Temptation and Emotion

Wow, what a few weeks for an investor! I am tempted to say, what a disastrous few weeks, but that would be unfair to all the smart investing advice I have been given through books and other reading material. Then again, I cannot even say what exiting few weeks, since all these corrections and buying opportunities cannot give any normal investor any confidence about what to do right away.

So I will just write about what my own thoughts are regarding all this. To begin with, I am pretty sure if I had money to invest right now, I would have bought something missing from my highly unbalanced portfolio. However, as is the habit, even though I have nothing to gain/lose from that action, every morning I check how the market is doing and how my portfolio is holding up. Now, I have no intention of doing anything in a time like this that involves selling or panicking, I am after all a mere mortal. And sadness and disappointment does lead to a very strong temptation to "do something".

The idea of course is to resist the temptation to do anything. I know that, and so does probably anybody who has had made an effort to learn all the basis of common sense investing. I can give out all sorts of charts showing you how not selling, sticking to the long-term investing strategy in a market like this works out way more beneficial for an individual investor as compared with somebody who does such "crazy" things, but then I would not be able to call myself a "lazy investor". So, just believe me or pick up any decent investing book.

I guess what I am saying is that even after knowing what the right things to do are, investing, money, personal finance, the stock market, etc have a very strong human element to it. We are all emotional human beings and panic, disappointment, excitement and most importantly temptation are factors that no book or knowledge or advice can teach you. That unfortunately has to be handled individually.

As for me, I generally deal with days like these by a few minutes of silent cursing followed by some sulking, a brief moment of panic and then moving on with life......

Microlending for mainstream - kiva.org

I had read about kiva.org from a financial blogger who I read fairly often. Yesterday while watching local PBS in HD (since it is either that or Discovery that seem to have the only decent quality HD programming) that I saw a good segment on kiva and spent some time today looking into it.

I guess enough has been said about the creativity of the idea and the ease and effectiveness of it on various blogging sites. The 100% repayment rate so far is certainly impressive and it seems to be getting more attention each day.

I am not a charitable person when it comes to donating money, but this appeals to even my charitable side. Of course micro-lending is not charity. However, I am looking at it as most people like me would do; Loan some amount that you are comfortable with, hope that it helps someone with the need to get setup or make a small business work. If that works, I suppose the feeling of having helped can only be good. When the repayment comes across, I am sure you are not going to need the money then, so see if you can help someone else. Call it pseudo-charity, but this is something I could see myself doing with the selfish reason of enjoying the feeling of having helped.

I like ideas like this that work.

Just what you have been waiting for...

...another investing/stock market blog. Since the 17 that you have been reading already aren't sufficient enough.
If you haven't guessed already, I am a little cynical.
To be honest, I shouldn't be. As of writing this post, I have approximately $15,000 in my investing portfolio currently "invested". A couple of index funds and a few ETFs. In the next few posts, I will get into details about what those exactly are and how did I get myself into that situation. I recently managed to transfer an additional $2500 into the account ready to be invested as soon as I figure out where that goes.
The portfolio has gained around $1600 since I started actively investing which was around a year ago (10 months and a few days to be precise). This idea of "active investing" goes against the very basis of my investing theory, which is summarized as "Lazy", but more on that later (another post most likely).
What I am getting at is that, yes, this is another investing blog. I will talk about stocks and ETFs and mutual funds (which I am pretty sure I am never going to invest myself) and index funds, but not to educate or to preach. I am going to do that so that when I go back and look at why my portfolio is at where it is, there has to be some thought process involved. Lets see if I can keep an account of that through this.
Hopefully in future, when I look at my Roth IRA account and see 3 stocks of Symantec (SYMC), sitting at 32% loss, I don't scratch my head and wonder.....what was I thinking?