Each week you'll learn how to be a better dividend investor and follow the journey of a welder with a passion for passive income to $1,000,000 and beyond.
Last week, my earholes were pleasantly penetrated with the wise words of Howard Marks on the My First Million Podcast and one idea stuck.
Getting ideas to stick like Band-aids can be quite the challenge when we're buried with a daily avalanche of information.
Unless Elon Musk is going to put an memory chip expansion port in our heads, it's the general ideas, or mental models that Charlie Munger was so fond of that can be a cheat code.
The MFM hosts asked Howard about his reading habits and how he picks the books he reads and his answer stuck more than that ear-worm jingle I shared in the link above.
Howard said he never read any books about HOW to be an investor, like multiplying this by that and add this and subtract that.
The books he found most interesting have always been the ones about INVESTOR BEHAVIOR.
Kind of reminds me of the famous saying: "Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll sit in a boat and drink beer all day."
Facts, figures, p/e ratios, dividend yields, CAGR's and financial statements tell us where a company is today and how it got here.
But the MOST important thing in investing is what's going to happen next, and that is incredibly difficult to accurately predict.
Kind of like why Warren Buffett says its better to be approximately right than precisely wrong. And wrong Warren has been and you will be too. It's just the nature of the game.
Because nobody knows exactly what is going to happen is what makes investing so exciting and interesting!
It also makes investing more terrifying than being on Odo island and watching Godzilla emerging from the ocean and coming ashore.
The ideas in these books helped define Howard's successful and unsexy investing style of focusing on fewer losers instead of finding more winners.
Howard said, "I think any idea you can't make a movie about or won't make you sound really cool are generally undervalued ideas when they logically math out the way that one does."
To sum up his investing for 40+ years is like eating at his favorite Italian restaurant in New York: "Always good, sometimes great, never terrible."
Howard said he's naturally overly conservative and if he took more risks could have had much more money...
As of this writing, Howard Marks has an estimated net worth of $2.2 Billion.
Conservative investing for the win.🏆
What do you think and will you be reading any of Howard's books? Hit that reply button and let me know about it. I'll respond to every reply!
Disclaimer: This is not investment advice, just one person's opinion that may be incorrect. Do your own research before making any investment decisions.
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Each week you'll learn how to be a better dividend investor and follow the journey of a welder with a passion for passive income to $1,000,000 and beyond.
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