My Top 5 Investing Mistakes So You Can Avoid Them
Steve "Mr. B" Ballinger 
Many of the mistakes I have made are actually quite common investing mistakes so my goal here is to share them with you so you can avoid them.
My Top 5 Investing Mistakes I Have Learned From…So You Can Avoid Them
One of the keys to investing is learning from your mistakes. That is true of life in general. Fortunately I made my biggest mistakes early in my investing career. I still make mistakes or simple misjudgments or miscalculations but what is important is to learn from each one and avoid the big ones. Many of the mistakes I have made are actually quite common investing mistakes so my goal here is to share them with you so you can avoid them. Not in any particular order but let's start the list!
Thinking That An Investment Will Rebound & Go Back Up
Sometimes they just don't. You invest in something and think "Well if this stock was such a great deal I invested in it at $75 it is even a better deal at $55 now so I should hold onto it or maybe buy more." The unfortunate truth is sometimes stocks go down and keep going down for a reason and there will come a point where you just have to cut your losses.
Check out the video to see an example of this with me and Lucent Technologies.
Thinking That Those "Top 5 Stocks To Buy Today" Articles Are Right
The key thing to understand about investing articles is that they are designed to get eyeballs to look at them so they can sell adverting against them and the publisher can make money. Article where they list top things to buy get attention. Some of them are good and you can tell because they will go into detail about why the stock is a good buy and use data to back that up but will also talk about the downside risk as well.
Check out the video above to see a really bad example my younger self did.
Not Knowing The Rules
This is particularly true with tax advantaged accounts. For example, in the USA if you have a 401k at work and you leave the company and want to move your 401k to the new employer or to a mutual fund company of your choosing and manage it yourself that is a called a 401 Rollover and if you do it wrong you will get hit with some big penalties.
Check out the video
above to see how I made this big mistake and it cost me 10% of my profits
because I did not follow the rules…because I did not know the rules at the
time. This example can be a real costly mistake to avoid.
Owning Too Much
If you collect stamps then owning a lot of stamps is a good thing. Collecting a wide variety of investments such as many mutual funds or exchange traded funds (ETF) can lead to not knowing what you are investing in, possibly had unnecessary fees, and not understanding the purpose of each of your investments. Diversification is a good thing but this goes way beyond that to where you become more a collector than investor.
Yep. Since I am good at evaluating and choosing mutual funds and ETF that can lead to a little bit of collecting so check out the video to learn more about this mistake of mine that I still need to watch out for.
Leaving Money On The Table
This is actually a very common mistake that many people make. In the video I talk about investing in a plan through work like the 401k plan in the USA and how some companies will match what you are investing up to a certain amount. For example, 3% of your salary. That means that if you invest just 3% of your salary then the employer will put that same amount into your retirement account (401k) automatically. Nothing you have to do it is free money. So important you know if there are any benefits like that you can take advantage of.
Check out the video to learn more about my case when I was younger and one big secret to my success is not only investing to a company match but striving to invest the maximum I can.
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