Do you feel anxious about your investments all day long? You panic when prices fall, and you panic when they rise. Why? Most likely because you do not really know what you bought and what you are holding. You need to settle one question at a fundamental level: what is real investing? In Duan Yongping’s words, buying a stock is buying a company, and buying a company is buying the present value of its future cash flows. ...
Do you think price is the most important thing when you buy a stock? In practice, most people who fixate on the share price lose money. I used to be one of them: I looked at the price first and barely asked what the company actually did. It cost me years of detours and a lot of tuition. Then I read Duan Yongping’s investing Q&A, and it clicked. What matters most is the business model, then the corporate culture, and only then the price. ...
Why do investors either lose money consistently, or make money and then give it all back? The answer is simple: if the method is wrong, how could the result be right? So stop, and ask yourself honestly: from the first day you started investing until today, are you up or down? If you are up — can you sustain a return above 10% a year for five, ten, even twenty consecutive years? If you can, congratulations: you could write a book about investing, and you can stop reading here, because the rest will only waste your time. ...