It baffles me. The US unemployment rate hits 10.2%, worse than the expected 9.9%. And guess what? The stock markets around the world rally for the second day in a row. What is going on? Has the investor gone mad?

The people have to realize that, more and more consumers are becoming jobless. Consumer spending will reduce. Corporate revenue will reduce. And so will earnings, unless these corporates initiate another round of layoff to save on administration expenses.

Can someone enlighten me as to why the stock markets are rallying in the face of this worse than expected unemployment news?

Today I attended my very first AGM. I got to experience first hand how it feels like being a shareholder. It’s a very good exposure for me. I was given some door gifts. We were served light refreshments before and after the AGM.

By my count, there were no more than 30 shareholders plus proxies who attended the AGM. Not many questions were asked during the AGM. And the resolutions were passed fairly quickly. The management did give some good answers to the questions asked. But overall, the quality of the questions asked were somewhat poor. I wish next year there will be a shareholder activist in the AGM.

After the AGM, I had the chance to talked to a few other shareholders and the Directors. The time spent talking with the Directors were great. I was able to learn more about the company in less than one hour than I had in the last few weeks searching for information about the company.

The KLCI shed 1.6% today. Haven’t seen such a huge drop for a while. Shanghai shed almost 6%. Has fear and panic crept back into the market? Reminds me of “the cycle of market emotions” I’ve read about in the July 2009 newsletter by HSBC.

What goes up, must come down. What goes down, must come up.

Be like Warren Buffett. Be greedy when people become fearful. And sell when people become greedy. This is the smart way to invest. Making buy sell decisions based on logic.

But instead of this common sense way, people usually get caught up in the market emotions. When everybody is greedy, they become greedy as welland usually end up buying overpriced assets. When everybody panic and sell, they become panicky too and sell at a distressed price, usually undervalued.

In summary, we have to look at the market and see what everybody else are doing. And sometimes it may be more profitable to bet against the herd.

I’m going to list down some observations of the stock market crash of 2008. Hopefully next time I’ll make better decisions.

1. Don’t catch falling knives. Wait for the market to bottom first. It’s better to miss the bottom, than getting hurt trying to catch the bottom.

2. Buy blue chips, fundamental counters. Don’t buy second liners, speculative counters. It’s easier to get burned with speculative counters than with fundamental counters.

3. Should transfer money from EPF to mutual funds sooner than later.

4. Buy stocks and hold. Excessive trading leads to high transaction costs, eating into gains.

5. Set a target price, and let Mr Market come to you. Don’t go chasing Mr Market.

6. Consider leveraging up. Make use of Share Margin Financing to borrow and buy shares.

I started buying stocks in June 2008. It’s been six months now and I did a review of my performance. Here’s the results.

Capital: RM40,000. Transaction costs RM1,500. Current portfolio value: approx RM36,000. This means a loss of about RM4,000.

I have accepted that it is impossible to time the market. I also didn’t realize that I had incurred up such a huge transaction costs. From now onwards, I’m only going to buy fundamental stocks. Buy and hold.