My first stock
This post was originally published on my old finance blog in January 2021. Transferred here as I am no longer maintaining that site.
Not counting the monthly DCA into Nikko AM STI ETF (G3B) via the DBS Regular Savings Plan, my first real stock market decision was opening a CDP account and DBS Vickers account in 2018 and buying Starhub (CC3.SI) at SGD 2.28.
Things went downhill from there. The stock never recovered to my entry price. I held it for nearly two years, watching it fall, telling myself it would turn around. I finally sold in early 2020 at SGD 1.40.
It was a loss. But it was also an education. Here is what I took from it.
Lesson 1 — A cent matters more than you think
I queued to buy at $2.28 because there were a lot of orders sitting at $2.27 and I thought: what is the difference of a cent? A meaningful difference, as it turns out — both in the psychology of the trade and in the actual numbers when you are holding a large quantity. Never dismiss the queue price as trivial.
Lesson 2 — Understand what you are buying before you buy it
I bought Starhub partly for the quarterly dividends without fully understanding what cum-dividend (CD) and ex-dividend (XD) meant. The stock price movements around dividend dates confused me completely. I was in the market before I had learned the market’s basic vocabulary. That is the wrong order.
Lesson 3 — Set a stop loss and honour it
I had multiple chances to exit above $2.00, and again around $1.80. I did not take them. The reason was emotional — this was my first stock, and I had told myself I would hold it forever until it went green again. That is not investing. That is attachment.
Stop losses exist for a reason. Two years is not a long time in the context of investing, but it is long enough to learn that emotions are the enemy of good decisions.
Starhub was the most expensive cheap lesson I have had in the market. Every subsequent trade has been shaped, in some way, by what went wrong here.
This is not financial advice. Just a record of one trade and what it taught me.
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