When you suddenly have lots of time on your hands, it feels freeing initially but after awhile you start to wonder if you should be more "productive" with your life. In an earlier post, I shared about how I left my first full-time job after being burnout and how I planned to travel overseas. Well, a tiny virus had other plans and I was soon forced to abandon my dreams of catching the cherry blossoms in Japan as the world plunged into chaos and confusion. Singapore raised its health alert to orange in the first week of February 2020 and we subsequently entered into a 2 month lockdown from April to June.
On a personal level, this series of events landed me in a very interesting situation. Earlier on in the year, when various recurring bills started to be due, I was forced to evaluate exactly how much I was paying every month, especially for my health insurance and savings plans. Getting into the details shocked me, as I was paying close to 4 digits every month for all my plans. Looking back now, I understood that part of the reason why I wasn't able to amass much savings over the years was due to me overpaying for insurance. That kickstarted my journey into personal finance, and I was determined to learn enough to be able to make informed decisions and streamline my expenses in this areas.
Coincidentally, I also reconnected with an ex-teacher friend during this period and she shared with me how she had just started on her investing journey. Prior to this conversation, my impression of people who invest was quite narrow-minded. I thought it was reserved for a select few, for either those who had lots of money or those who had deep specialised knowledge in the financial markets. However, that conversation piqued my interest and I wondered if I could venture into the world of investing and learn to grow wealth on my own terms.
As I continued to make sense of this new world that just opened up to me, I received a recommendation to take up an investing course. It was an Options course and the trainers seemed well-versed in their craft, sharing about how easy it was to make money in the stock market. As someone who was very new to this, I got excited and could hardly wait to try out the strategies that were taught, thinking and projecting how much I could make by the end of the year based on the high ROI month after month.
Unbeknownst to me, a bear market was brewing in the background. It soon became clear that covid was not going to pass us by in a matter of weeks, and the reach of the virus kept expanding to more and more countries. On 30 January 2020, just days after the Lunar New Year celebrations, the World Health Organisation declared a global health emergency. Over the next few days, countries started imposing air-travel restrictions.
By mid-February, the markets started to plunge. I had just finished the Options course and had a few positions open (mainly puts that I sold to collect "premium"), and my P/L statement quickly turned from bad to worse. I was told to prepare for stock assignment if the price dropped but no one told us how to respond when prices go into free fall. I began to panic and tried to reach out to course participants whom I kept in touch with after the course. No one knew how to react. Should I close the position at a loss or should I continue to wait it out? Both options seemed equally dire.
*If you read till this point, thank you for following my journey. In the next post, I will continue to share how I navigated the covid crash of 2020, as well as lessons learnt along the way.
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