4 Common Mistakes Made by Beginner Stock Investors!

Stock investing is a highly competitive and risky business. The risk of losing your money in the stock market can be mitigated by learning about treasury management, trade finance, and other related areas. If you are a beginner stock investor, there is no time like the present to learn as much as you can about this exciting field.

There are many mistakes that beginners often make, and those mistakes could cost you dearly in the long term. In this post, we’ll discuss four common mistakes made by beginner traders and offer advice on how to avoid them. 

Common mistakes made by beginner traders and how to avoid these mistakes are:

Purchasing without doing the research: One of the most important parts of trading is understanding what you are buying. This requires some background knowledge and information on your part to make an informed investment decision. You should have all this before making any investments to avoid mistakes like jumping into something just because someone else said it was good or looking at a graph that makes something look more promising than it really is.

Not considering risk management: When people hear about successful traders, they often think that these traders were simply lucky; however, there’s much more behind their success than luck alone. These professional investors know how to manage risks properly, which has helped them navigate through rough patches while maintaining portfolios over time. Risk management also helps know what to sell when things go south and how much of a loss is too big.

Not having an exit strategy: Another common mistake investors make is not having an exit strategy. They often get caught up in the moment when something starts to go well and don’t sell it even though they know that it might come back down. Having a solid plan for exiting trades should include some type of profit-taking or using stop-losses, which are set according to your preferences as they can limit potential losses while still allowing you to take advantage of gains.

Getting caught up on emotions: Investing requires patience more than anything else as it takes time for good investments to pay off—but this doesn’t mean you should be patient all of the time. When new traders make a lot of money, they tend to hold onto those stocks thinking that their luck will continue, which isn’t always true; hence why risk management is so important because if things go south (i.e., there was an unanticipated event like bad news from another company), then these beginner traders may end up losing a lot more than they bargained for.

Learn treasury management by joining MBA course at Imarticus Learning Institute

Avoiding these mistakes is the primary step towards becoming a successful trader. The second and equally important part of learning to trade profitably is good risk management skills as well as understanding various compliances in the market. Learn risk and treasury management in banking & finance with Imarticus Learning.

Imarticus Learning offers MBA courses in finance in collaboration with Jain University. This course will enable you to gain in-depth knowledge & understanding of the various treasury operations and also help you understand risk management.

For more information, connect with us through the Live Chat Support system or visit any of our training centers based in – Chennai, Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Delhi, and Gurgaon.

Confused Between Model Building Approach Historical Simulation? Things To Consider!

If you consider Basel II, there are two ways of calculating Market Risks VAR:
• Historical Simulation Approach
• Model Building Approach

What makes them different?

Historical Simulation approach is most frequently used by organisations. As the name suggests, we consider daily changes in past/historical values to compute the likelihood of the variations in values of current portfolio between given time frame. The other advanced version of this model places more emphasis on recent observations. The key assumption in historical simulation is that the set of possible future outcomes is fully represented by what occurred in a definite historical time frame/window.

On the other side, model-building approach involves assumptions about the joint probability distributions of the returns on the market variables. This model is also known as variance-covariance approach.

This is more apt for portfolios which has short as well as long positions in their bucket. This consists of commodities, bonds, equities, etc. in the portfolio. Here, the mean and standard deviation are computed from the distribution of the underlying assets returns and the correlation between them.

Daily returns on the investments are normally assumed to be multivariate normal which can be the models biggest drawback. Hence, model-building approach makes it easy to calculate Var.

Model Building approach assumes two things:
• The daily change in the value of a portfolio is linearly related to the daily returns from market variables
• The returns from the market variables are normally distributed

Shortcomings of Historical Simulations
Over reliance on past data can fail to serve the purpose as markets change every moment. The momentum can be gradual or sudden, but does not remain static.

Large number of factors like Technology, regulatory changes, economic conditions, seasonal patterns, etc. influence market and in such scenarios manager who are using historical simulation can face unfavorable situation.

Shortcomings of Model Building Approach
Also this approach is much more complex to use when a portfolio comprises of nonlinear products such as options. It is also a grim task to relax the assumption that returns are normal without a significant increase in totaling time.

When to use? Model building vs. Historical simulation.
Depending on the situation, appropriate model should be adopted by the organisation. While both of them have pros and cons, it is important to list down the objectives of risk model before adopting either of them.

Model building approach producer quicker results and can be used in conjunction with volatility and other correlation procedures.

The advantage of the historical simulation approach is that the joint probability distribution of the market variables is determined by historical data. This approach may not be very complicated however, it is little slow for computation. However, the methodology used in historical simulation is in line the risk factor and does not involve any estimation of variances or covariance’s which are statistical parameters.

One should use historical simulation model only when they have data on all risk factors over a justified historical period if they want the model to depict strong representation of the outcome in future.

To know more about model building join Imarticus Learning’s Financial Modeling Certification Courses, which will help you understanding opportunities in the Investment Banking, Private Equity, Budgeting and Financial Control space.


 

Introduction to Capital Market

What Are Capital Markets?

Capital markets basically deal with stocks and bonds in general. In simple words, any firm is it private or government, is always in need of funds, so as to finance its various operations to achieve certain long-term goals. Thus every firm is supposed to acquire these very funds or capital; for which, it sells stocks and bonds. These stocks and bonds are basically like shares, all of which are in the companies name. For instance, when the government of any country, issues what are known as treasury bonds, it basically is tapping into the capital markets, thereby generating capital.
This process is basically known as the IPO or Initial Public Offering. Capital Markets are largely divided into two types, the primary markets, and secondary markets. The companies and governments sell their securities in the primary market, whereas the investors trade with these securities in what is known as the secondary markets. Thus, it is safe to say that the capital markets are an important area of the finance industry.

These markets are more like the foundations on the basis of which, various companies and governments are able to invest in businesses, generate employment as well as better infrastructure. One of the core responsibilities of any capital market includes getting the people who are looking to invest, in contact with those looking for capital. Put so simply, this sounds like a very easy task to do, but in reality, a lot of professionals, perform this high-pressure task, to get the desired results.
The private companies look to raise capitals for various reasons, other than just expanding their businesses. They could be looking to finance start-up business ventures, or to battle with the sudden decline in the turnover, or for buying out the competition. While it may seem like it is only those very companies, which are profited from this whole business, it is not so. The very reason someone would want to provide capital is that that person would be looking to gain profit from their financing efforts.
A lot of people know of capital markets as stock exchanges. These are places where anyone can invest and are more commonly known as the public markets. This is where the Initial Public Offering takes place, which is the first time when any firm, comes out into the public to sell their securities. The next step where securities are bought and sold by investors is known as secondary markets, as spoken about earlier.
These secondary markets take place, subsequently after the primary market proceedings are over. Just as there are public markets, there also exist the lesser-known private markets, which are also known as exempt markets. These can be called as more lenient as compared to the public markets, primarily because there are no regulations to be met. Also, this is seen as a more cost-effective way for companies to fund their financing needs.
Thus the arena of capital markets has come to garner more attention by a lot of people, which is why candidates look for programs, which can make them proficient in the inner workings of capital markets. Imarticus Learning one of the best education institute in India offers industry-endorsed courses in capital markets, finance, and investment banking.

A Beginners’ Guide Investing in The Stock Market

There is no better way to learn than by doing. So we at Imarticus Learning believe that the best way to prepare for an interview for Corporate Finance jobs is to actively invest in the market in whichever way possible thereby putting some ‘skin in the game’, which ensures you know what’s going on. While FMVC and our Diploma in Corporate finance focus on Interview Prep using mock interviews and providing sample questions, we always encourage our students to actively participate in the stock market by opening Phantom Accounts.
Before you begin actively investing, you need to answer a few questions :

1. What are you doing this for? If you are doing it for the course, we advise you to open a phantom account, which essentially means you do everything but invest real money. Regardless of if you open a phantom account or the real thing, the following steps will help.
2. What kind of investor are you? Are you a risk taker, risk-averse, or a little bit of both? This is what we call investor profiling and we delve into this a great deal in our Retail Banking and Wealth Management Diploma, one of India’s leading programs/courses in Retail Banking and Wealth Management. Being a risk taker is simple. It requires a strong stomach and a healthy attitude to losing some money because the equity market is volatile. While you will be making decisions based on sound analysis, sometimes things go wrong and you could lose all your capital, hard earned money you have been saving for a long time. How do you feel about that? If you shudder at the thought and think you will lose a lot of sleep then you are probably risk averse. Once you realize this, you can then invest your portfolio keeping that in mind and put aside a small amount for risky ventures that offer spectacular returns and perhaps put the rest in conservative investments with lower returns.
3. How much time do you have? Picking stocks is hard work and there’s a reason why Mutual fund managers get paid so much to do it. So if you don’t have the time, we suggest starting out with an index fund like Franklin India Index or HDFC Index Fund – Sensex. An index fund is a mutual fund that invests in a predefined stocks of an index in a percentage allocation that resembles the index. Your portfolio could be a mix of different index funds, NSE Small caps, BSE Sensex and maybe even an international index fund.
4. I want to invest individually. We suggest creating your own index fund and take control of the percentage allocation thereby doing some work of your own while having the Sensex as a guide. If you plan to move away from the index, then create a portfolio of 12-20 well-chosen stocks that are extremely well covered and have excellent investor relations.
Here are some broad rules
a. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket or one sector
b. Understand the concept of defensive stocks and cyclicality
c. Don’t completely trust your broker but aim to create a good relationship
d. If you plan to invest using an online platform- the preferred method, then remember to read, research and plan meticulously and keep a record and mark to market regularly
Our next blog post will focus on the technicalities of opening your first account as well understanding various stock market terminology.