Understand the risks you are taking and brace yourself for the outcome.
IRENE Bergman turns 100 this coming August.
She is the longest-serving financial advisor on Wall Street and still calls her clients regularly.
Her advice for profitable investment is “Don’t obsess over quick profits… best to wait at least three years, better yet, many more before evaluating holdings. If thesis is wrong, have courage to make the changes.”
The Bergman story serves to reinforce basic rules in investing – invest long term to grow wealth and do not time market for quick gains.
Action requires courage
Today’s investing environment is exciting for punters in a market not far north. If one can stomach the turbulent gastric juice tsunami, then fast bucks can be made. Or fortune lost!
If one is an average Malaysian working hard to ensure one’s hard-earned salary can beat inflation, currency crash and GST, heed Bergman’s advice. Grow one’s funds in a portfolio of assets.
Malaysians generally love real estates and stocks! In recent years, investors’ appetite for more sophisticated assets has increased as more are putting their bets in ETF, structured equity funds, gold bars, wine, art and historical artefacts and plantations.
Speculating vs investing
So which should one do? Speculate or invest? Both are similar. Whether one speculates or invests, one wants to grow capital. The difference is the risks a speculator or investor can tolerate to get the monetary rewards.
Speculators, in Bergman’s view, are those who take higher risks and expect abnormally high and quick profits. Investors, on the other hand, invest in assets with reasonable risks and wait for satisfactory yields after three years or more.
Whichever you are, understand the risks you are taking and be prepared for the outcome. If one is a speculator, as Bergman in her 40-plus-year career said, “Don’t do anything stupid.” Yet when one sees one’s bets in stocks being obliterated on-screen, it is hard to stay invested and keep calm!
Current Malaysian investing climate is volatile; yet both speculators and investors do not have the crystal balls to inform them when profits would come in. It helps to shop around for one’s own Bergman to advise you on the right portfolio to invest and stay invested through thick and think!
Happy 100th birthday, Irene Bergman. May we all live a long and prosperous life like you!
The writer can be contacted at info@successconcepts.biz