https://www.linkedin.com/in/td008/ (Tariq Dennison) is a Hong Kong-based manager of US and offshore retirement plans at his own firm, https://gfmasset.com/ (GFM Asset Management). Prior to GFM, he worked in the wealth management divisions of https://www.societegenerale.asia/en/ (Société Générale) in Hong Kong, CIBC in Toronto and London, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_Stearns (Bear Stearns) and https://www.jpmorgan.com/ (JP Morgan) in New York, after a few years in Silicon Valley. Tariq holds a master of financial engineering degree from the https://mfe.haas.berkeley.edu/ (University of California at Berkeley) and a bachelor of science degree in mathematics and the history of philosophy from Marquette University, and is a visiting professor of fixed income and alternative investments at ESSEC Business School Asia-Pacific in Singapore. Tariq is an http://www.ifphk.org/ (IFPHK) Certified Financial Planner and the author of https://gfmasset.com/book/ (Invest Outside the Box). He is a frequent speaker on RTHK Radio 3’s Money Talk program, HKIBN Cable News’ All About Money program. He has also presented on ETFs, investor education and retirement plans at multiple public conferences.

“The number one difference between whether or not someone has a million-dollar retirement account is whether they put money in the account early on, not whether they invested in stocks, or bonds, or international, or value, or growth. It was whether they simply had the discipline to save regularly and not do stupid things. And the second thing is just making sure that we have the proper tax structuring and we take care of accounts in the right way. There are enormous differences between having something in a taxable account and a tax-free account, being able to touch it and not being able to touch it.”

Tariq Dennison

Worst investment ever

Tariq offers listeners a tale in three parts, spanning the 20-odd years of his entire investment career. But like many investors Andrew speaks with in his podcast, Tariq says the challenging experiences made him the investor he is today.

Part 1: Pre-bubble Silicon Valley beckons

He started working, investing and made his first real money in Silicon Valley in the late 1990s. He was invested heavily in tech stocks of companies he truly thought he knew well as he either worked for them himself, or had friends working with them. He was buying the companies’ stock as he and his friends watched them prepare to go public, they were progressing, he thought he understood their business models and saw the path to success before them. And, like many others in the aftermath of the burst tech bubble, he lost money in those stocks. He points out here though that these would fail to make them his worst investments ever. It was early, the amounts were small and in total he lost less than US$10,000.

Part II: Not about what he lost but the gains he walked away from

His Silicon Valley forays happened before he learned proper financial analysis. “That was stage one.” At this point he was still in his early 20s. In the next stage of his journey, he went to the other end of the spectrum, becoming overly focused on target companies’ financials, and wanted them to have a lot of cash, big dividends and big earnings. He especially loaded up on two very familiar blue chip names: Apple Computer (Apple Inc., AAPL:US, APPL.OQ) and Philip Morris, a pair of the best performing stocks in the past 20 years. And thus, part two of Tariq’s story is that he sold them much too early compared to the potential they would realize even years later. He bought big parcels of each at $20 a share between 2000 and 2002, then sadly sold all his positions in them when they hit $50 a share. He had made in each stock 150% returns and was happy. But also sadly, he denied himself huge gains by selling those stocks early than he had ever lost in the tech group (Apple stock has made a simple percentage gain of 650% [or an averaged 32% per year,