⚠️ You Can't Earn $$$ outside of your Knowledge

This is a repost of my recent Blossom writeup. I think the info is important especially in this multi-year bull markets we are experiencing now, so I am sending this to you mailbox in case you missed it:

As retail investor communities grow, I begin to see more and more contents are being created suggesting questionable investing practices.

If someone claim to be making huge profits but is being ambiguous about how they made it, it's probably a scammer trying to sell you a course, and earns their profits from the course, not from investment.

There are no tricks in investing, you save a portion of your salary every month, invest it into a broadly diversified index ETF or a portfolio of diversified stocks and earns 10% annual return. With good stock picking it maybe possible to achieve 20% per year return but it will take a lot of work and the result is not guaranteed. There are NO shortcuts to make a lot of returns on small efforts.

There will be people who try to sound smart by using a lot of complex economic "analysis" to try to hook you in and buy their products, which most likely won’t add any value. The legend Peter Lynch has said "If you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you've wasted 10 minutes", and I agree. There are simply too many variables in our economy and I think it is beyond us to completely understand how it works.

The best way to invest is sticking to index funds, or investing in well-established companies that you know about. For example, as a software engineer, I mainly invest in software/tech companies as I either use their products frequently or I understand how they operate.

Here are some rule of thumbs I use:

1. Avoid any complex investment/trading schemes, stick to simple all-in-one ETFs or blue-chip individual stocks and hold them long term.

2. Avoid any investment loans unless you understand the risks completely

3. Believe no one except yourself (my posts included, always verify)

4. Stay away from any investment products you don't 100% understand. Simpler is always better when investing.

5. Don't believe any claim unless it's backed by facts. For example, I've seen people on Blossom showing massive all time gains on their portfolio but it is not linked to broker, and some of their holding has impossible gains (For example, when you check the all time stock chart on Google, the most gains you can get from absolute bottom to top is 100%, but is showing 900% gains on Blossom)

I hope this helps and happy investing.