(another blog post)

I now feel 3 hours a week spent on personal investment is not bearing fruit. The effort appeared to be helpful and educational. It’s addictive to look at your portfolio everyday, when the markets is on an overall upward trend, but the addiction is not healthy…. Am Not growing as an investor.

I still have no confidence/insight about Turkey, Russia, Philippines and other “promising” markets. I just feel they are likely to outperform other markets. No data to back up my gut feeling. I feel I don’t have the bandwidth to analyse the data. My gut feeling is quite unreliable.

Even the popular markets like US and China I don’t feel I understand anything at all. I only heard some news and some analysts’ comments. I try not to fall prey to the marketing propaganda and brainwash, but since this information permeates the media (I tune in to these channels selectively) I feel I’m influenced.

Honestly, I am probably one of the millions of uninformed, uneducated, un-sophsiticated investors following a herd-instinct. The big bankers and big analysts routinely use TV, newspaper and internet to manipulate public perception, to their advantage. One of these TV personalities once gave a short talk in my school and I kind of believe his revelation — these guys are smart, knowledgeable and have a lot of information so they select what data to share and what direction to lean towards. They always can find data to support their biased analyses.

I feel superior to my wife (and my dad and mom) who doesn’t know anything about investing. but actually I’m not smarter than the average investor. Not more experienced either, even though I have spent a few years investing. I don’t have a reliable “feel” about the market. My bets are mostly blind.

There are some historical trends I kind of believe
* most stock indices beat inflation over the long run (30Y?). US stock indices are even better.
* bonds are much less volatile and show a more consistent growth trend over the last 10 – 20 years.