[$10 million in my hand, so what do I do now?]

Aside spending $1M on your luxury tours to all around the world, buying a speedboat and indulging yourself in caviar. Let's say all of us have $10M strictly for investment, what will we do with it?

Go get yourself a copy of "How to manage your own finance", "Invest in bonds/equities/FOREX, the failsafe way" or "Entrepreneurship 101"? Frankly speaking, what my advice is to put $9.99M into the bank and open a stock broking account with only $10k credit. Why so little? We can definitely afford to take bigger risk now with $10M in hand right? Let's put at least $1M into our stock account and start acquiring some good stocks! Well, chances are we will lose everything in a second.

I love what Robert Kiyosaki wrote in one of the investment books, you need 3Es to succeed in investment. Those 3Es are education, experience and excessive cash.

Why set the ceiling at $10k? This is the amount we are able to handle for first time investors. For seasoned investors, well the range can easily go beyond the $1M mark. $10k is really an amount we can handle comfortably. So start small then we set a realistic target to hit. After we are comfortable with $10k, we move on to a bigger portfolio of $50k which consist of 8-10 types of stocks from various sectors then move on slowly to the $100k, $250k, $500k and so on. Why do I say so? Well, it is easy to buy and sell a counter if you only plan to buy 1000 units. But the difficultly and method use to buy and sell 100,000 units of that particular counter might be very different. You need to learn dollar cost averaging up and down. Then you will be more selective with the counters you buy too. At first with $10k, you might want to invest in small cap companies which have very limited amount of liquidity. But with $1M, you might want to choose medium cap companies to avoid facing any liquidity issues.

So let's all learn how to kick start our investment by first accumulating $10k. Then we set a target what we want to achieve by middle or end of this year. It can be anything from $20k to $100k. Just set a number that we are comfortable with. Investment is a long journey with lots of ups and downs. I can still recall the first day I bought my Public Bank stock, although it wasn't really that much, maybe just $2.5k in value, it took me about 10 minutes to decide whether to commit that amount or not. Although I've spent so much time researching on that particular company and convinced myself that it is a really good counter, but at that moment, fear comes in. A lot of questions will flood your mind. Questions like, are you sure it is the right time to buy? Will it continue to go down? Is $2.5 too much or too little? What if it goes up the next hour? Then all of a sudden, I remembered what Warren Buffet said, "It is better to buy a good stock at a fair price rather than getting a fair stock at a good price!"

Back to the topic of the day, what should I do now?

1. Education: Invest heavily in our own financial IQ.
   
2. Experience: Go sign up with any brokerage firm and start small.
   
3. Excessive cash: Learn to save and side aside at least 10-20% of your income.
   

But with $10M, you can skip the last one and move along with 1 and 2. But remember, you need to act FAST because 10 years from now, with the current inflation rate, the $10M you have in the bank even if it is on FD might have shrink to less than half.

Blessed evening ;)