My biggest mistake in not selling - Koon Yew Yin

Any big lesson for ikan bilis retail investors to learn from whale investor like Koon?


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Based on the above, the share price should go above the share placement price of Rm 1.40 when the 1,200 MW power plant is completed in 2020.

CW8888: Leverage is double edged sword. Bo Lampar retail like Uncle8888 won't touch leverage. He is very satisfied with his account size; no need to be bigger. Leverage may be seen as Greed in disguise. No?


My wife started to accumulate more shares and we finally bought a total of about 160 million shares with margin financing. We bought too many shares with margin finance. Our average price should be about Rm 1.20 per share.

If you look at the price chart, you can see the price went up to Rm 1.85 in Feb 2018 and when I saw it started to drop, we started selling. I should have sold more to avoid force selling. It was my greed that I did not sell more shares.  

In fact, forced selling was a blessing in disguise for us.

We had to sell to meet margin calls. The more we sold the more the price would drop. Forced selling is a vicious cycle. (CW8888: Ownself kills ownself during forced selling)

We were fortunate introspectively to have sold a huge amount of our holdings at higher prices in comparation with the current price of 50 sen per share. We have completely sold all our holdings.

Based on our average selling price of 80 sen, our average purchase price of Rm 1.20 per share and our total holdings of 160 million shares, we have lost Rm 64 million. Coincidently this is the 64 million $ question many people have asked me.

This is my most expensive lesson in my life.


Read? My biggest mistake in not selling - Koon Yew Yin


As I said before, no share can go up or go down indefinitely for whatever reason. When it is up, you must sell some so that you have money to buy when it is down. My biggest mistake is that I fell in love with my shares so much that I did not sell when they were at their peak.

EGO: Ego is the root of my problem. I am so proud to have found shares that went up a few hundred per cent within a couple of years and if I sold them, I have less shares to boast.

GREED: Another problem I have is greed, which is one of the deadly sins. It can be a virtue or a vice. In the stock market, it encourages investors to work harder to find good stocks to buy and continue to buy but then we forget about selling. That is often one of my biggest mistakes.

From the several articles I have written and published, you would know that I have discovered Latitude, VS, Lii Hen and a few other stocks which have gone up a few hundred per cent in the last couple of years. But my big mistake is that I always find difficulty in selling. I fall in love with my discoveries and I did not sell more when their prices were peaking