ask other races about their Filipino co-workers, they would say "Oh! he/she is a hard worker, I love her", it's because we Filipinos don't ask for help, we do everything on our own. We say we don't like to be tagged as "lazy" but what it really is is we feel dumb or weak when we admit that we actually need help. We overly pretend we can do all the task in front of us with little to no help. It is mixed bag of ego and cultural problem that is rooted within us that's why it's so difficult to unlearn. On the topic of asking questions, I had an encounter with a guy over the phone where I asked about wire…

In this year I made major adjustments on my investment approach. I made this change because of the painful experience of losing a lot of money in 2022. And I realized that life has a lot more to offer than constantly checking on the positions I hold and trade them multiple times per month. I got sucked into the idea that trading is the better way to make it big in the stock market. As a trader in the Philippines, I never thought of tax implications that come with trading equities. It's a very different experience in the US. There are rules that are set in place so that you, as a regular investor, can't rig the system. In 2022, I almost blew my account by being bullish on a bear market. To add fuel to the fire, I was hit by a tax bill end of the year. It took me a long time to recover, I had to undergo a lot of unlearning and re-learning on my investment approach. What I first did was to consolidate my investments into a single platform, Charles Schwab. I then created a long-term portfolio where I plan to hold "Compounders" with the goal of outperforming the S&P500 year over year. Aside from that portfolio, I retained a small portion of my previous account to scratch my itch of trading with the goal of still outperforming the S&P500 by a large margin. I also have my Roth IRA for retirement. Here's the screenshots…

Your time is precious, choose not to spend it with inherently stupid people. When provoked, you don't have to retaliate, let them drown in their ignorance.