The Journey Begins

Hello friends, I’m back!

First off, have to say thank you all for the overwhelming responses and private messages of support after the last post, very much appreciated! I debated long and hard with myself as to whether to share it, so great to hear you enjoyed it.

Apologies for then going AWOL, you must have thought, this guy – pulls us in with his personal expose and then buggers off to gloat and grin like a Cheshire Cat.

Not at all friends, have faith people – I was just investigating what I need to do to bring the blog and website up to standard. Seems like the expected shelf life for a blog is less than 6 months because bloggers either become disheartened due to lack of views or burn-out.

Being a marathon not a sprint, I’ve decided to space out the posts a bit so the content can be quality over quantity. Maybe once or twice a week going forward (I know – like you, my tears haven’t stopped, I’m devastated).

But back to posting!

The most common question I get after the last post is – hey how come you are so really really really ridiculously good-looking? Um, genes and good diet I think, next question please. What’s that? How did I get to where I am now? I caught the bus home, nex… oh you mean financially? Well let me start from the beginning.

Growing up, as mentioned before I was never the smartest kid nor the brightest at school. I’d rather play soccer and run around than learn about Caecilius or Pythagoras or Syphilis. Not that I wasn’t aware of STD’s or didn’t have an affinity for triangles, it was just that I wasn’t into studying texts from books or writing about the feminism reading of Hamlet.

Subsequently my marks in the Year 12 (senior) exams were poor in comparison to my school friends and I was fortunate to even be offered a place at uni for a Bachelor of Commerce.

I loved going to uni, truly it was the best years of my life – the freedom, the friends, the activities, the freedom, the girls (forgive me, I attended an all boys high school) and the freedom! Wowsers, amazing time.

With all the freedom I had, unfortunately I did not devote enough time to study and just scraped through in my last year when it came to the finals and pass grades (sound familiar!).

However the biggest take-out of that year, was not that I finally knew what Syphilis was (nono, not me OK, my friend *Bruno caught that grenade) or that girls could give you Syphilis – it was my first taste of working in financial services.

My friend ^Warren referred me to a firm he was working at and that’s how I got in, through a referral.

I was placed in the financial planning arm where I quickly learnt I was never going to be a financial planner. Luckily though, one of the junior planners was a massive share-market buff. He loved trading in penny stocks and one day gave me a “hot” tip.

“Buy XYZ”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a stock, you know a company”

“Oh cool, how do I do that?”

He then proceeded to show me how to open up a trading account, how to transfer funds and how to buy and sell shares.

The journey had started!

Naturally I bought XYZ with everything I had at the time – maybe a grand maybe two and watched and waited.

Nothing happened, I waited a few more days, the stock moved up a cent or two – holy moly, I made a week’s wages!

What do I do? Should I sell? Should I buy more? Should I go and dance a jig? TELL ME.

Relax, just wait and see – there’s more money to be made yet, he reassured me.

So that’s what I did… and saw the investment lose three quarters of its value.

WTF is this – what a crappy game, I just lost three quarters of my money, now tell me, what do I buy next?

I was hooked – my investment journey had started and I wanted more! Like an addict, I kept coming back so I could get my hit.

When you first start out you don’t know what research is, heck you can’t even spell due diligence, but what you do know is when you see your money move up and down it’s terribly exciting.

You can never learn this with formal education, as much as I love learning about Trigonometric functions and Black-Scholes, formal education didn’t teach me diddly squat as to what to do when the GFC hit around the corner, formal education didn’t teach me when I should sell when I was holding onto a multi-bagger during the aftermath, formal education didn’t teach me what I should do when that same multi-bagger reversed and I lost my entire stake in it.

What happened? Let me tell you, you see… what’s that? This post is too long, you have to get back to work? OK fine, I’ll save it then just for you.

Until next time friends!

*Not his real name, his real name is Ivan, Hi Ivan!!!

^Warren’s real name is Warren.

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