dumb bull ivan wrote a post · Oct 14 02:12

My Personal Investment Journey and Sharing

Hi all, a little bit different from sharing of Technical Analysis, but more on my personal investment strategies to go in line with the topic this week.

I started gaining an interest back during my time in the army, and dabbled with Crypto. Back then, I honestly didn't know much about investments and dumped most of my savings there, only for most of Crypto to pullback (this was around 2016/17). I was quite bumped and ignored investments for a while due to the pain of losing money at a relatively young age when I was 20/21.

After a while, I got my first proper job and finally had "adult money", but I found that I wasn't saving anything and when big expenses hit, I often didn't have enough to pay for things. That's when it hit me, I had to do something to change my lifestyle.

I started reading up more on investments, started looking into financial literacy and this is what I've personally developed. While some people prefer to have a ratio (e.g. 50% essentials, 30% savings, 20% luxury etc), I decided to actually budget out my expenditure in a simpler way, that has proven to be effective with me.

1) I budgetted out $600 for meals every month, I will physically withdraw this money, so that whenever I spent, I have the pain of paying money (compared to tapping a card/QR transactions), in cases where my friends paid first, I would transfer them and take this portion out of my cash, for me to deposit it at a later stage. This $600 includes eating out/drinking with friends. This was very tough as I don't have the luxury of a cooked meal at home and most of my food was takeout (of which I'm sure most people can relate). This would turn into a rough $10 budget per meal (lunch/dinner), which I was comfortable with, and soon enough, I actually found that on certain months where I don't go out as often, I could slash this to $300-350/month (the extras will go to point #2)

2) The rest of my money (I won't reveal how much I earn) - I portioned it to give some allowance to my parents, with the remainder being split into half - one into cash savings, the other into investments

I personally feel that budgeting is more important than the actual investment, as this gives you more insights on your lifestyle/spending before being able to make any sound investments. However, I still didn't have the knowledge of investing, and that's when I decided to talk more to my relatives and learn more online (mostly Youtube), and one of my favourite ways to make money is by using options.

HUH OPTIONS? SO COMPLICATED, DON'T WANT LAAAAAAAA

Hear me out. First off, you have to understand what an option is (I'm planning to go through this in one of my next few posts, so stay tuned!) - it is essentially a contract, that allows you to buy/sell the underlying at a set price. The strategy that I eventually found and grown to love is called the Wheel Strategy, of which it mainly comprises of:

1) Sell a CASH-SECURED put (options on US stocks typically follow 100 shares, so if e.g. if the strike price of the option is $100, the option contract is for 100 x $100 = 10k USD). By having 10k USD, and selling said put option, you are promising that if price hits below the strike price of $100, you will buy the underlying at $100. Regardless of whether it hits the strike price, you collect the PREMIUM from selling the PUT contract

2) Wait for expiry (you can roll your contracts if you want, but more on that next time). If you get assigned, ok, pay up the 10k USD and hold the stock. If not, the options expire worthless and you get to enjoy your juicy premium from selling that put contract. In this case, repeat step #1

3) With those shares, you can now sell a COVERED CALL with your 100 shares. Same thing, choose a strike you like, get paid in premiums.

4) Wait for expiry, if you get assigned, ok, your 100 shares get taken away and you still get to collect that premium, then you repeat step #1. If not, repeat step #3.

But Ivan, investments are very daunting and I don't want to do options. I don't want to go through all the hassle of learning.

Ok, don't worry, I gotchu. I'm not saying there's no risk, but I understand the pain points. And I feel like in this era, there are many ways to make your money grow, such as robo-investing platforms or even using Moomoo. And I would like to advocate for Moomoo in this aspect. For the Casual Investors (shoutout to @CasualInvestor), you can potentially look into setting aside an amount every month and just dollar cost average (DCA) into $SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY.US)$ or $Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO.US)$. These ETFs track the S&P 500 and gives you an exposure to a basket of stocks. With the remainder of cash, you can use invest into Moomoo's market money funds and treat Moomoo like a "bank account", of course the only downside to this is that withdrawals can be slightly delayed (as compared to the traditional bank account), so please hold on to some cash as well!

Hope this sharing has been useful. Some disclaimers are that for example, my budget as mentioned above definitely changed with time, as I grew older, I looked into insurance and ILPs as well, of which this is also considered in my budget. I would say the most important thing for budgetting would be to take a note of your non-negotiables, such as rent/mortage/insurance/food/bills, my personal budget went up from $600 to about $1.4k a month now due to my non-negotiables, and sometimes, this things aren't avoidable.

And as mentioned before, there is no point in comparing your personal wealth, it only makes you feel demoralised when you compare. Go at your own pace, and if the amount you have makes you happy, shouldn't that be enough?

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dumb bull ivan

Just a dumb bull believing that stonks only go up... until there's a reason to cut and cosplay as a bear

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