Speaking on the sidelines of digital brokerage Moomoo’s flagship event MooFest on July 15, Ho urges retail investors to verify the information they receive. “FOLO”, or the fear of losing out, creates a “different set of dynamics”, he adds. “If you only invest based on what you hear from your friends, unless your friends are creating the trade, you are in trouble. By the time information cascades down to [retail investors], the money has already been made upstream; you will be buying at a high price.”
Investing is not for the faint-hearted, but a good starting point for rookie investors is to combine common sense with hard work, says Prof Ho Yew Kee, cluster director of business, communication and design at the Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT). This will enable them to make sense of corporate and financial news from various sources.
“What makes us uniquely human is the ability to make good decisions in an environment with incomplete information. So, that means we triangulate; we pick up all the bits and pieces and put them together. That’s why investment is hard work. It takes effort, it takes time [and] it takes expertise,” says Ho, who was formerly the head of accountancy at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Business School.
