Hi,
I got a great question from somebody this week and I thought it was worth sharing …
Question:
“Re share renting, what would have happened to buyers when they got in last year (especially Oct-Nov) before the crash, surely they would have lost a lot of money as a lot of blue chip companies haven’t recovered.”
Answer:
Thanks, that’s a really good question!
It is certainly true that if somebody bought, say, Commonwealth Bank shares that were trading at around the high $50s and low $60s in November and December and they simply held on to them, they would now have an investment that was only worth low to mid $40s - not a great investment!!!
This is not the sort of investing that we encourage people to do!
An investor’s prime responsibility is to preserve his/her capital. Therefore, we encourage people to go through a careful process before investing a cent. This process includes the following steps:
1) Risk management
This covers a few things but as far as your question is concerned, the key thing is to be absolutely clear on how much you are prepared to risk on any investment. So, let’s say that you were poised to invest in CBA when it was near the top of the market at $60. Your risk management process would have helped you to determine what price you would exit from that trade if it went against you. I do not know what the situation was back then but let’s say that you had worked it all through and your exit was at $58. You would then set it up so that you exited when the price dropped to that level. There are a few different ways of doing that. Either: just make a note of it and watch the price and then call your broker if the price hits $58 or set a stop loss or buy insurance at that level etc.
Now, of course, the premium you received for renting out the shares would offset your loss. I don’t know, but you might actually still have made a small profit in this example.
2) Share selection
Another key to success is determining the criteria for when you will enter a trade. In my opinion this is not as important as your criteria for when you will exit, but it is still important. So, you would have been looking for particular circumstances to occur to indicate to you that this was a good time to rent this particular share. There are many different criteria that people use. However, one of the goals of all of these is to attempt to minimise the number of times that you lose money. In other words, for share renting, you are looking for a trigger to suggest that the price might be going up. Or, at least, not going down. I do not know whether CBA would have triggered an entry at the peak or not as that depends on how you would choose to select the share. But hopefully, overall, the number of times that you would buy at the peak would be minimised. After all, as a private investor one of the huge advantages that you have over the funds managers etc is that you do not have to invest! You can wait to look for the right time to invest and leave your cash sitting in the bank while you wait for your criteria to be met.
3) Trading plans
In my opinion, the third key to success is to have a trading plan. What this means is that you have worked out in advance exactly how you will invest. That includes things such as how many trades to have open at any one time, how much to risk on any trade, your criteria for entering and exiting trades etc. Now, for this to be a proper trading plan, you should have tested it first. These days it is very easy to automate the testing so that you can thoroughly test your trading plan in all market conditions. The software that we recommend has 6 years of stock market data to test against. This means that you know how your trading results will look in any market. So, the recent bear market would have been one you would have tested for.
As a result of testing, some investors have a second trading system that they swing into operation when triggered by a shift in market sentiment. Others might choose to leave their money in the bank. Others will still look for the opportunities but will understand that there are likely to be less of them.
So, overall, yes, it would have been possible to lose money in the recent bear market. And, I know that some people have lost money. However, we encourage people to approach investing as a business. Businesses have income and expenses. One expense of an investing business is the trade that goes against you. And, like a good business manager, one of your tasks is to minimise your expenses through good management.
By the way, some of the most successful investors get it right less than half the time. More than half of their investments go “the wrong way” and they lose money. However, they have set themselves up so that the few that go the right way make heaps more than the ones that go the wrong way.
Anyway, this turned out to be a much longer answer than I thought I would be typing! I guess it really WAS a great question! I hope my answer makes some sort of sense. Let me know.
Ian
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