Like others, I'm also having a story to dazzle you with my trading mistakes but are quite different.
I started trading just 3 months after I joined 18 year club. Initial amount was 25k which I saved from my saving. I was reading financial book like The Tao of Warren Buffett, Rich dad poor dad, Intelligent investor etc.
I stared idealizing myself as a Value investor and decided long before I started investing to invest for long run only.
No doubt, world richest investor are also a long term value investor. For example, take Warren Buffett. But it was much easy as it sounds. So here's my biggest trading mistake that may work as a base deck for newbie investor.
When I got registered with Zerodha, I was very excited with the virtue of earning a huge wealth from stock market. I had also heard many rag to riches stories like A man turned 10,000 Rs into 704 crores which excited me more to invest.
Okay, let's talk about the whole experience.
I analyzed stock based on my knowledge and considering the factor that I read on internet before choose stock for run. I came out with 4 stocks - Usher Agro, Inox wind, Treehouse and REC.
Now here's my bad luck with all of this stocks:
Usher Agro:
I bought this share at first because of its growing profit from past 3 years and also it was available at very low PE ratio. I bought my 400 share @28 in market. I saw this stock going high to 35 on positive monsoon news. I was excited as my first investment grown up by 25% in just couple of weeks.
I hold the stock for hoping for further rise but who knows the market trend. Mr. market turned opposite and the stock dropped out to 20. I lost 3200 in just couple of days. Still the stock is moving in very lusty trend. Still I've that 400 shares, worried to book the loss.
Lesson: Not always historic results of a company can be use for predicting future.
Inox Wind:
I invested in this stock when it was trailing around. In fact, it was the only stock with lowest PE in its industry with a ROE of 40%. And also Indian government is taking many initiative to increase solar energy by 2020. So thinking this solar related company as a great buy, I bought it. But again the bad luck, the stock trailed down to 215 in some matter of days. this was a greater loss than above Usher Agro. Still I'm not able to figure out why the stock fall out so high. Hard to understand the market behavior. Still the loss is not recovered.
Lesson: There are many other factors than financial statements which should be consider before buying a stock. Market do not consider financial statements to value stock, at least in short run.
Treehouse:
Again a big losing stock. Stock was traded at 0.34 times its book value and providing a good dividend yield of 3.86%. Also it has good consistent profit growth of 86.56% over 5 years. I think it's enough to conclude it as a good stock. Everything was going good until demon Morgan Stanley Asia enter the market. They sold 2 lakh shares of Tree House which made the stock drop to 40 Inr and my investment dropped by half.
Lesson: Sometime market works for big institutes.
My last bad investment.
REC ltd:
It's a good stock with a high earning and dividend payout. Also it was traded at 0.58 times its book value. I entered stock at around 169. It have a good financials and also traded at a very low PE as compare to others. For a long time, I was not able to find out why the stock price of such a good dividend paying stock is not growing high. Later on I discovered that most of government owned stock doesn't grow much despite of great value and low prices. This factor was not in my valuation parameters, that's why my portfolio was full of government stock earlier. This stock was also dropped to 158 when I sold it but later on grows in value and now trading at 182. Again my bad luck.
Lesson: Stay away from government stock.
However, I had also invested some money in other excellent stock which gave a excellent return but as the question state, this was my mistake that I made while investing and learned a lot.