After three years of buying the fund, I am further away from financial freedom

The four fund investors have all paid tuition fees, have experience in avoiding pitfalls, and summarized their own investment ideas. More importantly, investment has brought positive changes to their lives: some people have changed from moonlight people to people with saving habits through regular fund investment, some people have invested to buy gifts for their loved ones after making money, which has become a sweet memory in the future, and some people have turned investment into a career and integrated investment into their lives

Text: Huang Huiling, intern, Shi Jiaxiang

Editor|Guo Nan

In 2023, "Reading Unique" invited four fund investors to talk about their "fund adventures". They have all paid tuition fees in the investment process, and they also have experience in avoiding pitfalls, and have summarized their own investment ideas.

More importantly, investment has brought positive changes to their lives: some have changed from moonlight people to people with saving habits through regular fund investment; some have bought gifts for their loved ones after making money from investment, which will become sweet memories in the future; and some people have turned investment into a career and integrated investment into their lives.

Our interviews revolve around several topics: how have you experienced investing in funds in the past three years? how to deal with the ups and downs of the market in the past few years?

Netizen @ Azure with light in his eyes has been investing regularly every month since 2018 as his "dream piggy bank". Investing not only brought her closer to her goals, but more importantly, tempered her character and values.

In August this year, she reduced her food and clothing and invested 20,000 yuan in equity funds. "The bottom is an area that you can buy if you undervalue, you don't have to wait until the bottom," she said. It's like adding clothes when it's cold, it doesn't matter if it's late autumn or early winter. ”

@晓磊的基金生活从2006年开始买基金, you earn more money from investing than you do from working. Contrarian investment allowed him to earn a good return in 2020, and he also continued to improve the investment framework in the follow-up callback, and continued to buy the bottom, at present, his bullet has been shot off 80%, with a floating loss of 1.5 million yuan. "After two years of active efforts, we are a little closer to the goal of financial freedom. I see it relatively openly, and now I am still increasing my position. ”

When he was young, he earned 100 yuan or lost 200 yuan, and his mood would be greatly affected @北洛 Shimen, who is now a mature investor. In his opinion, now is a good time to buy funds, because all indicators point to freezing. "I am now doing three main things: the first is to add the position at the bottom, the second is to reduce the current cost at some special time points through various means including timing, and the last is to work hard to ensure that there are no cash flow problems. ”

The daily life of @北drift migrant workers, who have avoided the fall, experienced market madness, and prefer balanced allocation, he believes that he still needs to slowly explore and improve. "If you don't take the initiative to learn and improve your awareness, it's hard to become a qualified investor. Referring to the importance of "feeling loss" for young people to learn to invest, he said, "In fact, investors do not want to be educated, only willing to be taught by the market. Participate more in the market and pay more tuition, and you will naturally learn. ”

@眼里有光的azure:

I saved money in the bathroom of a gas station in Xinjiang

This is my fifth year of investing in funds. Because of my insistence on regular investment, I have changed from a moonlight family with a monthly income of 3,000 moonshine and a monthly income of 30,000 moonshine to a person with long-term savings habits.

Since August 2018, the monthly fixed investment has been 8,000 to 10,000, and by the beginning of 2020, it has accumulated to 160,000, in 2022 it has 530,000, and recently this number has risen to 780,000. During this period, the account had a maximum profit of more than 100,000, and it has now withdrawn to more than 60,000.

When I first bought the fund, I was traveling in Xinjiang. The signal is not working, and there is only a net when you stop at a gas station. I just look at the market in between going to the toilet and buy a little bit when it falls. So now part of the profit in the account is saved in the bathroom of a gas station in Xinjiang.

The starting point for investing was when I read Bodo Schaefer's "Puppy Money Money" and "The Road to Financial Freedom: Earn Your First Million in 7 Years", understood the concept of "dream list" and "dream piggy bank", and decided to put it into action.

The book says, "At first people didn't know what they wanted. If you write to a mail-order company and say, 'Please send me something good,' you won't get anything. So, write down your dreams, any dreams that can be achieved with money, and then cut them down to the 3 most important dreams. Then, put a photo that represents your dream in a prominent place and imagine what it would be like to make your dream come true. Finally, prepare a piggy bank for every dream. ”

So I wrote down my three dreams: first, to meditate once a year, second, to travel with my mom once a year, and third, to be financially free.

Later, it was found that the first two dreams of needing money every year actually have nothing to do with high-risk investments, and belong to stable investments or living money. The last one is the target of high-risk investments. But in the beginning, it was really the power of clear dreams that gave me a very strong drive to figure out how not to moonshine and how to invest.

It was this force that drove me to read Peter Lynch's Recipe for Success, to study the Yale University Endowment, and to read many, many books. Although my main focus is on fund investing, it was Peter Lynch's stock picking approach that had a big influence on me.

The mainstream view is that novices should start with regular investment in index funds. But I insist that even if you don't plan to invest in stocks yourself, you should know first. After all, both index funds and active funds are a combination of stocks. If you really understand a few stocks, you will have a general outline of the stocks, and when you really understand the index fund, you will know with more confidence whether you are more optimistic about the SSE 50, CSI 300 or CSI 500.

There is not much meta-knowledge of investment, and reading a dozen books is almost a qualified starting point, and then it is to learn, practice, review, and repeat, so that the knowledge on these books and the knowledge of others become a part of yourself. I think the crux of the problem is that investors don't know what they are buying, when to buy, and when to sell, which is a problem with the investment system.

I really like a quote I read in "Warren Buffett and Soros's Investment Habits": an investment philosophy cannot be passed from one person to another, you can only use your own time and effort to get it.

The investment system was built little by little, and at the beginning my investment system was probably a simple hut made of mud. There are various loopholes that will leak rain.

I get very anxious when the market is constantly going up and my cash flow is limited. I also made a mistake in the process and overvalued Zhang Kun's E Fund Blue Chip, a fund that used to earn me extremely high returns, but the recent return was only -1.12%. It's like riding a bicycle, the concept is of course to look ahead, relax, and ride, but as soon as you ride it, the front of the bike will still be crooked.

When I choose a fund, I will have a few indicators, like a price comparison before consumption. First of all, I judge whether the fund is a good asset (invest in a company that creates value), whether the money is not used for a long time (more than 7 years), secondly, whether the fund is in my circle of competence, whether I understand the asset class, and finally allocate it according to the overall asset and the current market.

As an average investor, I have some principles that I have been sticking to. For example, insist on not doing zero-sum income varieties (derivatives represented by futures), never use leverage, and do not take a heavy position in a fund.

Take leverage as an example, if you taste the sweetness in a certain operation, you will take leverage as one of the eternal options in the depths of your mind. And at some difficult time in the future, it's hard not to stop the idea of fighting it. Eventually, leverage becomes a recurring option.

I divide the floating loss into the costs that cannot be avoided with the right investment and the loss caused by the wrong investment. The latter, of course, should be stopped in time. And if it is the former, even if nothing happens, the market may be inexplicably undervalued for a long time, bearing floating losses for up to a year or two or even longer. This fluctuation is like the growing pains of adolescence, the cost paid for growth.

In August this year, I reduced my food and clothing and invested 20,000 yuan in equity funds. The bottom is an area that can be bought if you underestimate it, so you don't have to wait until the bottom. It's like adding clothes when it's cold, it doesn't matter if it's late autumn or early winter. However, the market can be undervalued even if it is undervalued, and it is important to make sure that the money you invest is not used for at least 7-10 years.

My investment goal is financial freedom. I've divided it into three versions, which are the Real Life Edition, the Forest Monastery Meditation Edition, and the World Traveling Edition. The real-life version is a passive income that covers 100,000 yuan of living expenses every year, and at an annualized rate of return of 10%, I will be able to save 1 million by the end of 2024, and the cost of meditation is even lower. Even if the freedom to travel around the world is calculated based on the annual expenditure of 300,000 yuan, I can achieve it by the end of 2032.

For me, investing is more important than tempering my character and values. Before investing, I would suffer from both gains and losses, and I was afraid that I would be rejected by the people I cared about in my interpersonal interactions. But in the market, I found that I could also be confident, calm and decisive. I'm still trying to reconcile the secure and the insecure, but I know in my heart that "I'm clearly different" is a strength in itself. In addition, I also learned to measure the value of things in terms of twenty years and experience delayed gratification.

It is said that investment should constantly iterate the system, and for me personally, it is easier when it falls. When I feel uneasy, I should re-examine my investment system, starting with the most important investment goal and asset allocation, and dig deeper into what kind of life my money has, what kind of investment experience I prefer, and what kind of person I am. Further down to the trading strategy and methodology (including the pace of adding positions), how to find and correct mistakes, and so on.

Examine the investment system rationally, and emotionally cheer yourself up as a good friend.

@晓磊的基金生活:

Most people overestimate their ability to invest and underestimate their expenses

I started buying equity-biased funds in 2006 and I made more money from investing than from working. Investing became my hobby and my current job.

Raw motivation is important, and I think it's important for me to embark on this path: I have been getting positive feedback from the market from the very beginning.

When I entered the market in 2006, my thinking was the same as that of a leek, and the Shanghai Composite Index had reached a record high. It's just that it happened to be a super bull market for two consecutive years, and it was on the mountainside in retrospect.

After I started buying funds again in 2019, I made money with additional investment in 2020, which made me feel quite talented in doing this. It's like going to school to read, if I read this course well, I'm willing to read it.

If it is a small partner who came in at a high level at the beginning of 2021, it will be difficult to continue to walk with a floating loss of 20%-30% now.

The first equity-biased fund I bought was ChinaAMC Large Cap Select. At that time, I only had 10,000, and I put 5,000 into it. Later, the fund quadrupled, but it only made me 20,000 yuan. So, in fact, it is not a good thing to have a big bull market when we are young, because the gap between us and the rich people will get bigger and bigger.

At the end of 2009, I went to a brokerage. Just in time for the opening of stock index futures, I doubled the principal of 200,000 yuan a year. Stock index futures are so volatile that a few minutes of volatility is higher than a month's salary.

For my investment career, entering Huaan Fund in 2015 was a very important node, and my investment horizons were suddenly opened. In those years, I have come to understand more and more the truth that "an individual can't beat a team, and an amateur can't beat a professional".

When I was in charge of investor relations at a listed company, I often read articles on Xueqiu. It turned out that even with a reputation for professionalism as a snowball, the long article above only scratches the surface of our company's analysis. If professional industry researchers correspond to the graduate level, then retail investors are in the first grade of primary school, and most of the snowballs are at the level of the second and third grades.

I have done individual stock and industry research for so many years, and I am certainly not an amateur, but my personal strength is never enough to compete with professional fund managers. After discovering the gap, I gradually changed from a shareholder to a basic citizen.

However, at the beginning, I thought that maybe I was just a gap with them in terms of the depth of individual stock research, and the industry choice may not be weak. So I bought technology, medicine and consumption at the beginning, and I happened to step on the wind. However, I later realized that the industry theme was not something I could control, so I simply gave up and changed to build a portfolio with an active fund, and let the fund manager help me with the industry allocation.

2020 was a year of tremendous feedback on my practice of contrarian investing. When the market was undervalued, I threw 33,000 a day into it. Within two months of smashing, the market bottomed out, and it made 3 million that year. But this round of decline, I copied the bottom early. From the end of May 2021 to the present, 80% of the bullets have been fired, and now there is a floating loss of nearly 1.5 million. Luckily, I started buying after the peak fell by about 10%, but I didn't expect it to fall by 20% later.

Now that I reflect on it, I still don't think about it comprehensively enough. In 2021, when I guided the buying and selling rhythm according to the previous price-performance framework of stocks and bonds, I ignored the impact of the US economic cycle and US bond interest rates on A-shares. Later, I adjusted my price-performance framework, and I haven't been so aggressive lately.

I think industry-themed funds should be avoided, but in 2021, there are still some remnants of the idea of industry-themed funds, and 10-15% of the 80% of the bullets are Hang Seng Technology. This made me realize that on the one hand, I should invest contrarianly, and on the other hand, I should not be too confrontational with the market. I haven't got a good balance between the two.

After doing it for a long time, I feel more and more that investing is a process of overcoming human weaknesses. The most important thing in investing is to know yourself correctly, and then to respect the strong in all fields, and these two points alone can eliminate 90% of people. Those people on the Internet who say that "fund managers are not as good as me in stock trading" basically have no chance of becoming qualified investors.

You still have to admit that you have limitations. My current circle of competence and methodology are concentrated in A-shares, and I don't have enough knowledge of overseas markets. Funds are essentially investment tools, which can help you expand to different types of assets, and whether you can use them well depends on your cognitive ability of such tools, the higher your cognition, the better you can control.

I always believe that buying active funds is an investment and research resource for group buying fund companies. But now the most popular content on various platforms must be scolding fund companies. Especially under the recommendation of the algorithm, the more fierce the scolding, the greater the interaction. In this case, the really professional and rational information is buried, and the loud voices are saying that the fund group is harming retail investors, and some big Vs say that it is better to buy funds than to speculate in stocks by themselves. Under this kind of self-media ecology, most people are unable to access the correct investment philosophy. But I also think more clearly, requiring group rationality is naturally a false proposition, and most people cannot be saved.

Regarding the problem of star fund managers losing money that has been hotly discussed in recent years, in fact, I don't understand when many fund managers with a management scale of more than 30 billion yuan appear in 2020, I don't think any fund manager can manage so much money. However, some fund companies and distribution agencies have intentionally or unintentionally ignored this information in the process of creating explosive funds and fueling the flames. They assess the scale, and they are bound to show the best side to customers, which is easy for customers to form consumption impulses.

I prefer to choose a new fund manager. Small funds are naturally stronger than large funds, and the selection of cutting-edge fund managers has an advantage. In the process of selecting new fund managers, I pay more attention to the balance of industry allocation and the dispersion of individual stocks. Now there are many cutting-edge fund managers who are also very anxious, seeing so many track players quickly become popular, and they all want to bet on a track to succeed, I definitely don't choose this.

Among the fund companies, the strongest ability to dig up votes and the greatest contribution to excess returns are often those senior researchers, those who have already become the head of the research team, or those who have just come up to be fund managers for a year or two, and their motivation is the strongest.

There is another point, which may also be the consensus of FOF. People basically don't choose the fund manager to be the leader, because a lot of his work is delayed by administrative matters.

Regarding the underperformance of active funds in the past two years, I understand that a large part of the reason is that marginal incremental funds determine style and mean reversion.

2019 and 2020 happened to be the process of transferring residents' large-scale asset allocation to financial assets. The new regulations on asset management have broken the rigid payment, the golden age of real estate has ended, and the public fund has received a steady stream of new bullets, and the performance is very strong.

In this year's situation, the main styles of public funds and northbound funds are large-cap and mid-cap growth, which is almost the worst direction of this year, because they themselves are suffering from net redemptions. So I think it's understandable this year.

I don't think there's anything wrong with the long-term excess returns of active equity funds. For example, this year, the market has provided a lot of opportunities for funds to misprice and alpha.

On the question of whether you can achieve financial freedom through investment, I have always had a theory: financial freedom has nothing to do with how much you earn, but with how much you spend. At my age, if I don't have to buy a house, I don't have a big capital expenditure, and I can retire if I have enough cash assets to save more than 40 times my annual expenses. That is to say, if the annual expenditure is 100,000, then 4 million is enough for retirement.

In order to calculate when I will retire, I have an anti-human habit - bookkeeping. I've been keeping accounts for 17 years, and it has the advantage that most people underestimate their expenses, just as people overestimate their ability to invest. The biggest scam I've ever found out I've ever encountered is that "getting married saves money." In 2007, I spent about 1,200 to 1,500 yuan a month, and now I spend more than 50,000 yuan a month.

After understanding your own spending structure, you can actually optimize it. My bookkeeping software has a sound, and every time I write it down, my wife says her heart is shaking. In 2020, I felt closer to retirement. However, through these two years of active investment, the gap has become even wider.

The impact of investing on my life has been disruptive. If I had stayed at PwC after graduation, I would have been working for PwC, both in terms of the freedom of work and the accumulation of wealth, which would be far less than today. I am now a "one-to-eight", with four elderly people in my family, my wife is at home full-time, two children, and an aunt. If I were an ordinary worker, I would never be able to do it. Of course, the fund will lose money for another two years.

I am more open-minded, and I am still increasing my position, because my own wealth growth is basically dependent on this market, including my current work as a fund investment advisor, which is also brought to me by investment. For me, there are no odds for being bearish.

@北落的师门:

Looking forward to accumulating some more chips

I learned about the fund after I joined the fund company as an intern in 2010. Although I majored in finance before, I didn't learn much in school with the theory of the industry.

In the first few years, I decided what to buy by listening to the fund manager's roadshow. Whoever has a high level of speech and good performance will buy his fund. Later, after staying in the industry for a long time, and doing fund research work, I realized that it is not the same thing at all.

As soon as I started in the industry, I caught up with the market downturn. In 2012, I went to the sales department of a securities company to chat with the general manager, and an employee pushed the door in and said that he wanted to resign, and the general manager quickly signed it, and then asked him why he resigned. The employee replied that summer was approaching and that he wanted to set up a barbecue stand with his brother - at that time, doing a summer barbecue would make more money than a year at the company.

Hope always comes in the most desperate times. In 2013, the ChiNext index doubled, and the market rekindled enthusiasm.

It was also the first time I made money from the fund market, and the first Chanel bag I bought for my girlfriend (now my wife) was made from the fund. The first single-lens reflex camera used in school was also bought with three or four thousand yuan earned from stock trading, and it has been used for fifteen or sixteen years now.

I think that if you make money in the market, you have to take a profit to improve your life. The money earned from work may be reluctant, and the money earned from investment is like a strong wind. It's a sweet memory that reminds you of a bull market you've experienced.

I am a very disciplined person and will take profit and stop loss in time. Although I often lose money, there has never been a fund that has made me lose so much. Everyone else likes to sell what makes money and keep what loses. I like to sell what I lose money and keep what I make. Because I think the money can be redeemed when it is needed, as long as it is opened at a relatively low point every time, the cost is controllable, and it can be invested for a long time. However, if you buy at the hottest time in the market, it is basically impossible to return to your capital through long-term investment.

Like Munger said, buy great companies at a reasonable price. You have to do value investing before you can be long-term. If you are speculative, it is best to hurry up and stop out.

I've had little financial luck since I was a child, and the money I make is basically based on cognition. There are also people around me who have become rich by luck, but not the luck of the stock market, such as the sudden demolition of the house, and the original shares in the hands of the enterprise restructuring. In the stock market, I have hardly ever seen anyone who got rich by luck.

I believe that in order to become a qualified investor, in addition to basic knowledge, you also need sufficient psychological quality, and this needs to be constantly tortured by the market. Therefore, when you are young, you should buy more radical products, experience the market more, and feel the feeling of loss. It's more important to do your job well and get a higher salary and bonus. Compared to income, the loss is small money.

After working for ten or eight years, the amount of funds has reached a certain stage, and I have experienced various fluctuations in the market, and I am already an "old bird" in terms of mentality. In retrospect, when I was young, I would have a big impact on my mood when I made 100 yuan a day or lost 200 yuan, which is quite funny.

I think now is a good time to buy funds. Because all the indicators point to the freezing point, the timing of the recovery is not known. Maybe half a year, maybe a year, maybe two years even worse. I haven't made any money in the past three years. Fortunately, there were some profits in the first year, and even if the drawdown was in the two years, it was still under control.

Now I'm looking forward to accumulating some chips. If we can wait until the next bull market, we may be able to achieve financial freedom. Of course, you can't be in a hurry, boil slowly, wait slowly.

I'm doing three things right now: the first is to add to the bottom position, the second is to bring down the current cost at some special point in time through various means, including timing, and the last is to work hard to ensure that there are no cash flow problems.

@北漂民工的日常:

It is difficult to become an accredited investor without active learning

I entered the market in the summer of 2013, and the Shanghai Composite Index was only 2,000 points. At that time, my classmates were doing summer internships at bank branches, and I had to open 30 accounts before I could open an internship certificate, so I opened a stock account.

After graduating, I worked as a financial editor on a portal, and as soon as I started the industry, I encountered the abnormal volatility of the stock market in 2015. Fortunately, I just had a job at the time and had no money. I was a little hurt by this stock market crash, and I also realized that I was not capable enough to study stocks, so I turned my investment direction to funds, hoping to defeat magic with magic.

At the beginning, there was no rule to buy a fund, just to look at the platform recommendation. The first active equity fund to buy was Tianhong Yongding Value Growth managed by Xiao Zhigang, who is very active in Xueqiu and has a high historical return on the product.

At that time, I had never bought a bond fund, because the income could not be compared with P2P, which was very popular at the time. Later, I successfully avoided the P2P thunderstorm because I found two problems: first, more and more people on the platform began to sell their P2P shares, and even discounted, and second, the platform I invested in had a shareholder with a strong endorsement ability to withdraw.

In 2018, I started interviewing fund managers, and the interviewees were much more knowledgeable than me. I'll buy all the funds they manage, take them for a while, increase their positions if they have a good holding experience, and sell them if they don't work. In fact, this is essentially chasing the rise and killing the fall, but I also used this method to screen fund managers who fit me. My allocation is biased towards equilibrium between stocks and bonds, so I may not make much money in each bull market, but the bear market will not fall in full positions.

The biggest pitfall I have stepped on is that the investment is not diversified enough, and some targets are too concentrated. Putting more than 25% of your capital into a fund may make a lot of money when the wind is tailwinding, but the win rate will not be very high.

What impressed me the most was 2020, it was crazy. I followed the trend and bought a 300,000 Internet celebrity track fund, which earned 100,000 in a week. The following week, the money was lost again. The market is very crazy, and a lot of people's rationality has been washed away.

But then I dodged two drops. One was the Hong Kong stock Hang Seng Technology at the end of 2020, because I was sensitive to the Internet, and I doubted the sustainability of Hang Seng Technology at that time, and then the liquor fund in 2021, I saw that some funds began to restrict purchases, and most of the funds with heavy liquor positions were liquidated before the highest point.

The market in the past two years has indeed been very uncomfortable. At the end of 2020, I earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fund, and after two years of drawdown, the profit has disappeared by almost sixty or seventy percent.

My investment philosophy is that there is no way to achieve financial freedom through financial management. At the end of the day, I'm just an office worker and don't invest for a living. Investment funds are only a means of wealth preservation and appreciation, and the appreciation of personal assets requires the injection of long-term cash flow. If someone claims that they can get a return of how many times through how many years, they must want to cut your leeks.

In terms of work, I think I still have to enter a relatively beta industry. In a relatively large platform, you can get a relatively high income. The friends who work together are not because of the big difference in their abilities, but because of the difference in platforms, which ultimately led to different results. One of the things I like to say is that don't take the beta given by the times as your alpha. In recent years, everyone's work has become more and more unsatisfactory, which is a very anxious thing. Sometimes investing relieves your anxiety because it gives you the idea that you can make money with this thing. The scratch lottery has been very popular recently, and this is also the case.

I don't think I'm an accredited investor yet, so I can only slowly improve. In the process of buying a fund, there is a high probability that you will have to pay tuition. If you don't take the initiative to learn and improve your cognition, it is difficult to become a qualified investor, and you can't become a qualified investor after a long time.

There are many veteran investors in the A-share market who have been crawling for 20 years, and their investment thinking is still chasing the rise and killing the fall. Because people are path-dependent, not so many people have the mentality of active learning and active iteration. Many people refuse to learn, and after 20 years of stock speculation, they still use the same method as before.

For beginners, I have two suggestions: those who like to learn and toss should invest more in the early stage. We talk about investor education, but in fact, investors do not want to be educated, only willing to be taught by the market. Participate in the market, pay more tuition, and you will naturally learn.

If you don't have that much time and simply want to save trouble and make investments, you can seek the help of some professional fund investment consultants. The market changes really fast, and if you don't pay attention, you won't know that the fund manager you bought has left.