Successful Free Value Investing (Sg, Us, Uk)

[JonRobin]

Hi,

I am a beginner.

Is it possible for me to succeed in the long run, in value investing, without paying anything like paid screener systems, paid alert or reports, etc., other than the broker per-trade commission?

If yes, how do I proceed on doing it? E.g. reading graham's book, using free screeners/filters (which ones), free alerts/group sharing if any? etc.

I will appreciate it.

[shuoyanz]

Hi JonRobin

Of course it is possible. The paid systems are just for your convenience. You are trading money for time. If you do not want to pay for the services, then you have to spend time gathering data from annual reports.

So, IMHO the most important free resources are:
1) Annual Reports (real financial data)
2) Yahoo Finance / Morningstar (gives some financial ratios)
3) Analyst Reports (gives some insights that you may not have thought of)
4) The free stock screener that comes with your brokerage account (POEMS, Vickers, etc.)
5) The ValueBuddies forum (provides even more insight than the analysts )

Welcome to the forum!

[JonRobin]

Indeed, you already proved #5. Thanks.

I want to do paper trading first. It makes sense to open e.g. an iOCBC account, even if I wont trade real money yet (OCBC said there is no penalty if I dont trade for a long time) to take advantage of their free tools.

[shuoyanz]

Haha glad to be of help. I am a newbie too.

Good idea. When doing paper or real trading/investing, I find it very helpful to write down your thoughts at each decision you make. Then you can look back and know what you have done right or wrong.

No matter whether you earn money or lose money, you must have learnt something out of it.

[corydorus]

Investment is about Probability. To have an edge, Annual Report is a Must Step for me. Serve me well so far. Of course VB forum gives us different perspectives and education which are important.

[JonRobin]

Which (e.g. iocbc, poems, etc.) broker has 'good enough' free tools for real trading? And are they only for account holders or free for the public?

[shuoyanz]

You mean trading in the sense of speculation/statistical way of buying stocks,

or you actually mean investing in the sense of value investing?

I think most of the tools available are for account holders only.

[Harvest Time]

You still need to do your own home work.

ShareInvestor has a lot of tools, but you need to subscribe to it (Singapore and Malaysia markets).
Puntergallery forum is more for punting trading/punting. No tools available.
ValueBuddies has a lot of quality postings.
SGX is free source of information.

Paying a small fee for good tools is good as it save you time and alert you when opportunity come.

[Fish Head]

i would suggest that you start by reading annual report of those companies surrounding you. Like Vicom for your car inspection, Breadtalk if you buy food from them, CapitalMall if you go shopping. To gain an idea of business instead of share prices. Read the discussion on this forum is helpful also.

At one point when you are familiar with a few companies business, and financial figure, and price is not too high (measure by PE, PEG or dividend yield), start with smaller amount, increase the money when you are comfortable.

It may take months or years for the above process depend on people, but don't jump into it after doing it for only weeks. it will be painful to move too fast.

Paper trading for me is meaningless, key successful factor for value investing is mindset, without real money, you would not be able to test your mindset. You need to have the ability to overcome the situation that share price drop 50% for a great business, and newspaper, friends, TV and etc all tell you that tomorrow is the end of capitalism, but you still spend thousands of money to buy more. Then you are successful value investor.

[JonRobin]

For a beginner, I agree that it is much better to trade for real as compared to paper trading, during the 'learning process'.

We are still in the learning process, so we ideally will trade the smallest lots possible only, e.g. 1 smallest unit possible that can be bought.

1. You will get to use the actual tools that you will use when you decide to increase the volume of your purchases.
2. You can increment the volume of your purchases as your confidence grow.
3. You can use more than 1 broker to observe and choose which broker/s fits your personal trading preferences.
4. You will not get the real 'sweat' as compared to when you are trading big volumes, but you will have a feeling of being 'in' the market as the prices change, as compared to paper trading.

What we wont learn during this small-lot trading activity are:

1. Actual 'sweat' that we will have when we are in the market, with a big volume of stock units, as the price moves significantly against you, and the 'overwhelming excitement' as the price goes in your favor.

2. The actual broker technical turnaround when you are trading big lots. For example, requests actually getting filled, and how fast.