I vividly remember the first time I went to our morning coffee and wasn’t walking briskly with my head up high and shoulders back, happy to start a new day and read more about investing like I always did.
This day, I was walking slowly, my mind wandering. I realised that my work in investing would be much longer and more challenging than I imagined. There is a classic mismatch between expectation and reality, and frustration lives in that gap. My disappointment clearly showed that I had miscalculated the task at hand.
Why should I expect to learn any new domain just a year after reading 100 books? When did reading and time teach anyone anything? Besides time and reading, you also need hands-on experience, work hard, and understand companies and markets, a task that lends itself to much work and suffering.
There are many questions and answers; you don’t immediately know which should be asked and which answers should be taken at face value. Whenever you go to a new class, and the teacher asks if you have questions, you usually don’t ask questions. Why? Because you don’t know enough about the class to know what to ask. It is challenging to compute the answers even after asking the right questions.
The thing about investing is that any beginner will likely start from the wrong place. This happens because before you start investing, you need to learn about yourself and what kind of investor you would be. But you can’t know that before you begin testing stuff out. It is the dreaded chicken and egg situation, but don’t worry, everyone goes through this, and basically, the only valid action is to start anywhere, anytime.
My course of action led me through ideas of deep value investing, value investing, growth, quality, the dreaded HODL, Hold On to Dear Life, buying low, selling high, getting some technicals in, and small-cap and mid-cap investing.
I am an investor, but what investor am I? There are books to read, podcasts to listen to, YouTube channels to follow, and email newsletters to subscribe to. You can find your bearings by experiencing and following many ideas until you decide what works for you.
There are books you should read, like Why Does The Stock Market Go Up? – by Brian Feroldi, The Psychology of Money – by Morgan Housel, The Intelligent Investor – by Benjamin Graham, Where the Money Is: Value Investing in the Digital Age – by Seessel, Adam. Add dozens of others from economy, management, markets, finance, and accounting to get a well-rounded picture of the task. Add to these books about portfolio management and types of investing, and you will have an entire course in investing. And that is just the books.
What about learning from podcasts? You have Motley Fool Money, The Real Investment Show, The Investopedia Express, Millennial Investing, Behind The Balance Sheet, and The Acquirers Podcast, just to name a few.
This is not enough. You want to learn as much as possible about companies from different websites. Here, I can name Morningstar, Seeking Alpha, Yahoo Finance, Fintel, Finchat, Barrons, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investopedia, Capedge, Zacks, Simply Wall Street, and, for US companies, SEC.gov.
What if you like reading newsletters? You can start with Oaktree Capital, Investopedia, Behind The Balance Sheet, The Bear Cave, Forbes – Investing Digest, Stockopedia Newsletter, Nightview Capital, and The Acquirer’s Multiple.
If you like following people on Twitter, you can find Brian Feroldi, Brian Stoffel, Aswath Damodaran, Guy Spier, Morgan Housel, and Jim Gillies.
If you prefer to learn through videos, the following YouTube channels are informative and entertaining: Sasha Yanshin, The Motley Fool, The Plain Bagel, Damien Talks Money, PensionCraft, Long Terms Mindset, and Aswath Damordaran.
Then there are accounting terms, investing terms, strategies and tactics to consider, all of which work differently. Which is the best and when? What does history say? What are these strategies’ base rates, statistics, and rules? Can I survive prolonged periods of underperformance? And what is that habit of comparing with a benchmark? What benchmark is good? Why should I compare to a benchmark? What am I doing here?
As you get into the weeds, more questions start popping up. Keeping an investing journal, writing ideas, and making a quarterly report helped me maintain my sanity and track what I did and why. I have learned a lot, and failures have helped me learn more than I expected.
In the middle of all this, you are trying to figure out how everything connects with everything else. The only way to deal with an adaptive complex system like the stock market is to learn how to deal with yourself first. Then, you can learn how to handle the unknown and find new solutions to unforeseen situations, like how our immune system and brain work.
Investing is not easy, but it is fun because it forces me out of my comfort zone and allows me to learn more about myself and the world around me. Companies, businesses, markets, products, services, and everything connecting them open a new window into reality, and curiosity is the fuel that keeps me going.
At a hiring interview, I was asked what makes me wake up in the morning, and my answer was simple: I wake up in the morning with a curious mind, ready to discover what reality has new to offer.
Investing is not easy, but the many discoveries it presents give me enough impetus to get started.
Investing is fun.
This article has been first published in SIGnet Newsletter – January 2025 | Issue 61.