Don’t chase fast mon­ey. That was the warn­ing is­sued to bud­ding in­vestors dur­ing a we­bi­nar host­ed by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Stock Ex­change last week en­ti­tled “Nav­i­gat­ing the Lo­cal Stock Mar­ket: A Be­gin­ner’s Guide to In­vest­ing with the TTSE & JMMB.”

“Now we live in the in­ter­net age, and we go on these on­line plat­forms all the time and we see a lot of a lot of web­sites or peo­ple promis­ing ex­or­bi­tant re­turns. Easy mon­ey, they call it. That is not in­vest­ing. What I will tell you is if it seems too good to be true, then it prob­a­bly is not true,” said David Paul, se­nior in­vestor an­a­lyst and port­fo­lio man­ag­er of JMMB In­vest­ments dur­ing his pre­sen­ta­tion in the we­bi­nar.

“Be wary of that. There isn’t any mag­ic bul­let if the way to cre­at­ing wealth is through con­sis­ten­cy and dis­ci­pline.”

Paul al­so sought to de­bunk the­o­ries that in­vest­ing in the stock mar­ket was on­ly for the very wealthy or could on­ly be fa­cil­i­tat­ed through a stock bro­ker­age com­pa­ny.

“The first op­tion as a new in­vestor is you could get pro­fes­sion­al help. You could get pro­fes­sion­al ad­vice to do the in­vest­ing for you. Now, you could do this in two ways. You can ei­ther have your ad­vi­sor, put to­geth­er a per­son­alised port­fo­lio for your­self or you could just in­vest in a mu­tu­al fund. This op­tion comes with fees, just a heads up, var­i­ous man­age­ment fees,” he said.

“The sec­ond op­tion that you have, which is what we are re­al­ly here to speak to you about to­day, is that you can do it your­self. With this op­tion, though, you would have to put aside the time and the ef­fort to do your home­work and find out the stocks that you prob­a­bly should in­vest in, and which stocks you should hold for the long term. Are there any short-term trad­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties?”

It was re­vealed dur­ing the we­bi­nar that in fact, most of the in­vestors on the T&T Stock Ex­change (TTSE) were in­deed, in­di­vid­ual in­vestors.

“New sta­tis­tics show that con­trary to pop­u­lar opin­ion most ac­tiv­i­ty on the Ex­change is done by in­di­vid­u­als like you and me. As of April 2023, in­di­vid­ual ac­counts make up 95 per cent of the to­tal TTSE ac­counts. And fur­ther to that we not­ed that year to date TTSE record­ed over 16,000 trades and 79 per cent of those trades were ex­e­cut­ed by in­di­vid­ual ac­counts,” said Kiy­oh­mi Joseph, mar­ket­ing op­er­a­tions of­fi­cer of the TTSE dur­ing the we­bi­nar.

Paul al­so said while there is some hes­i­tan­cy due to the per­cep­tion that the mar­kets are volatile, he not­ed that the lo­cal mar­ket was large­ly sta­ble and that most could make man­aged in­vest­ments in com­pa­nies that they reg­u­lar­ly pa­tro­n­ise.

He how­ev­er said bud­get­ing and main­tain­ing in­vest­ments were cru­cial to se­cur­ing re­turns in the long term.

“Mar­kets don’t move in a straight line. They go through booms and busts, ups and downs. Once you in­vest in sol­id com­pa­nies that can with­stand down cy­cles, what his­to­ry has taught us is that the mar­ket will re­ward pa­tience be­cause over the long term, most mar­kets trend up­wards, right al­though we have booms and busts in be­tween,” said Paul.

He how­ev­er ad­vised po­ten­tial in­vestors to en­sure they had an emer­gency fund so that they would not liq­ui­date their in­vest­ments be­fore they ma­ture.