Why Picking Your Own Stocks Is Harder Than You Think

The Market Doesn't Reward Effort

This is the hardest truth to accept: in financial markets, working harder does not mean better results. Information about a stock that you read in the news has already been read by thousands of others before you. By the time that information is public, the stock price has usually already priced it in.

Research by S&P Dow Jones Indices shows that roughly 80 to 90 percent of actively managed funds run by professionals fail to beat the index over 10 years. These are not amateurs — they are professional analyst teams with far better tools and earlier access to information than individual investors.

Common Blind Spots When Picking Your Own Stocks

First: confirmation bias. People tend to seek out information that confirms a decision they have already made, rather than looking for reasons they might be wrong. Once you like a stock, bad news about it is usually ignored or rationalized away.

• Symptom: Ignoring poor financial reports, dismissing unfavorable news, or telling yourself "the market just doesn't understand this stock's value yet."

• Consequence: Holding on to a falling stock and missing the safe point to cut your losses.

Second: survivorship bias. Stocks that surged get talked about endlessly; stocks that collapsed are rarely discussed. Looking at a "biggest winners this year" list and trying to find a pattern to apply next year is an unreliable approach.

• Symptom: Opening a "Top Performing Stocks of the Year" ranking and trying to reverse-engineer a formula to use for the following year.

• Consequence: This approach is deeply flawed. Studying only the spectacular successes while ignoring the hundreds of failures behind them gives you a distorted picture of actual risk.

Third: overconfidence. After a few winning trades, people tend to overestimate their own ability and increase their position sizes right at the moment risk is building up.

• Symptom: Believing you have "figured out" the market, then casually scaling up your capital by several multiples.

• Consequence: Committing large sums at exactly the moment market risk is peaking typically leads to heavy losses that wipe out all previous gains.

Recognizing these psychological traps is the first step toward building solid investment discipline. Always ask a contrarian question before placing a buy order, have a pre-defined stop-loss scenario ready, and follow position-sizing principles rather than chasing short-term emotions.

You can also use automated trading tools to optimize your trading performance.

Alpha Stock VN: Efficient Automated Trading for VN Equities & VN30 Derivatives

What Is Alpha Stock VN?

Alpha Stock VN is AlphaSet's quantitative investment strategy for the Vietnamese stock market — a quantitative investment platform built for individual investors.

The AlphaSet team has over 10 years of experience developing quantitative trading strategies, previously managing $80 million for funds in Dubai, UAE, and has processed over $200 million in assets across multiple market cycles, with more than $10 billion in live trading volume since 2016.

AlphaSet serves traders ranging from professional to semi-professional, participating in digital asset markets (spot/futures/XAU) and the Vietnamese stock market — enabling individual users to trade automatically with impressive real-world APR.

Users don't need to know how to code, don't need complex setup, and don't need to watch charts continuously — they can still trade effectively through AlphaSet. Simply connect AlphaSet to your brokerage account via API, select the AlphaStock strategy, and let the system trade automatically 24/7.

Unlike manually buying and holding, Alpha Stock VN scores and ranks tickers in the VN30/VN100 universe using a multi-factor system, prioritizing stocks with strong institutional money flow, while using VN30F1M futures contracts to trade both directions or hedge during market downturns.

How Does Alpha Stock VN Work?

Instead of spending your own time researching hundreds of stocks, reading financial reports, and watching the screen minute-by-minute to place orders, you simply subscribe to AlphaSet's service and connect it to your DNSE account. The entire process of analysis and order execution is then carried out automatically by the system, directly within your own account.

AlphaSet's algorithm scores and ranks tickers in the VN30/VN100 universe based on four signal groups: technical, fundamental factors, foreign institutional flow, and market sentiment. From that ranking, a single capital allocator splits funds across two segments:

• Equities: Buys only the strongest-ranked stocks, traded on a T+1.5 settlement cycle.
• VN30F1M Derivatives: Goes long or short according to trend, with approximately 5.4× leverage. For derivatives trading, the engine combines trend signals and technical signals to determine when to go long and when to go short.

Every decision is data-driven, every position has a pre-set stop-loss and is executed automatically — unaffected by emotion or rumors when the market moves. The goal is not to beat the market in every single session, but to consistently accumulate alpha (excess return above the market) across multiple cycles — something most individual investors who trade manually find very difficult to achieve.

Your assets remain yours at all times. Your capital always stays in your own brokerage account; AlphaSet has no ability to withdraw or transfer funds. The authorization only permits order placement, and you can revoke it at any time directly within the account management app.