Position disclosure (20 October 2026): I still hold shares in Clearbridge Health.
This post was originally published on my old finance blog in February 2021. I moved it here because I no longer maintain that site.
Not every post in this finance journal is a good news story. There are losses, mistakes and moments of poor judgment too. I think it is important to write about those as much as the wins. The lessons from bad trades tend to stick better anyway.
This is one of those posts.
The setup
In April 2020, a stock called Biolidics (8YY.SI) had a significant pump. I missed it entirely. A related company, Clearbridge Health (1H3.SI), started moving sharply upward on 23 April 2020. I had just missed the original move, and watching the related stock run gave me a strong sense of FOMO, or fear of missing out.
I bought Clearbridge at SGD 0.38. Its all-time high, as it turned out, was SGD 0.39.
My queue filled. Immediately after, the stock dropped to around 20 cents in under two minutes.
I could not sell in time. DBS Vickers does not support stop-loss orders, and placing a manual sell queue takes long enough that by the time I had done it, the damage was done.
What actually happened
To me, it looked like a textbook pump and dump. The price had risen rapidly, attracted late buyers like me, and then collapsed near the peak. Whatever drove the move, the people left holding at the top took the loss.
At the time of writing this post, Clearbridge was sitting at around 15 cents. I was down over 50% on the position.
What I learned
The lesson is simple and brutal: chasing a stock that is already moving fast, driven by nothing fundamental, is almost never a good idea. The people who profit from pump and dumps need buyers at the top. FOMO turns you into that buyer.
A few things that would have helped:
- I should not have bought a stock I had not researched. I knew nothing about Clearbridge’s fundamentals.
- I should have had a stop-loss in place. DBS Vickers made it inconvenient, but the discipline still mattered.
- I should have recognised the pattern. A stock moving from 15 cents to 39 cents in a very short time on no news was a warning sign, not an invitation.
The market will always create another opportunity. Missing one is survivable. Chasing it into a pump and dump is considerably more expensive.
This is not financial advice. Just a record of one mistake and what it cost.