9 years in the stock market isn't that long, so do take what I'm about to share with a grain of salt. What works for me don't necessarily mean it will work for you. I can only speak from my own experience, mistakes, and observation. But I do hope you learn a thing or two. And if not, at least see things from a different lens. 

My advice here is not for everyone but should apply for the majority: buy good companies. I don't have any secret to tell you. The secret lies in the simplicity or boringness of this strategy. Invest in good companies that can earn excess return for a long time. Find them, pay a good price, and do nothing.

80% of the people invest to time the market (closer to 99% on i3). There's nothing wrong with market timing. Some have done it well, for a few years. But it is a game of trying to outsmart everyone else. Because being the 1st to sell versus the 1,000th to sell make a huge difference when the trend reverse. And you won't get rich by doing it once, you have to do it consistently over a long time. Imagine playing a game where you have to consistently outsmarting everyone else, when everyone else trying to do the same thing. It is a game I failed and I think majority shouldn't be playing it either. A punt here, a punt there, soon won't have a nickle for his grandma. So before you want to punt because you think you can catch the bottom or sell at the top, think really hard. 

Serba Dinamik is a case in point. Because of what happened recently, everyone gets excited. It looks oversold, I think I can catch the bottom or punt a bit to make some easy money when it bounce back. Or perhaps there's no issue with their balance sheet, omg I'll make at least 300-400% if it goes back to the original price. And everyone get excited analysing its balance sheet. There's nothing wrong buying Serba. And the question is not whether is Serba Dinamik is a good buy at this price or not, the question is why tf do you need to care about Serba when there's so many stocks out there to look at? 

And again this goes back to a key point that you don't have to buy obscure stocks, problematic stocks, or turnaround stocks just to make good return. Buy good companies with a good track record. No digging required. 

JAKS is another example. People have been digging around JAKS for so long. Sharing photos of its Hai Duong power plant commission progress, PE calculation, PBT etc, maangement, I think every imaginable analysis, probably just shy of analysing Vietname's birth rate or GDP growth rate, has already been done on JAKS, a herculean tasks of research that is worthy of a praise. But the thing is, has all these research prove fruitful? Now people can still prove me wrong if JAKS shoot up to $10 next week. Whether these research and analysis are accurate are not that important because you're still be losing money on JAKS if you bought it 5 years ago. Compare that to the boring well run company like Public Bank, you would have achieve 16% outperformance by simply owning PBB. However, if you travel back to 2016 and do a survey, everyone will tell you JAKS will at least outperform PBB over the subsequent 5 years. 

This is not a JAKS bashing post but to illustrate the point that analysis is good but you better be sure that the payoff is worth the effort. And the question is always do you really need to buy something that require such an in depth analysis and assume you're right about your analysis in order to do well in the stock market?

I did an analysis on OKA (https://klse.i3investor.com/blogs/JTYeo/2016-03-07-story92646-An_Analysis_on_Oka_Corp.jsp) back in 2016. Going into the details from ISO certification, weight/diameter of concrete, soil acidity, to Porter 5 forces. No doubt I've learn something about the business and industry. So what? I won't have made a cent holding on to OKA.  

Another less talk about thing is opportunity cost. When you buy poor/mediocre stocks, low P/E stocks, turnaround stocks etc, time is your enemy. You're hoping for the price value gap to close. But the longer it takes, the worse it is for you. You're at the mercy of the market expectation. You don't have that issue with owning good companies. A good company can continue to grow its free cash flow, and even if the share price goes no where for years, you will be excited to keep buying more of it. 

A case in point is Insas. Not bashing Insas. Just naming stocks that is on top of my mind. It is probably true that Insas breakup value is worth more than its current market cap. You can do all kind of things that an activist does, but you have to be sure it is worth the effort. And the question again is not is Insas is a good buy or not, but do you really need to buy Insas, out of all the options in Bursa? That's more important. 

I bought Tropicana few years back. It had a market cap of $2 billion with a landbank GDV of $58 billion. I was thinking the business as a whole has to worth more than $2 bil easily. And I'm sure Tropicana still got more or less that amount of landbank today and perhaps still remain undervalued, but the opportunity cost would have cost me big time. Tropicana is trading at $1.3 billion market cap now. 

How about another mistake? APM. APM is a classic case of can't go wrong because APM was swimming in cash 3-4 years ago. Cash in balance sheet is like closer to 50% of its market cap. And that is still the case today. But anyone who owns it for the past 3-4 years will still be sitting at 30-40% loss. Having so much cash in its balance sheet does guarantee it is unlikely to go bust in some economic crisis, but it doesn't remove the fact that automotive is a tough industry. Even for the management pedigree like APM. What makes you think you'll come out alive betting on tough business run by management who don't give a damn about minority shareholders? 

Both Tropicana and APM is a good reminder and caution for people who invest in Insas and the like. Some stocks might really look cheap on paper but unless you're prepared to stomach it for 5-10 years, it will be far better to buy good companies. The stock won't magically go up or the market won't suddenly warm up to your assumption just because you bought it. 

So another advice is don't try to outsmart yourself. If there's one thing I learned over these 9 years is that instead of trying to be smart, try not to be dumb. Try not to be dumb means have a good sense of your own ability. And of course, sometimes the paradox here is you have to make mistakes and reflect on those mistakes before you know where your ability is or study from someone else's mistakes, which is the point of this writing. 

Another point is buying good companies is not enough. You still have to stop yourself from being too smart. Anyone who has own Hartalega over the past 5 to 10 years would have made around 200-1,000% return. But I think that only applies to a small % of retail investors. Why? Because most people are busy being too smart jumping in and out; buying at X, selling at X+20%, buying at X+50%, selling at X-30% etc. That's the same with trying to predict what Hartalega is going to earn next quarter etc. Hartalega probably has the best profitability over the past 1 year in their entire history, but that can't be said for those that bought its shares. Again a herculean amount of work, analysis, scuttlebutt and field research have went into forecasting glove ASP, margin, capacity expansion or even COVID case, but the market remind us that in the short term share price runs on market expectation, not on fundamental. Hartalega makes a billion a quarter and it won't matter. So that's another challenge added to market timing: not only you have to be right consistently, you also have to predict how others would react if your prediction turns out to be true. The advice here is if you're going time the market, don't worry about fundamental analysis; if you're going to do fundamental analysis, don't try to time the market. Combining both is recipe for disaster. And people always combine them because when a stock is going up, they're market timing; when it comes down, they become a long-term fundamental investor. That's how you buy high sell low. 

So here's a rule of thumb. If you're a long-term investor, anyone that talks about the fundamental of a business i.e production capacity, ASP while issuing target price for next 3, 6 months. You can ignore him. Anyone who make macro prediction, ignore him. 

So the beauty if you're not that good with investing, like me, you can still beat the market by buying good companies and do nothing. Instead of doing all these in depth analysis, in contrast, good companies are more straight forward and easy to understand. You would feel embarassed for making some outsized return i.e holding Hartalega despite not doing any research. That's far from saying you shouldn't do any research at all. That would be like whacking PE 10 to any 12 months trailing EPS and call that the fair value. You still need to be sure you pay a good price and understand how the company make excess return. But apart from that, you outsource it to the management and industry dynamic. What do I mean by that? Good companies that make excess return generally are where they are right now because they've done a lot of right decisions i.e capital allocation in the past. So instead of having to do all the analysis by yourself, you can simply let the management do the heavy lifting. You can't do that for a turnaround stock because no one is going to watch your back if you make a mistake. With good companies, you can afford to make a mistake while still come out alive.

Another good thing is even if it requires you to spend months of deep research to own a good company, which typically you can hold onto for 5-10 years, that's a very good return on effort. Compare that to poor/mediocre stocks where you spend months on research, made some good money, sell it, you have to do the same thing again to another stock. 

Another challenge with in depth analysis is sunk cost fallacy. When you spend too much time researching a stock, you have the tendency to commit to it in order not to let all of your effort go wasted. So here's an unconventional advice, if you find yourself having to list out 10 reasons or write 10 pages in order to convince yourself to buy a stock, that's a warning sign that you don't have a solid investment thesis. 

I believe most people would do well and not get into so much trouble if you just buy good companes. Or if you have access to index funds that cover MSCI World Index or big market ETFs like S&P500, just do that.