Samudera Shipping

[Squirrel]

At the risk of looking arrogant, in my humble opinion, this has been the most obvious bear market in the making throughout my history of investing. This is a critical juncture for my personal portfolio at its current sizing. Handling the crisis appropriately would go a long way.

On hindsight, everything looks obvious. In your view, if this had been the most obvious bear market in the making, why did you hold 40% cash in the first place? I mean you should sell out everything and hold 100% cash.

Having a long term perspective is important in investing. You cannot depend on one crisis alone to make or break your portfolio. Obviously, I also went through many crisis as well, be it dot com crash, GFC, 911, SARS, Covid, trade war etc. In every crisis, I remain almost fully invested at all times. I don't know what makes you choose to navigate the market differently this time round, but we should not change our investment process just because, you know, "This Time its Different".

There is no different. Every crisis will come and go. But our investment process should not differ from crisis to crisis.

As I have said, I am not good at timing markets and I am used to riding out the bear cycles by “time in the market”. By going 40% cash was a big deal to me. I still stand by my words that this time was obvious. People could see that inflation was coming and fed would have no choice but to raise rates. If you insist that was hindsight, then I have nothing to say. I don’t insist my approach is right, and I don’t insist your approach is wrong. However you seem very keen to insist my approach is wrong. I am not sure what your motivation is for the tirade against me. And I have never said “This time is different”. I said my approach is different because of my personal situation. My portfolio is at a critical sizing juncture that getting one bear market right would go a long way.

So what’s your motivation? Is it to extract a “you are right, I am wrong” from me?

Every crisis is different and I choose to handle it differently. You choose to do the same with every crisis that’s up to you. I have my personal goals to meet and my own opinions to follow. Mutual respect is important. There are a multitude of examples of people who treats every bear market differently but I shall not go into them, since my market timing is definitely not as good as theirs. I hope you have done well going through every crisis fully invested. I know for the time being I am better off having timed the market. Who knows what is in store in the future.