STE's Stocks Investing Journey

We often relate Index ETF as one of the asset class for “passive investing” and one of the main tenets of passive investing is the strategy of long-term holdings and less active trading . Because there are very infrequent buying and selling, fees are low. In short, this means you’ll lose less of your returns to management due to higher transaction cost in the long run. But recent fund flow data seems to show in a different result as what we had always thought. Traders Get Whiplash After Fastest Ever Fund Flow Swing From Euphoria To Despair <source:trulytimes.com>   “US equity funds and ETFs reported $26.87 Bil of outflows, the largest weekly outflow since December 2018 and the third largest outflow ever, more than reversing a $22.67 Bil inflow one week earlier .”   It seems that ETF no longer meant for “passive investors” but more for trading nowadays. New trading platforms with a much lower or zero commission have also contributed a lot to such huge fund flow in

  Stocks Valuation: Art or Science?   This is an “old age “ question that pondered all of us as an investor and question we hear from time to time. For me, I think stocks valuation is both a science and an art. We often hear that analysts are trying to find the so-called ”intrinsic value ” of a stock or business and different model or methods of analysis would give a different result of valuations, sometimes the variance could be huge.   <Image Credit: Mishfitlife.com> Beauty (Value) Is In The Eye of The Beholder: Part 1     Valuation is a science because there are “ scientific element ” involved in methods of valuation e.g using DCF (Discounted Cash Flow ), SOTP ( Sum-of the parts  ), Asset-Based Model (Relative Valuation ),  Financial Ratio analysis (PB/PE/Div Yield etc ). Valuation is an art because it involved “judgement “ about the prospect or future of any company. It is always as subjective as art when it comes to “ estimating” or forecasting future growth or

  Time flies, we have seen a very volatile market while entering 4 th Qtr of 2020, where the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite dropped nearly 6.2% (from the highest point of 12,074 achieved on 2 nd Sep 2020 ) its biggest percentage declined since June 11. But I think this pullback is quite normal with a market which already increased by almost + 82% since low in March 202, as it reflects the “ reverting to mean “ to some extent.                                             <Video Credit to: 楊世光在金錢爆 > Technology stocks have been among the leaders in the broad market rebound since March and it looks like the sky is the limit with such magnitude of increased in the past few months. We have seen the “ decoupling “ of “ Wall-Street vs Main-Steet “since the pumping of trillions of easy money into the stocks and bond markets ( as well as commodities market like gold and silver, or even crypto). Overall, stocks have soared since March despite the worst economic slumps and highest “ unem