Reel From The Real RFTR

How you buy an investment matters as much as what you buy. John Bogle figured this out decades ago, and created Vanguard, to give direct access to investments to retail investors like us. Sometimes there is no getting around it. Middlemen must be paid - bankers, hedge funds, VCs, private equity. But given that middlemen can end up with as much as 40% of our wealth after 5 decades of investing, we should always find the most cost-effective approach to investing - in stocks, crypto, real estate, bonds, art, collectibles or anything else.

As humans, we are these wonderful feeling and thinking beings. But when it comes to money, we are mostly irrational, and no one is completely rational all of the time. Money, on the other hand, is coldly rational. Money does not know who we are, why we exist, why we want it, and what we are willing to do with and for it. Money doesn’t know you, doesn’t believe in you, and feels absolutely nothing about you.

"Well Bought Is Half Sold" 

Investor billionaire Howard Marks knows a thing or two about price, and how much it matters in investing. 

Find out how I traded $SABR to test and validate this theory.

Size matters. Even in investing. We know this, by instinct. 

If we had to invest $100,000 all at once, we would spend time, take care, and be more thoughtful.

But we can waste that same $100,000 in small amounts of $100 each. It can be so easy to throw away $100 a thousand times.

In investing, small can be deceptive. Small is comforting. Makes us think we are smart, and never lets us suspect we are lucky. 

Small encourages us to be reckless with our hard-earned savings.

Large forces us to embrace discipline. Where 💰💰💰💰💰 are involved, playtime ends real quick.

In investing, you can be wrong half the time, and still win big. 💰 

But only if you know why. 

Don't accept losing as some sacred rule of the game. 

Understanding your losses is key to winning in any sport, and investing is no different.

It is the Champion's Way. 

However you make your way to financial freedom, it will involve spending less than you earn, growing your savings at a faster rate than inflation and doing that over time. That's the wealth equation. Earnings less Expenses (1 + growth rate) to the power of Time.

Happy New Year all! 

I wanted to kick off 2022 by talking about the decision to become financially free. It's definitely something you have to choose again and again, but I feel that it is totally worth it! The ups, the downs, the journey, the learning, all of it is worth it. That said, freedom is not free.

This is a love letter to investing, in appreciation of the game. Everything, absolutely everything we do in investing matters. The moves we make, and those we don't. It is important to remember this as we save and invest our way to personal wealth.

We work very hard to earn a living, and even harder to make sure that we have savings at the end of the day. But when it comes to investing, we let our money get away with laziness. We don't seek the absolute best companies / assets / projects for our money to go and work in. Learn to set your savings to hard, compounding labour. You deserve it.

What's wrong with earning a salary? It can make us bad investors.

Instead of seeking real, transformational wealth from our investments, we seek (a replacement of) salary.

What most of us call a “safe” investment is really an investment that performs like a salary, delivering small but frequent and repeatable amounts of money, because we are used to earning money in this way. drip, drip, drip, drip. 

Pls enjoy this episode.