The saying goes : you can fool some people all the time but you can't fool all the people all the time. With this idea as a backdrop, I was appalled when I saw this piece of news article.
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Beat The Herd Mentality To Improve Investment Results
Beating the markets is beating the herd mentality.T he intelligent investor is a great book to start reading for amateur investors. The book is rich in quantitative data but readers may find it hard to swallow as the language is written with a terse archaic style. But what the book does not touch on is how to be an emotionally intelligent investor and beat the herd mentality. While numbers are easy to handle, one's emotions can prove to be an inconquerable mountain like Everest. And for most of us, this may very well be the final obstacle to being an investor great.
Descendants Of The Herd
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If you are in Asia and you consider yourself a value investor, Hong Kong is a great place to find bargain companies at more than fair prices. And that hunt begins in Hang Seng Index. Although the index, a representative of market performance has held its ground at 23700 levels with respect to global indices, our screens have begun to show a number of candidates worth considering. (more…)
The whole fiasco surrounding Swiber reminds of a slow contrast effect, not visible to human perception. People, investors, bankers, creditors do not notice extremely slow changes taking place until *wham* - A slap in the face takes place. This was pretty much what happened to Swiber Holdings. That slap in the face happened to be an inability to pay off its bondholders in terms of coupon payment and eventual redemption. And on hindsight, I am glad to say that we were just bystanders on the sidelines looking on with compassion for the many investors and bondholders who got burnt as a result.
This reminds me of the frog in boiling water syndrome. If one were to put a live frog in boiling water, it feels the pain and danger to itself immediately and leaps out of the boiling water. But if one were to put a live frog into a pot of water and begin boiling it, the frog would just go along with what was happening, not noticing the small changes that are taking place to its surroundings. Eventually, the frog is boiled alive and dies. This is a great metaphor of explaining our inability to adjust and be aware of changes occurring in our world today. That awareness, incidentally, is what we need as investors.
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