Part 1  http://klse.i3investor.com/blogs/myportfolio/116909.jsp

To recap, My ROI for my portfolio was standing around -30% at that time, it was mid-2015

Let me backtrack bit to provide a little summary on how I used to select stocks when I first started in late 2014, I screened them using the in-house screener provided by my online broker, I think they are using ExcelForce's software like many others. What I will usually input will be PE<12, ROIC>12, DY,>3, which will usually give me a list of of 25-40 stocks. Going into each of them individually to seek out any abnormalities like extremely negative cash flows, one-off items will usually result in a shortlist of 16-20 stocks which I will then pick a few to buy after going throught their Annual reports,  newsflows, articles etc to gauge their business conditions. That was how I first selected my first few stocks, Favco, padini, matrix etc.

Now here is the dilemma, a few stocks that had good run-ups in 2016 appeared in my initial list. However, I did not buy them for whatever illogical reason I had at that time. The notable ones were magni, homeriz, ccmdbio, scientex. I remember thinking magni sounded really boring and unattractive while and scientex looked expensive price wise, trading around 6+. I also thought homeriz looked too small. As you can probably infer by now, my style is pure FA, yet I was constantly lured by these sort of silly opinions. it's hard to resist thinking about them as it is human nature. Even till now, I am sometimes affected by new highs, lows, nice price numbers like Rm1,2 while I sometimes have the habit of watching stock prices for an hour or 2.

On the other hand, there were a few stocks that fell in 2016 that appeared in my initial list like teoseng, fiamm, eita, ecs etc. I remember almost buying teoseng but a sudden last minute thought I had about the price of egges being controlled coupled with expansion across the industry held me back.

Hence, I consider myself quite lucky even though I did not manage to pick up the above multi baggers. I believe the element of luck will continue to influence my return.

I will write more about how I select stocks in the future, but let's go back to my journey in mid-2015.

I decided to hold on to my losses and had some new capital which I then injected into Favco and Elsoft. Both were great a few weeks after that, rising about 15% each. I then decided to dispose of half of Elsoft. Unfortunately, elsoft soon plunged later and the rest of the elsoft shares I was holding recorded a -20% lost. Favco also retreated as its financial performance plunged due to its decrease in orderbook. At the same time, Padini retreated to a new 3 year low at 1.4. However, that price offered a dividend yield of more than 7%, and I thought to myself, maybe I should average it down, which I did with the proceeds from half of the elsoft shares which I had disposed. It was not an easy decision, my capital was running dry.

Just a note, Elsoft did not show up in my selection list, I was influnced by KC's writeup on it, yes I have a few stocks which were influenced by articles here, however, I am sensible enough to know that my buy and sell actions are my sole responsibility, and I do check the companies out myself. So even when suffering a -20% drop in elsoft's share price, that was my own decision. After going thorugh KC's article, I found that there was a large demand for LEDs, coupled with Elsoft's excellent financial performance, not loss making even during the financial crisis, and the strenghthening USD made it attractive for me.

TBC