Changing tires and stock investing
Hesitation comes when you are doing something fairly new
LAST week I experienced a bump in the road, which eventually led to a flat tire. It was good that I was already at home, where I had no choice but to change the tires by myself. The whole process of changing the flat tire from start to finish proved to be a very memorable one as I was able to get valuable principles from it that I could very much relate to stock investing and trading.
Here’s what I learned:
Hesitation comes when you are doing something fairly new. I was taught by my father to change flat tires when I first learned how to drive. But the last time I ever experienced a flat tire was probably 11 or 12 years ago, when I was still in college. Though I did it once, it’s something new to me. So before changing tires, I was very hesitant to do it. I waited for more than eight hours to begin. I believe this is ordinary to a lot of people who want to invest in the stock market. Because stock investing is not yet a common investment vehicle for most of our kababayan, many feel uncertain to do it. However in reality, when we start to get our feet wet, we’ll find that it’s not as complicated as we think it is. Similar to what happened to me while I was changing my flat tire. Five minutes into the process of changing it, it dawned on me that,
“Hey! This is something I can actually do and complete!”
So to everyone who hesitates to start, it’s time to make the first step and make the leap from consuming to investing.
Tools will greatly enhance your work and make you more efficient. I finished changing the flat tire in about 30 minutes. I believe it would have taken me longer time to finish that or not even finish it at all if there where no tools available, or if the proper ones were not there. The same goes for stock investing—to be at your best as an investor is to use the tools that are available at your disposal. These are your fundamental data and research that you can use to pick which stocks are cheap and valuable, and the technical data which allows you to know when is the best time to buy and sell your stock.
Frustration and emotion should be thrown out the window. Upon seeing the flat tire, it would have been easy to be sad and ask myself
“why did this happen to me?”
Like in stock investing, bear and bull markets will come and go. The market will have its times when everyone just wants to buy, and when people would just want to sell the stock down. As traders and investors, our goal is to stick to our plan no matter what happens. It may be easy to be sad when the market is down and happy when the market is up. But we don’t make money that way! We don’t decide based on our emotions, rather we decide based on the goals that we set. To be profitable in investing, we should set our goals and stick to it like glue and not waver from, it regardless if our emotions would tell us otherwise.
Sweat happens when you work it out. As I was mounting the car and also changing the tire, a sudden surge of sweat came to me as I was exerting effort and trying to get work done. The same is true in stock investing and trading, there is no such thing as getting rich quick. By wanting to be financially free, we study and do our due diligence. As we do so, a trading plan comes into play. As we execute the plan, experience unfolds so profits come. Profit is not the end goal but, rather a product of our passion.
Changing tires and stock investing may seem different, but eventually there are certain principles that you can get from the simplest of incidents that each of us may use in investing. My greatest desire is to see more Filipinos financially free, and to see more of us move from consumers to investors. I have dedicated my site www.marvingermo.com to further help more Filipinos in their quest for financial freedom. I believe the greatest days of our country have yet to come!
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Marvin Germo is a registered financial Planner of RFP Philippines. To learn about financial planning and how to become an RFP, attend free personal-finance talk on January 30, 7 p.m., at PSE Ortigas. To reserve, e-mail info@rfp.ph or text at 0917-3464126.
Source: http://businessmirror.com.ph/index.php/en/business/banking-finance/26573-changing-tires-and-stock-investing
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