Julia's coding blog - Practice makes perfect

From January 2015, she started to practice leetcode questions; she trains herself to stay focus, develops "muscle" memory when she practices those questions one by one. 2015年初, Julia开始参与做Leetcode, 开通自己第一个博客. 刷Leet code的题目, 她看了很多的代码, 每个人那学一点, 也开通Github, 发表自己的代码, 尝试写自己的一些体会. She learns from her favorite sports – tennis, 10,000 serves practice builds up good memory for a great serve. Just keep going. Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

Case study: Victoria portfolio performance review

Feb. 12, 2020

Introduction

It is a good idea for me to review my Victoria performance. Now it is easy for me to put those transaction into Excel sheet and then generate dividend, positions and commissions quickly.

Case study

I like to push myself to learn how to invest S & P 500 index fund; one thing I learned to do is to push myself to work on something simple and easy first. So later I can come out some creative idea to work on improvement.

Those are my 10 years saving from 2010 to 2020. I was naive and I did not learn to invest on the stock market from 2010. If I have invested $10,000 dollars on VGT ETF from 2010 to 2020, then the growth of fund will be around $50,000 dollars. Knowledge is power, I did not push myself to learn, so I live so frugal to save all those $50,000 dollars in Canada over 10 years, which is all I can save in Canada.

I just use this as a small example to illustrate how important it is to learn to work on research, stay confident to learn, and also examine all possible leaks in my personal finance. It took me six months research from Nov. 2018 to May 2019, I found out my biggest finance mistake.

I have to say that I am lucky to be healthy, smart to find out my own weakness.

Actionable Items

Knowledge is power. Hard work beats talent, but I have to learn again in my 50s the importance to take risk, grow with USA and world economy by investing S & P 500 Index, and FTSE.

I had over $25,000 US dollars in my 401 K and IRA in 2010 for me to invest. If I have above average knowledge how to invest, and I put those fund into VGT etf. During 10 years period, I was busy with Willingdon church small group activities, I never even opened my book to look into what I should work on, at least 5 hours a year. I just could not believe that I was so biased and could not move away from daily busy activities, focus on basics of personal finance.

If I learn to be frugal, put all my savings from full time job in a manufacture company in the city of Vancouver, no matter how small the wage it is, I will save $5,000 dollars each year to put in VGT using dollar cost average. From 2010 to 2019, I was busy with so many things but I never spent over one hour to study what is S & P 500 index. I am not a learner at all.