Picture this.
You walk into Uniqlo and buy a T-shirt for S$14.90.
The next day, you pass the same store.
You see the same shirt with the same colour on the same rack.
But it’s selling for a discount at S$7.90.
You know that sinking feeling.
You were just one day away from keeping around half your money.
Here’s the thing: that feeling is perfectly rational when it comes to T-shirts.
And almost entirely useless when it comes to stocks.
But you still feel the knot in your stomach anyway.
It’s also why investors freeze when the Straits Times Index (SGX: ^STI) is setting new highs almost weekly.
The same three words keep landing in my inbox.
Should you buy, sell, or hold today?
It’s a fair question, I’ll grant you that.
But I also think this question is doing you more harm than good.
A T-shirt is finished. A business is not
A T-shirt is a finished product.
The day it leaves the shop, it is as valuable as it will ever be.
From there, the value can only fall.
So, yes — for a T-shirt, the moment of purchase is everything.
Shares are different.
When you buy a stock, you own a slice of a business that opens its doors again tomorrow morning.
The business continues to serve customers, generate revenue, keep costs in check, and if it’s any good, hand you a growing dividend along the way.
A T-shirt cannot improve itself.
But a business can.
And yet we shop for shares the way we shop for shirts — fixated on the sticker, terrified of the markdown.
The limits of “buy, sell, or hold”
Here’s where it gets worse.
When you narrow investing down to a decision you must make today, you have implicitly agreed to be judged on a single point in time.
Your success or failure rests on one entry price at one moment.
When you set it up that way, there can only be two likely outcomes.
Either the stock goes up from where you bought, or it falls after you bought.
That’s because the stock price is always there, always updating, always ready to tell you whether you were clever or foolish.
But look at what you have set up for yourself.
Of course, the stock will disappoint you if you judge your performance from one buy at one single point of time.
No one can predict what the market will do in the short run.
Going for broke
Two weeks ago, on 22 July, I sent out a Get Smart about the dangers of using leverage.
I did not expect to be proven right quite so quickly.
Last week, South Korea’s Kospi came apart.
At one point, the index was down as much as 40% from its June peak.
By the end of July, the index was down nearly 30% from its 52-week high.
At the centre of it were single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds, launched in May 2026 to give retail traders amplified exposure to major Korean firms such as Samsung Electronics (KRX: 005930) and SK Hynix (KRX: 000660).
Now, pause and ask yourself why anyone reaches for a leveraged product in the first place.
For me, there can only be one reason: they want the payoff now.
Leverage is what you use when the ordinary pace of compounding feels too slow — when you are asking the market to deliver the returns immediately, and not several years down the road.
That’s the same human instinct as buying the Uniqlo shirt, wearing a different outfit.
And it comes with the same expectation attached: give me my gains today.
The problem is, the market does not follow anyone’s schedule.
The outcome, in this case, wasn’t what investors were expecting.
Get Smart: Plan beyond today
Here’s what I want you to take away.
If your success or failure depends on the stock market paying you back right away, you have already lost.
Not because you picked badly, but because you’ve agreed to terms the market has never once honoured anybody.
Share prices fluctuate.
That is not a flaw in the system — it’s a feature.
So plan beyond what you’re going to do today.
Know what you actually want — retirement income, a home deposit in ten years, a second stream of cash while you’re still working.
The goal sets the timeframe, and the timeframe sets everything else.
Set expectations that match it.
Good businesses compound over years, not weeks.
If you need the money inside five years, stocks are not the right vehicle, and no amount of leverage will change that.
Then invest regularly.
Not once, not perfectly, not at the bottom. Regularly.
Because when you’re buying every month for the next decade, a lower price isn’t a wound.
It’s a second helping at a better price.
The investors who do well are rarely the ones who got a single moment right.
They’re the ones who gave themselves enough moments that no single one of them mattered.
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Disclosure: Chin Hui Leong does not own any of the shares mentioned.
