Always do your research before putting money into any company or assets

I was inspired to start this thread after seeing the news about South Korean Funeral Firms facing insolvency due to losses from crypto ETFs. The quote from the original post really made me think, and I wanted to share my perspective since I found it pretty informative. Otherwise, I would have just replied to the OP. I've come across several stories of companies shutting down because of major liquidations, leaving investors and affiliates panicking about how to get their money back amid all the insolvency issues. A lot of investors overlook the importance of having certain criteria in mind before they invest in any company, no matter how promising it looks. It's crucial to keep in mind the long-term stability of the company's services. There's also a recent report about Harvard selling off its entire ETH position just after one quarter, which highlights the dangers of not doing your homework before investing. You really need to consider what assets you’re getting into. Before you throw your money in, it's important to evaluate the firm's management quality, their ability to innovate if needed, and how well they can handle competition in the industry.

A large chunk of people will invest in their lifetime, at least those within the most developed countries who have pension schemes - but they may not even realize this until much later in life. Even if you invest outside of pension schemes the best bet is to keep your investing "boring" with index funds that have low management fees and spread across the top 5000 global companies, which will give you fairly decent returns around the 8% range per year but this is trending down. Over enough decades of your life and consistent adding to that pot, it should give you a great return even through the dips in the economy. Fewer people will have enough interest to research individual companies in enough detail to make an educated guess on whether something looks dangerous (for your money) or is a valuable buy. You really have to spend a lot of time learning investing if you want to buy into individual companies and then monitor them. Warren Buffett, arguably the greatest investor in the world, had a buy and hold forever mentality.

Several cases occurred against well-known crypto companies/exchanges, so if I can advise you and if you want to invest, especially if you want to do it for the long term, maybe you can use the Trezor Safe wallet, hardware wallet, Bitcoin BTC and so on. If you invest in crypto and if you use the tools I mentioned, maybe you don't need to worry about dealing with crypto exchanges, you have full and complete control of your crypto assets.

It will be a waste of money to invest without conducting in-depth research about the organisation. It is no longer difficult to get information about a company because the internet has made it easier. There is no excuse for ignorance because even illiterates can seek the advice of reputable asset managers. I remember some years ago when my uncle wanted to buy stocks because he had his collegue in the office talked about it. He consulted a well known investment managers in my loacation and he got the best advice. There are businesse  that has stand the test ot time and are have been consistebnly profitable. But we should also note that business involves risk, hence we should be prepared for any outcome.

Mostly all of us focus on how much profit can be made by investing on a company before put our money, meanwhile we rarely forget to consider about company risk structure, management quality and potential of fraud. Many company look promising but matter of fact has poor management liquidity, excessive debt exposure , weak corporate governance or some of them do financial manipulation. IN my opinion, no bargain in due diligence to avoid. Based on my experience finding investor for my business and become investor on many small business , before investing usually company financial health is always be first consideration. Cashflow route, debt ratio, liquidity, margin and stability of the company earning always be major point af analization. After that there will always be many question mark on report. After that before putting our money we must truly understanding management capabilities and quality especially the key person who run the company. We need to analyze their long term vision, ability to face crises and how they dinf solution and its SOP which show opeartional disciplin so we can measure the risk. We must find information where they will allocate our money when they to aggressive in speculative asset , high leverage and high voilatile sector the its categorized as high risk for investing and we must ask our self how much lost we can bear, but i always avoid investing in such company. Before investing, I require myself to have basic fraud risk understanding, its not just about stealing money but some company do manipulation on financial statement usually their reason to avoid high tax, concealment od febt, insider dealing, mark up which in the end the purpose are concealing true business risk, we as investor must find information about true business risk, so we will not loose our money due to only believe non transparent report and figures. Put your mind as an auditor and if there are question we can not reply or the company we want to invest can not explain better leave it before we take fatal financial decision. Better our money stay quite in our pocket than pursuing risky, falsely high returns.

In the usual financial schemes all investment a % is due to fail. As crypto is loud, so are their failures.

As far as I understand, Bumo Sarang invested their funds in a financial instrument offering double leverage. This action, in my opinion, is completely devoid of common sense.🙋 Harvard, unfortunately, also didn't prove themselves to be smart. Instead of averaging their investment position (buying at low prices, for example, buying Bitcoin at $60,000), they simply sold the cryptocurrency at a loss. Depriving themselves of the most promising asset in the world! As for me, I don't conduct thorough research before investing in an asset that's new to me. I simply buy a small amount of it. When you own a financial asset, you begin to research it (this is a completely natural process). And then you can make your own decision: whether you need it or not.

The prepaid trap is really scary. These companies collect money from people who want to pay for their funerals so that when they pass away their families do not get hit with sudden bills. So far it does not look like these people were investing their funds in these companies, also known as sangjo firms, but they were simply trying to ensure that when they die their families can easily manage the funeral costs. But on the other hand, the company management in question took a huge risk with that money. I do not know if that was done secretly or if there was a disclaimer given to those innocent people, but they took leverage on ETH and used 40 million dollars of those customer's cash and gambled with it, and they lost the bet. Many cases like this go unreported, and this happens due to greed. These management people should be dealt with, and the funds of those people should be returned.

Research is a crucial factor prior to investment process. Whether its for a single asset or a company, it would be best if we can make proper investigation or research first if it was not involved in past modus operandi or anomalies that would directly put our investment funds at high  risk of losing. However, I don't see any wrong investing into a prepaid funeral service since its a kind of practicality, but trusting the wrong people or management is the very wrong decision here. They don't lose their personal money, but they are like gambling our own hard-earned funds because they invested into a wrong asset, they invested blindly using our own money and life savings.

This is one of the reasons why I prefer to stick on investing into bitcoin where you are your own bank and in full control of your asset. Investing in a company that you don't know if they can be able to survive in the long run without consulting a professional or making proper research is like putting your money into a casino because you might lose it or not. It seems like this company is wants to copy how Strategy buys bitcoin but since it's not their ideas, they got it wrong.

Investing requires to be treated as crucial. Your point was either a fact too because at the time you'll loose your money due to ignorant to do your research or consultations, definitely your excuse will be a waste of time because you can't recover it except for legal cases where the perpetrators are apprehended. Hence, you still stand at a higher risk to loose if you don't abide acknowledge the risks of investment. Your being unaware or excuses of not knowing the right source to consult don't either be considered valid. Meanwhile, it's also important to do your research in different means whether offline or online and don't just feel satisfied on learning from just one source so that you get easily mislead by a source of information. The fact remains that no business is 0℅ risk free. Your emotions must always be attached with the negative side rather, when you invest with what you can afford, then it's ideal that you can control the state of mind and keep a healthy state of investment.

Of course, it was done secretly, otherwise the people would have pulled out their money from the company if they have known it will only be used to invest on their personal choices, and the worst part here is that they lose those money investing blindly on a wrong asset. It could have been more profitable if they target bitcoin, but that does not lost the fact that investing money not their own is still subject for investigation for mismanagement of funds.

We tell people to DYOR, and that's part of it whenever someone is investing to a specific asset or a firm. To DYOR is to make sure that you've known at least the basics of it up to the other complicated part because the money that you'll spend for investing came from your hard work. It also shows how responsible you are as an investor because if not, you're not going to take time in knowing what you're investing.

A company where families prepay to bury their parents took that money, all of it basically. Place it in a 2x crypto mining stock ETF. Not even crypto directly! A leveraged derivative of a company that mines cryptocurrency. And leveraged ETFs aren't meant to be held long term. This is a fact of which everyone in finance is aware. Even if you're clearly right, the volatility decay will take you down over the next few months. These companies are not even regulated as financial institutions in South Korea. They fall under the category of “prepaid installment transaction businesses”. 42% of them are technically insolvent now. There are six bills in the legislature, but none have been passed so far. Harvard purchased the ETH ETF and kept it for one quarter, observed its progress, and exited all holdings. No attachment. No community narrative. Just math. That's a good example of institutional competence. It's the opposite of these funeral companies who seem to have no one in the room that knew what a leveraged daily-reset product did over time.

Apart from Bitcoin, which supports decentralization and full ownership, I am very careful with third-party investment platforms. This is the reason why I do not support the idea of investing in MSTR and 21 Capital. Well, everyone has the right to do what they want. However, there are several cases of investment platforms running away with investors' hard-earned money. Unfortunately, we can conclude that there are no trusted platforms again. If they carry out the operation for a few years, the next thing is to run away. It is becoming a pattern from a third-party investment platform.

The cryptocurrency space is saturated with projects and even as saturated as it is, more and more projects are still popping up by the day. That’s just the way it is out here and you’ve got to do your due diligence if you don’t want to fall victim to a scam or an obvious pump and dump token. Back in the day when I still looked for opportunities in other projects, one of the criteria I looked at was, if the developers behind a project is named, if they are well known and if they’ve being involved in a very successful project in the cryptocurrency space amongst others beforehand. That’s give you an idea of the people behind it and you understand whom you’re dealing with. You do a read on the individuals about the project and go ahead to evaluate the project under other criteria even more.

Most people who truly understand investing don't follow hype and typically conduct research on the assets they want to invest in. This is so they understand the journey of the company they want to invest in, especially regarding its ongoing innovation, revenue and profits, scale of operations and target achievements over a specific period. Many people fail in investing because they don't know what they're investing in, so when the company goes bankrupt, they don't know what to do. Research is crucial for understanding whether the company we're investing in is performing well and how it will grow in the future. Some experienced investors have even stated that they will invest if the company has targets and future growth, making it worthwhile. If you want to invest in crypto, Bitcoin is much safer than other coins because it has stood the test of time and its performance continues to improve.

Let's also not forget that this similar acts of this firm using individuals funds entrusted in their custody and was used for their personal businesses whether knowingly or unknowingly to the clients is also the practices of the banks. Of course we also deposits our funds in the banks and the management loans the fund's out for their personal interests which the depositors didn't permit them to do that because it's expected that we could demand for the funds at any given time except for those buying bank shares or those with fixed deposit accounts which is notable that they're investing on it. We all knows that no investment is risk free and so therefore, even investing in bitcoin isn't advisable knowing that the beneficiaries may ask for the funds anytime for the need they projected it for since death is inevitable and unpredictable. We should also acknowledge the short term risks of investing even in bitcoin but then, the risk would had been minimal than investing it on Ethereum which landed the firm in the great lost and leaving beneficiaries frustrated.

They most important point that need to be noted on that south korean funeral firm insolvency is misappropriating the fund for a leveraged Ethereum ETF. Who really think this will be a good idea honestly, smh. I agree with you, always do check and research on every firm or asset we gonna invest in. Some company are too reckless for their own good and some just outright don't understand how to manage money.

Research will be your friend before you decide to investing in any, whether that is on any firm or assets. You will pick a wrong way to starts and cause a problem for you without you can get your funds back. By researching, you will finds how to handle the risks because this will always shows in the investment so you need to learn it. If you don't know much the firm or the company, you don't have to take the deal but search for others and if that is Bitcoin investment, it is better you start by yourself and not rely on other third party because you should remember that they can bankrupt, run away, or even other bad problems so always be careful and research before deciding.