This is the third installment on the discussion about basic principles in stock market investing. In the previous articles, we discussed about the first three principles of investment. First, the stock market is just another vehicle of investment. Secondly, investing in the stock market is a roller coaster ride and thirdly, you must determine what type of investor you are. We continue with the next 4 principles in part 3 of this 4 part series. If you wish to view the entire article, please visit my blog.

4.) While investing in the stock market does not take a lot of cash however having lots of it will obviously have an impact on how much you earn. - It is true that you don’t need hundreds of thousands of pesos or millions to invest in the Philippine Stock market. For me personally you only need about P 20,000.00 to start trading. This was the initial amount I began with. You don’t exactly need P 20,000.00, you can even start trading if you have P 10,000.00. But personally, I believe that is too small an amount. To show you what I mean let me cite Jollibee (JFC), one of my favorite stocks as an example. Jollibee shares cost only 51.50 per share as of today. In order to invest in a stock you need to purchase a minimum number of shares which is called the board lot. The board lot for Jollibee is 100. If you do the math you will only need P 5,150.00 (51.50 x 100) to be a stock holder of Jollibee Food Corporation. Let us presume that a year after you purchased the stock it climbed to P 100.00 per share. This means that you have gained P 5,000.00 more. However if you had invested 200 shares you could have gained much more.

5.) You must be consistent in investing - If you start small make sure you do not stay that way. Discipline yourself to invest a certain amount of your income to the stock market in order to pump in more capital so that your portfolio may grow. For the past month now I have slowly added to my investment, I did not just stop at P 20,000.00. Make investing a habit.

6.) You must learn to minimize your losses and maximize your profits - If your stock goes down, remember that the loss is only on paper. There is no actual loss until you sell your stock at the “losing” price. Hence the best way is to never ever sell at a loss. That is why it is important that the money that you invest in the stock market is considered as really “extra money” and not your emergency fund. If you invest your emergency fund or your savings you will be forced to withdraw sell your stock at a loss. Similarly if you sell your stocks and you profited from the sales, or you received dividends, utilize the profit or the dividend to buy more shares of stocks.

7.) The stock market is not a get rich quick scheme - In all investments always take note of the principle that money takes time to grow. Those Investments that give you very high rate of return in a very short period of time are most likely investments that make other people rich, not you. Most likely it will take several months or even years in order for you to really profit in the stock market, especially in the Philippine stock market. There are times that it will just take weeks or days to really make a killing. However these are rare occasions. This usually occurs in cases like when there is a consistent bull run or that there is an unusual drop or climb of prices in a short length of time for various reasons.

Would you want to know more about investment strategies ? Visit the blog of Zigfred Diaz where he blogs about several interesting topics such as investments, financial management, business, making financial online and Stock market investing