I met with a friend recently who has been investing on his own and he deems to be quite good at it, but he feels that it may not be easy to achieve his own retirement goals.

Upon prompting and asking a few more questions, I found out that he was trying to trade the market to try to consistently achieve 5% on his own and through his experience, it is not very easy.. He stays up at night to keep watch on the US markets and moves in and out between various companies, depending on his “watch list”. He gets right decisions probably about 8 out of 10 that he makes.

But even with that, he still feels that it is not easy to get a annualized growth year on year, over a prolonged period of time.

Whenever a company price goes up “too much”, he feels it is time to sell and keep the profits. When the company price goes down, there is the fear that the company might go into a downturn spiral due to some negative news. And tracking all these on a frequent basis takes time and emotional efforts to tide through the swings. And this does not even include the crisis periods that come along occasionally every few years.

It sounded like what I used to go through myself as an investor previously as well, unitl I changed my strategy a few years ago.

So I shared that the broad markets actually gave a return of 9-10%pa historically over the long term but yet many self investors have not been able to capture returns anything close to that over a 20-30yr period. Part of the reason is due to the emotional roller coaster we go through in our brain.

The human brain is wired to lose money in investments. When markets have gone up, it is hard to stay put and not sell out. And when markets are going through drops, it can be very difficult to maintain composure and stay invested, while topping up to take advantage of the opportunities. Our human mind is designed to keep us safe so anything out of the norm disrupts the pattern and we make emotional decisions driven by both fear and greed.

This becomes even more challenging when dealing with larger chunks of cash when investing. For example buying stocks with a $100k vs $1mil, which is primarily for long retirement funds is very different.

Do you know that there is a way to help you to…

1) simplify your life in decision making – the lesser decisions you make, the lesser the mistakes.

2) give you back precious time for your life – to focus on your varying passions.

3) give you the confidence to get to where you want in a way that is reliable and sustainble, which requires less speculation.

If you think you or your friends sound like my friend above, who are getting nowhere with your own approach to investing, we can have an initial chat to see how we can help.