Rest of 2020 Summary

 

Haven't been writing for almost a year. Here's what have been happening in between:

2020 Gloves

I've made some real money during the glove run last year. I started out with buying Rubberex and HLT, then also bought bigger guys Kossan and Supermax. I wasn't even sure why or whether I even need to diversify. I bought them as early as April.

My investment thesis: gloves will be hot item during the pandemic. I'll hold on to them all the way until the pandemic is over.

However, the swing of the prices, sometimes >20% per day, was too much for me to handle. I exited rather early with 200%+ profit. This is too bad, as I originally wanted to hold them until the pandemic dust is settled.

I miss a lot of dividends + price appreciation because of exiting too early. However, I choose my health over all this.

2020 Gold run

I also profited during the gold run last year. My investment thesis: the virus causes uncertainties in the market which will support the gold price. I did this by buying gold stock funds (https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/AMPRECM:MK) through EPF, using up all of my portion for mutuals funds at that time. At the height of the gold run I was holding on to 30% unrealized profit.

However, I quickly sold all of my holding the day Pfizer announced their Phase III clinical trial results, and booked only ~4% profit. A bit disappointed: had I managed to get the previous day's price, I'd be booking higher profit instead; but such is the nature of mutual funds.

IPOs

I managed to subscribe to 2 IPOs in 2020: Ocean Vantage and Optimax. I did this by applying via Maybank2U platform.

For Ocean Vantage, I subscribed the IPO at RM0.26 per share, and sold all at RM0.48 per share for a nice 184% profit.

For Optimax, I subscribed at RM0.30 per share and sold all at RM0.71 per share. Net profit 234%. Not bad at all.

However the gains were reversed by two unsuccessful trades that I made below.

Unsuccessful Trade I

Later in the year, when the glove run was fizzling out, I bought some Comfort Gloves in anticipation of quarterly announcement by Top Glove. Investment thesis: great numbers from Top Glove (I predicted it'd be crazy figures) will propel the market to push up glove stock prices again.

Yet, despite Top Glove announcing >RM1bil net profit, the price of all glove counters didn't move: instead all of them turned downwards. I held on to the losing position and booked a hefty +10% loss.

I should've cut loss earlier.

Unsuccessful Trade II

Glove vs Vaccine: an opposing trend pair.

I anticipated the FDA approval announcement in early December to affect the price of the glove stocks. Investment thesis: if the approval come through, glove stocks will skyrocket again. If the approval succeeded, vaccine counters will go up.

I bought Kossan for glove, while Kelington (as proxy for vaccine distribution that requires ultra-low temperature) for vaccine.

The FDA did approve Pfizer vaccine. Yet the price of Kossan and Kelington both went down. I sold and cut my loss.

I also bought Serba Dinamik at that time, thought I wanted to hold it for a longer term as I was excited with its future prospect.Yet, 2 days later they announced private placement that sent the stock plunging. I cut loss here as well...

Conclusions

In total, I made quite a nice $$$ through stocks in 2020. Yet, there are also many mistakes, and even more mistakes where I didn't cut loss early. This will serve as a reminder.

Also, making a lot of money won't serve much purpose if your health or your sleep is affected.

While I kind of regret not going pushing deeper into my thesis, especially with gloves where I had really high conviction, I'm also thankful that by not doing that, my quality of life is not as much affected had I gone even deeper into those.

Finally, even with those nice $$$, if your quality of life is affected, it doesn't matter so much anymore. I prefer a good night sleep than having a lot of $$$ in the bank.

How much money you can make depends on how much stress you can take, either from the market, work, or else. If you want to make more $$$ (and keep them), better make sure you're up to it.