Do you find investing difficult to master?
Don’t tell that to Laura Sloate.
Sloate is widely admired by her peers and clients where she managed over US$1 billion back in 1995.
It’s for good reason too.
Her returns for the seven years leading up to 1995 were 20% per year, comfortably outpacing the returns of the S&P 500 (INDEXSP: .INX).
If you are impressed, continue reading on.
But if you are still not sold on the idea, then consider this: Laura Sloate has been blind since the age of six.
She does not have the basic human gift of sight.
To organise her work, Sloate identifies different annual reports by feeling their covers.
Reading is another challenge.
For Singaporeans, it’s a basic skill.
But in the pre-internet days, Sloate had to pay a secretary US$140 per week to read to her while living on US$60 per week.
That’s how much she wanted to learn.
These days, life is a little easier. She would scan any written material into her computer and have it read back to her.
Of course, life being a little easier doesn’t mean it is easy at all.
There are a great many things we take for granted today which are a disadvantage for Sloata.
And yet, as we have shared from the start, these setbacks have not stopped her from investing and doing well at it too.
By sharing her story, we hope to inspire more to consider investing in stocks as a way to generate wealth.
Warren Buffett gets in touch with his feminine side
Warren Buffett invests like a girl, says author LouAnn Lofton.
In her book with the same title, Lofton outlines the advantages that females have over their counterparts.
For starters, men have a higher tendency to be overconfident.
That can prove to be costly when it comes to investing.
In my recent Business Times article, I said that many people think that investors fail because they are lacking in knowledge.
But from my experience, that’s simply not the case.
Instead, investors often make mistakes because they are too confident in their knowledge. And it gets worse when they find out that they were wrong.
Hence, it’s better to admit early on what you don’t know.
This is relevant for Singaporean women investors: a recent survey by Moomoo Financial Singapore showed that over 86% of Singapore women investors put aside between 10% and 30% of their monthly salaries to invest.
That’s a great start.
Interestingly, almost six out of every 10 women investors said they lacked the confidence in investing into vehicles such as exchange-traded funds (ETFs), REITs or other options outside their comfort zone.
While this statistic seems discouraging, I would argue that it is better to be aware of what you don’t know rather than jump into the stock market with two feet.
At the Smart Investor, we believe that everyone can invest, smartly.
We believe that the returns that the stock market provides are too good to pass on, and have been sharing free, easy-to-understand articles daily in a bid to help any investor out there to get started.
Get Smart: It’s not a competition
If you are from the male species (like me!), it’s not the time to be jealous.
Keeping our ego in check, whether you are male or female, is within reach of everyone.
Being consistent in your investing approach is not gender-related.
Again, it’s about knowing your tendencies and acting to prevent them from influencing your investment actions.
If you’re nervous, confused, or worried about buying your first stock, then our latest beginner’s guide to investing can help. It’s easy to read yet packed with valuable insights. Download it for free today, and buy your first stock in the next few hours. Click here to get started.
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Disclosure: Chin Hui Leong does not own any of the shares mentioned.
