"What is your story"

For me, I had a good paying job back in the 2000s that requires me to be constantly travelling overseas. With almost all expenses paid for by the company, such as flight, accommodation, meals, transport etc. and even with overseas allowances, I had a lot of cash which I initially just dump into fixed deposits. 

Being single and no time to spend those money, I started looking at the stock market for more opportunities to earn more. At easily 2%-3% at that time, I felt that fixed deposits weren't paying well enough to beat inflation. FDs nowadays are really super pathetic. Those were the teletext days where you need to key in the page number and wait for the tv screen to refresh.

With no investing knowledge and experience at all, it was amazing that I was able to make hundreds to thousands of dollars per trade. That was thanks to the economic boom period. I soon invested almost all my savings. 2007 was the best year I had in the 2000s and the lack of experience and knowledge caused a disaster when the Lehman brothers crisis happened.

My portfolio soon turned red with around 70% in paper losses. This was further worsened by the fact that I had very little invested in blue chips and dividend yielding stocks. With no experience and knowledge, I decided to stop investing when prices were so horribly low. Worst investing decision ever in my entire life.

My mum then started questioning me why I stopped investing and didn't buy more when prices are down and didn't buy REITs. To humour her, I threw 20k into $ASCENDAS REAL ESTATE INV TRUST(A17U.SI)$and 5k into $SUNTEC REAL ESTATE INV TRUST(T82U.SI)$After getting more than 100k stuck in shares to be only left with around 30% in paper value, I was pretty sure that those 25k were as good as gone too.

Fast forward around 10 years later. I was curious how were my investments doing and started tabulating everything into Excel. To my surprise, those investment in REITs had already earned back more the capital invested through dividends and share price appreciation. Most of my earlier investments were however still in the red.

I started to see the wisdom and importance of knowledge and experience from my mum who had been through many crisis such as the '97 financial crisis and dot com bubble crisis. 

Hence, I started reading up on various views, styles, techniques and principles etc on investing. Being influenced by my mum, I started investing heavily into REITs and blue chips (around 60%-70%) while at the same time trying to diversify my portfolio by including a variety of other sectors into it.

Fast forward by around another 5 years, the paper losses of almost 100k soon turned into a combined paper and realised profit of almost 80k.

"Why did you start trading or investing?"

Initially in my 30s, it was a mix of fun, curiosity and wanting to beat inflation. After the losses in the Lehman brothers crisis, I stopped investing. 

In my 40s and up, it's wanting to leave more for my kids especially education and medical, now more of retirement planning, while at the same time trying to make sure it's able to beat inflation.

I guess the goals and motives do change for most investors as they age.