My colleague at work is a liberal professor who is proud of the achievements of Bidenomics. One of the images displayed outside her office depicts the US stock market at record highs - hooray! Let it just keep going higher and higher, like - like - a bubble, perhaps.
My father told me, “money grows legs and walks away on you.” He had done some modest investing in the stock market after the war but bailed out at the bottom of the market towards the end of the decade, when I was born. Just know that everything to do with money is full of deception. When I started my own career, my mentors said, “you can’t become rich working with your hands; make your savings work for you”. As I progressed, a continuing education lecturer said, “in the market, you never know whether your next move is the smartest or the stupidest; it is always one or the other”.
The problem with retail investing (without inside knowledge of the business) is lack of accurate information; if it were accurate, you wouldn’t have to contend with “stupid moves” (tending toward self-destruction). But every investor makes errors, and if you don’t examine why you lost money you will be condemned to repeat the mistake, because when conducting learning by trial and error (which is all learning), the education lies in the error, not the success. When you repeat the error, you will know it and gnash your teeth for your incompetence; when you succeed at investing, you attribute that to how smart you are and become vain and arrogant. Therefore in investing, as in all things, it is better to be humble and grateful for your loss, which is the fee for your lesson. In investing, like learning arithmetic, no one can teach it to you. You must teach it to yourself.
What Goes Up, Must Come Down
My father told me, “money grows legs and walks away on you.” He had done some modest investing in the stock market after the war but bailed out at the bottom of the market towards the end of the decade, when I was born. Just know that everything to do with money is full of deception. When I started my own career, my mentors said, “you can’t become rich working with your hands; make your savings work for you”. As I progressed, a continuing education lecturer said, “in the market, you never know whether your next move is the smartest or the stupidest; it is always one or the other”.
The problem with retail investing (without inside knowledge of the business) is lack of accurate information; if it were accurate, you wouldn’t have to contend with “stupid moves” (tending toward self-destruction). But every investor makes errors, and if you don’t examine why you lost money you will be condemned to repeat the mistake, because when conducting learning by trial and error (which is all learning), the education lies in the error, not the success. When you repeat the error, you will know it and gnash your teeth for your incompetence; when you succeed at investing, you attribute that to how smart you are and become vain and arrogant. Therefore in investing, as in all things, it is better to be humble and grateful for your loss, which is the fee for your lesson. In investing, like learning arithmetic, no one can teach it to you. You must teach it to yourself.