There’s a good chance you haven’t won the lottery. But you can probably imagine what you’d feel like if you did, because you’ve experienced a version of that kind of financial good news at some point. Maybe when you’ve gotten a bonus at work. Or when the IRS says you overpaid your taxes and sends you a refund.

Everybody likes free money. For the most part, that’s why we invest in the stock market. Of course, the act of investing in the market and making money, is the same act as investing in the market and losing money. The trick is to know which stocks to buy. And when to buy them.

Like gamblers at the horse track, investors have all kinds of foolproof strategies. There are studies that claim, if you write a list of company names on a henhouse floor and invest in whichever names a chicken poops on, you’ll come out ahead of most of these strategies.

The generally-accepted, best stock-trading strategy of all, is to hire a seasoned, smart, Wall Street investment advisor with a proven track record. But most of us can’t afford that. And that’s why there’s The Motley Fool.  

The Motley Fool is a financial and investment advice company that democratizes investing in the stock market by making insightful, dependable advice readily available to almost everyone. They have a website, produce podcasts, publish books and newspaper columns, and they have a radio show.

New Orleanian John Rotonti is a Senior Analyst and the Head of Investor Training and Development at The Motley Fool.

Even the greatest investors go through tough times. On the days you look at your portfolio and it’s not doing as well as you’d like, you can still capture that dopamine-high feeling you get on a good day, by stepping through the door of a business in the Lower Garden District, on Magazine Street.

The business is Piety and Desire Chocolate. The public-facing part of it is called Café au Chocolat, and the aroma alone in this place will transport you to a place many emotional miles away from financial stress.

Piety and Desire is a New Orleans bean-to-bar chocolate maker, which means they make their own chocolate from scratch, from cacao beans they get directly from growers, mostly in South and Central America.

The founder and chocolatier at Piety and Desire Chocolate is Christopher Nobles. Christopher started the company in 2016. Today he works with a team of employees and they turn out around 2,000 handmade chocolate bonbons a week.

It’s a pretty normal part of human nature to think that everybody else has a better job than you. But then, you rationalize it. You tell yourself, “Sure, so-and-so’s job might look better than mine, but I’m sure she has her own problems.”

Well, when you’re through rationalizing yourself into feeling fine about your own life, you’re in a secure-enough place to admit - there are actually people who have pretty awesome jobs. For example, being able to live in New Orleans and work for a major company with national reach, and spend your day picking stocks, like John Rotonti.

And then you look across the table at Christopher Nobles. Not only does Christopher get to create works of art for a living, but they’re made of delicious chocolate.

Both these guys work hard, and they have to deal with stress of performing at a consistently high level and delivering every day, but what they’re each doing is exactly what they want to be doing, and it’s hard to beat that.

Out to Lunch is recorded live over lunch at NOLA Pizza in the NOLA Brewing Taproom. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

 

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