The Shoeshine Boy

It's been a long time since I posted. 
Just felt like it cos... well it's a worthy time to post something.

A lot of seasoned investors know of the story of the shoeshine boy...
​Legend has it that...

The story took place in 1929 : Joseph Patrick "Joe" Kennedy, Sr. JFK's father, claimed that he knew it was time to get out of the stock market when he got investment tips from a shoeshine boy. On that moment Joe Kennedy had the intuition that we were at the end of the bull market and subsequently he decided to short the market and became .. multi-millionaire !
​Ever since, the shoeshine boy has been the metaphor for "time to get out"; for the end of the mania phase in which everyone, even the shoeshine boy, wants in.

https://www.4investors.eu/post/the-shoeshine-boy-indicator

And so... I saw this maybe 6-12 months back...
People who shouldn't be talking about markets, crypto, NFT, etc... 
Well... people who shouldn't be doing these stuff, were starting to get their hands into these stuff. 
Aunties, here and there, the teens on the MRT, the ah beng neighbour, etc... 
And I was like... ok it's about time. 

I didn't sell down. In fact I'm still fully invested. 
As a long term investor, I need to be able to sit through most of these ups and downs. 
I did however switch out some of my iffy stocks for stocks which I felt would weather the downturn and recover well. 
So I'm pretty comfortable with my current portfolio. 
It's down by around 15% from the high watermark or "all time high". 
I'm still up around 15% from what I've put in. 
Of course not shiok to see the numbers down from ATH, but life goes on. 
We don't live in a world where stocks always go up. 

The thing I've learnt or seen these few months or years...
A lot of people love Warren Buffet, a lot of people talk about long term, or "value" investing. 
Everyone feels they are a value investor. Else why would they buy anything, cos well, they feel there's value in what they bought. 
The thing is... in the view of WB, gold, has little value. It doesn't do anything except sit around. It doesn't provide utility in a sense...
Similarly, crypto, at this point, isn't there yet. Blockchain tech will probably be used some time in the future. But it's not there yet. 
That's not to say people didn't make money from crypto. There's been folks who made a lot, there's been folks who lost a lot. 
But let's not get this wrong. There's no "value" investing going on in the world of crypto, yet.
You can tell yourself what you want. It is what it is. 
I did get a toe wet in crypto, despite not being a fan. That "portfolio" is down 75%. 

Other updates on my own life
I got myself back into the food rescue community. So food is once again free for me since I got back from overseas. 
My wife takes Grab or other private hires a lot to and from work and when we visit our parents. 
It was a deal between us, my wife wanted to get a car, I didn't want it. So the compromise was for us to use private hire as a casual form of travel. We do take public transport if the location is convenient and not too far away. Average spend is close to $600 on private hire transport per month.
We're trying to make it a point to increase our spending on consumer discretionary. The idea to "live it up a little". We thought it would be a good idea to "splurge" a bit every month. 
This has proven a little challenging as we hardly have stuff which we tend to splurge on.
Our main interest is eating, but we eat at home a lot as food is free, and on weekends we visit our parents so we also hardly eat out on weekends. 
We recognize that we aren't young anymore and eating out too much isn't really good for our health and waistline. 
We hardly buy merchandize, or stuff, simply because we have no need for it.
​So it's been quite hard for us to push another $400-$500 in discretionary spending. Also some of the places we used to visit raised their prices and reduced their items, so we feel the "value" isn't there anymore. 

Essentially, life has pretty much been cruising along. There's some level of routine, going out with friends, going out with my wife, going to visit parents, some days are spent doing "nothing", research, reading. 



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