Welcome to Oceanside Family Investment.

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My name is Hai Nguyen or Danny. I'm the founder of Oceanside Family Investment - a Hobart-based investment trust, and I also write about this thing I love called investing.

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Let me share a little bit of my background.

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I graduated from La Trobe University in 2015 with majors in accounting and finance. To be honest, I was not that interested in either. At some point, I even thought of dropping out because I was unsure about what I was doing. The idea of dissecting balance sheets and picking holes in financial statements for a living had not once crossed my mind before. And going through hundreds of pages of annual reports was definitely not on my bucket list. But (somehow) I managed to finish the degree.

 

Since, I've wandered around and worked a couple of jobs in accounting, retail, and hospitality. I also started a few business ventures. Being young and hungry for success and money, I poured everything I had into idea after idea, those of which I had very little knowledge and understanding. As you can imagine, I failed in all of them. In hindsight, I was setting myself up for failure.

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Any regrets? Not one bit! For the lessons learned and the people that I met and later become my mentors. They have taught me how to approach and analyze the underlying economics of the business; they have given me a tremendous amount of experience and insight into the business world: what makes a good business and what separates it from the crowd; they have made me understand the importance of capital allocation and risk management.

 

Not until now do I realize that this is what accounting and finance are all about. I did not just learn how to crunch numbers in class. In fact, I learned a new kind of language - the language of business. As you will find out in my blog, these have later helped shift my focus to the concept of value investing (developed by the great Benjamin Graham) and become the tenets of my investing strategy. And I believe they would prove to be the most valuable assets in any investor's toolkit.

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For the last few years, I have been learning about investing by reading books about great investors of our time. Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Mohnish Pabrai, Peter Lynch, and Howard Marks ... to name a few. Their wisdom is undeniably remarkable and timeless. Through their teaching, one can learn as much about investing as every other aspect of life. They have shown the world that it is possible to become wealthy; that investing, as it turns out, is not hard if you commit enough time and effort to it; that you don't need to have an advanced degree in finance or be numerically gifted to be a good investor.

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"A society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they will never sit in."

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This led to the decision to start Oceanside Family Investment. And this is what this blog is all about.

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I am not set out to write a manual for investing. And you won't find here on this blog a how-to or step-by-step instruction to find winners in the stock market. I have not cracked the code yet, nor will I ever be able to; if I had, it might not have worked in your favour. Everyone is different. Your tolerance for risk might be vastly different from mine. Your strategies and objectives might be fundamentally different from mine. Your investing time horizon may be much shorter or longer than mine.

 

The point is just because someone makes money with stock A does not mean you can replicate their success with it. Sure, you can clone any great investor's portfolio and buy exactly what they have purchased but what to do with them is another problem - a challenging and frustrating one, to say the least.

 

There is no foolproof recipe for investment success. There is no one-size-fits-all formula that you can apply.  Most importantly, there is no one right answer in the investment business. That is what is interesting about this space. Those who try to sell one will do you a great disservice.

 

Rather, this blog comprises of my investment philosophy, lessons I have learned, and a framework upon which I build and grow my fund. I aim to share ideas and approaches to investing, what matters and what doesn't. And perhaps, if you, after visiting my blog, find yourself thinking, "I have never thought about investing this way, " I will be on cloud nine (please let me know!).

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Lastly, whether you are a beginner or approaching Warren Buffett's status, I hope you will find this blog useful for your investing journey.

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Thank you!

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