How getting burned by penny stocks in uni taught Maybank managing director to invest prudently

Chong Wee Yeat, managing director at Maybank Singapore, says his penny stock-investing days in university taught him valuable lessons.

SINGAPORE – Chong Wee Yeat has had a storied, global career spanning momentous eras like the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak.

But it was his penny stock-investing days in university – when he had to swallow losses – that strongly influenced his investing mindset today, teaching him to invest prudently.

“Like many first-time investors, my early forays were modest and not particularly successful,” the managing director and head of global banking at Maybank Singapore says of his undergraduate years at the National University of Singapore.

He started dabbling in the Singapore stock market after taking a financial investment module.

“I gravitated towards penny stocks, attracted by the promise of quick gains, but quickly learnt how volatile and unforgiving that space can be.”

The 49-year-old adds: “That early experience shaped how I think about investing today. If I were to invest in equities now, I would favour strong, fundamentally sound dividend-paying stocks that offer steadier returns and a clearer balance between risk and reward in the long term, rather than chasing short-term price movements.”

Now, Chong says, stability and steady, sustainable growth are important to him, especially since he has experienced global events that have rocked markets.

Across his career, he has had a front-row seat to unfolding global events. In 2001, he was in San Francisco when the Sept 11 terrorist attacks shook the United States.

“It was a formative period, one where I witnessed first-hand how global events can abruptly reshape markets and sentiment. I still keep newspaper clippings from that time as a reminder of how quickly certainty can disappear,” he says.

Those experiences taught Chong about the fragility of normality and how easily markets and the status quo can be destabilised by uncertainty.