My First COL Investment Portfolio

Hello blogging world!

I’ve been buried in work and other activities lately that I’ve missed to write again about a lot of stuff that’s been in my mind for this blog. But let me restart the momentum by sharing with you how my first COL investment portfolio looks like!

Having a direct stock investment account with COL has been my goal for quite a while now, and joining last April’s The Global Filipino Investor’s Financial Literacy Summit has finally enabled me to do it. There were representatives from COL so H and I had filled out forms and opened our own accounts! I won’t go into the details of doing such since I believe you can find tons of articles explaining it already (click here or here), but what I want to share with you here is how I started funding my COL account and picking my first stocks!

Disclaimer: I haven’t attended any of the free seminars they offer and this sharing is based on personal experience.

1. Fund your COL Financial account

   Once you have completed the application, COL Financial will email you a confirmation and instructions on how to activate your account by funding it.

COL Financial account opening email confirmation. You can make your initial investment online or over the counter in major banks such as BPI, BDO, and Metrobank.

I’m banking with BPI so I simply enrolled COL online and paid Php25,000.00. You can also start with their Php10,000.00 minimum investment plan. I think the only difference is with regards to the platform that would be made available to you initially but as your portfolio grows, they will also automatically upgrade your plan.

Online bills enrollment in BPI. Look for COL FINANCIAL GROUP, INC. (COL).

In my case, COL confirmed my payment and sent my password after one business day.

 

2. Login to your COL Financial account

It’s now time to login to your COL account. Go to colfinancial.com and enter your details.

When you have time, try to watch some of the videos here to get inspired with why you need to invest! 😉 Featured above is one of my idols, Mr. Fitz Villafuerte from Ready To Be Rich.

Here is the screenshot of my current dashboard. You can quickly check the market’s performance from the stats above for: the whole index – PSEi, and the segments for Financials, Industrial, Holding Firms, Property, Services, and Mining and Oil.

Before you get into it, research is an important step towards investing wisely, so I suggest you also read a bit on the reports made available to you by COL. This is actually one of the useful services they offer in turn for the costs they charge for every transaction.

The current level of PSEi is around 7,800. A lot of research is made available to you by COL to guide you in making the right investment choices.

3. Buy your first stocks.

Again, this is based on personal experience so please proceed with caution in following the strategy I’m sharing. Investing in stocks is risky so be sure you are ready for it!

As I explored the site, I found this useful investment guide from their research section. Generally, people buy stocks 1) for trading or 2) for long-term investing. I’m more for the latter and because of this, I feel that fundamental analysis is a better strategy for me. Fundamental analysis values the company in a holistic way and estimates its future performance, ultimately enabling investors to determine whether it’s good to buy, hold, or sell the company’s stocks based on its current price and its estimated value. Technical analysis is geared more towards traders who study the movement and trends in the stock prices and take profits in the short run from fluctuations in the market.

Phew. That was a lot of words. That’s just actually my own definition. I hope I could give you a simpler way to explain the concept, but let’s just try to see first what I tried to do…

The first investment guide I tried to understand dated April 20, 2017.

Basically, the investment guide is a summary of all the companies that COL has studied over a period of time, and contains their rating whether it is good to buy, hold, or sell a stock. In above, you can see the current price, COL rating, date as of update, COL FV, and buy below statistics.

Let’s take one of my most profitable stocks as of the moment PGOLD:PM or Puregold Price Club Inc as an example. I’m pretty sure everyone knows about them from the numerous grocery stores they opened nationwide. In above’s report, it’s current price is Php42.00 a share while COL’s valuation is at Php51.00! Imagine the Php9.00 discount, multiplied by how many shares you can buy at this rate. Get what I mean? So if you have Php4,200.00 and bought 100 shares, you can potentially gain Php900.00. What if you had Php42,000.00 and bought 1000 shares? Then you’d gain Php9,000.00!

Here’s how you can check and buy PGOLD today:

Go to Quotes > Stock Information > Enter stock code. This is as of June 23 so PGOLD’s prices have gone up from last April already. Ask price is how much the current holders are willing to sell you their shares. You can click buy and proceed with acquiring shares from here.

Of course profiting from this is not that easy and not 100% sure, but with the right approach and knowing the companies well, you can succeed with this strategy of buying low, and selling high. As I’m disclosing to you next, my PGOLD investment was favorable but most other stocks still need some time to bear fruit:

Go to Trade > Portfolio to check the composition of your investment. Listed also is the average price you bought the shares, number of shares owned, current market price and the computed net gain or loss in each.

Tada! As you can see, in total, I have only 4 companies that are currently gaining: ALI, MEG, MRP, and PGOLD. But these are good companies that I would really love to hold onto for good and was fortunate enough to buy cheap. The rest are on a decline but very minimally and my total net loss so far is just Php-267.11. This might also just be temporary because the whole market is down. A few weeks ago when the index was at the 8,000 level, I was already at a net gain.

 

Conclusion

As with anything, investing takes time and knowledge. You’ll be extremely lucky if you gain during the first few times of doing this. But what’s important is that you TRY. Postponing investing only costs you time that you will never earn back. So better start now!

I’ll leave you with a final report from COL on their perspective on where the market will go to in the next months. Hopefully, this seals the deal for you to start investing now! 😉

 

Cheerios,

Maven

 

P. S. This is not a sponsored post. I’d also really like to thank COL Financial for being a tool to help Filipinos invest over the years and for guiding newbies like me into starting.

Update as of 2020: So I haven’t really been mindful of transaction fees when I started. XD And I made the mistake of diversifying too much, I might have been better off just going for an index fund. :)) Now that I know a bit more, please check out my updated video series on how to use COL Financial here. Good luck!