Should you invest in the Nigerian stock market?

I was exposed to stocks as 'something' to buy as early as 6. My dad was a stockbroker. I remember him being concerned about documents, talking to friends and clients about stocks, and also seeing a lot of quarterly and annual reports at home. This developed into genuine interest, and eventually, intention, as I grew older.

I have to admit, my foray into stocks was not entirely as a result of objective evaluation of all my options. I started following stocks even before I had any money to put in it. When I did get money to put into it, I had to decide what to make of it.

I'll leave objective analysis to a later time. Here's my investment thesis.

Objective

There are a ton of things you could make out of the stock market:

• Capital growth
• Dividend investing
• Ownership
• Bonds & Debt
• Day trading

I had no difficulty realising dividends & compound interests was what I wanted to do in the market.

To crystallise that, think of this goal: having one's living expenses covered entirely by earned dividends—the height of passive income if you ask me. To sweeten that, think of what would happen if your annual expenses totalled 12m, but you earned 15m in dividends. It would cover expenses with change to spare for miscellaneous and re-investment.

I set that objective and followed it with a narrow-mind. Admittedly, this conservative, risk-averse goal leaves a lot of money on the table. Why did I set that goal? Do I know any better? Why do I still stick to it?

Simple, I'm easily distracted. I needed to set and run with a goal that was simple enough to execute and also track.

This goal ignores possible capital gains and does not react much to capital loss. That is a side-effect of focused, long-term objectives.

Earlier this year, I performed some fancy-looking—if you ask me—analysis of what stocks to buy solely based of their expected dividend performance. I'll write about how I got it done.

So, should you invest in the Nigerian stock market? It depends.