Saturday 14 December 2013

My biggest loss - Global Yellow Pages

Last month I told my buy and hold strategy that works with SGX.  As promised, now I will blog about another of my ex-stocks that buy and hold strategy failed miserably.

As you can see on the title of this post, that stock was Global Yellow Pages.  Although it was my biggest loss, some lessons are learnt.

While I have a lot of travels in my early days, I was in Singapore when Yellow Pages went IPO.  It was just "Yellow Pages" then, without the "Global".  Yellow Pages's IPO price was a lofty $1.66.  Unfortunately, I was a noob then and I listened to my friend that "Yellow Pages was good and have a lot of advertisements, etc, etc". 
Lesson 1: Do not listen to others.  Do your own research on your investment.

In the old days, during the annual renewal of new telephone books, my company dedicated one whole room to hold all the new telephone books, before distributing to every employee with a telephone extension.  Now, with internet and various search engines, nobody flips the "yellow pages" anymore.
Lesson 2: Beware of obsolete business model. 

Similar to SGX, I held Global Yellow Pages since its IPO days.  I was busy with work and practically kept it and forgot about it.
Lesson 3: Monitor your stock portfolio closely.

After the 2008 stock market crashed, people may think what goes down must come up.  Global Yellow Pages went into free-fall and because of its obsolete business, never recover.
Lesson 4: What goes down may not come up.

When I finally sold Global Yellow Pages, it was just 7.2% of my initial investment capital for GYP.  On hind sight, I should have monitored my stocks closely and exit much much earlier.  Luckily, GYP made up just about 2% of my total portfolio.
Lesson 5: Adopt stop-loss for capital preservation.

Beginning this year, I have no more traveling. I have more time to read and learn from books and from many investment bloggers.  At the same time, I am able to grow and nurture my stock portfolio.

5 comments:

  1. Invest in IPO is 50-50.

    Most of retail investors may have started from this IPO investing path.

    Me too when I got started.



    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ah!

    Same same.

    I guess most have to go through this process of learning from our winners and losers.

    Its easy to say buy and hold.

    But ask which stock to buy and hold to make money?

    Now less people can answer....

    LOL!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi,

      Another one is HPHT. I am betting that the port business can turn around.

      Farmer.

      Delete
  3. Interesting thing on IPO

    When it is hot, you get one lot.

    When it is sour, you get all your wishes.

    LOL!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yes, stop loss is applicable for all vestment, be it long , short or value. For trade, stop loss should be tight, but for value invest, it can be wider. It is stupid to ride the stock down and up and gain nothing. In a crisis, we should sell as fast as we can, and buy back later cheaper. We may not buy back at the bottom, but at least, we are buying at a huge discount for sure.

    ReplyDelete