Good Financial Reads: An Introduction to Investing

I was on a call with BlackRock earlier this month and finance writer/investor, Morgan Housel was a guest speaker. He was asked to talk about the behaviors we use when investing, and how to use them to our benefit. His ideas were fantastic I want to summarize them for you here:

TIMING IS MEANINGLESS, TIME IS EVERYTHING

Stock market manias rarely look the same from one mania to another. But there are always a few telltale signs that froth in the markets is reaching a fevered pitch. One of those signs is investor interest in what’s called “penny stocks.” These are stocks of extremely small companies whose shares often trade (but not always) under $1 a share. 

A target date fund is an investment that is designed to provide a reasonable risk/return trade off given the year you plan to begin withdrawing from the fund. It is a “fund of funds”, which means it is a mutual fund that owns other mutual funds.

Running on autopilot can be dangerous. If a pilot’s course is off by 1 degree traveling from San Francisco to New York, they will end up 40 miles out in the Pacific Ocean. Likewise, if you don’t recalibrate your financial autopilot settings, you’ll miss your destination of financial security.

A particular setting that I find all my clients struggling with during their first review is management of their RSUs.

In the face of their worst imaginable fears, they do it. Probably not because they want to. They do it, maybe, because that’s the way we humans are wired.

What do they do?

They continue.

And the only thing that might be driving them is a faith in the future. A faith that the future will be better.

My wife makes fun of my driver.

Every time we play golf, she has not one, but several “witty” comments during the round.

Every time.

But, you see, I like my driver.  Yes, it’s 25 years old. Yes, it’s very small (or, I like to think of it as normal-sized as all the drivers these days look like balloons).

The phrase in the title of this post is said to have been first used in the novel “Don Quixote,” and is written as follows, “It is the part of a wise man to keep himself today for tomorrow, and not venture all his eggs in one basket.”

The message, of course, is that it can be quite risky to keep all your valuables in one place.

Imagine if you could have someone else go to work and send you the paycheck.

Wouldn’t that be great?

Now, what if that person were brilliant, and leader in her field?