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Saturday 12 July 2014

Value Investing Mastery Course (VIMC) With BigFatPurse

I received an invitation email from Alvin late last month to attend this course. I was quite surprised that he emailed me as I do not even know him at all. I did visit his website before but I didn't post much comments on his website. I am honored to have received his invitation.

I attended this course today and was pretty surprised at the turnout. There were a total of 42 students who were keen to learn about what the course had to offer. Questions were asked during the course and the facilitators were keen to share with the class their knowledge and experience in the theories behind CNAV1, CNAV2 and POF.

VIMC's strategy is to buy stocks at a conservative margin of safety using the values obtained from its CNAV1, CNAV2 and POF analysis. Based on these numbers (which they will show you how to calculate them in the course), one can then make a calculated decision to buy / sell / ignore / monitor the current stock that you are looking at. The best part is that they have made it very simple for you to calculate those values. They even have a excel spreadsheet for you which just requires you to enter a few numbers from the financial reports and you can quickly know if this stock is worth looking at.

The best part about the course is actually the investment game played at the end of the course (yes there is a game! We learn best through games!). It helps you to understand the concepts better and to apply them in the investment game and the class participated very enthusiastically. (Probably because everyone contributed $10 to this game and the top 3 groups with the highest portfolio wins a portion of the pooled money!)

Overall, if you are a budding investor and are looking to find out more about share investing, this is a great course to attend to find out more. You must of course be willing to invest the time and effort as it is a whole day course.

For more information about this course, you can visit http://www.bigfatpurse.com/vimc/

Tuesday 1 July 2014

8 months without work!

Time flies. It has been a total of 8 months since I have had a job. I really miss those times when I have salary crediting to my account at the end of the month. However, I certainly do not miss the long working hours or the shift work that I have had to do last time.

With the current bull market, I am glad that my networth has somewhat kept constant even with the high taxes that I have to bear this year. I hope that this continues (not the high taxes part) and that my net worth will keep climbing when I start work in August (fingers crossed).

a) Coursera
During my free time, I have been taking coursera courses, but I have since stopped after the 3rd course. I have somewhat concluded that I am not really the studying type so I have put this on hold for now.

b) Insurance
I have recently bought term and am currently waiting for the approval. If it goes through, I would the proceed cancel my ILPs and to be more proactive in investing the rest.

c) Dividend investing
I have been trying to tweak my portfolio to get a good yield. I am currently at 6.9%. I am hoping to push it up to 8% by the end of the year. I am currently convincing myself that I would need to set aside more funds for this. I am holding on to more cash rather than buying income generating assets. This is probably because of the property leverage strategy that I am currently on.

d) Rental
My tenant has moved out and surprisingly, when I took over the place from him, its even better than when I rented it out. I am hoping to find a new tenant soon. Otherwise my plan on using leverage to grow my money would fail. I want to rent it out before I head out to Australia for my work. When I have a tenant in place, I think I would feel more comfortable putting more money into my dividend investing strategy.

e) Reading
I have been reading quite a lot lately. When I am in the orchard area, I will head down to Kinokuniya to catch up on magazines and books. After lunch/tea with friends, I would also go to the library or the book shops to see what books are available and to try to complete some chapters whilst waiting for my gf to finish work. There are just so many books to read and so little time. However, I can get quite tired of standing and reading at the same time as I am quite stingy to purchase books.