I recently concluded that any minute I spend teaching anyone anything about investing is a lost minute for both of us.
Investing is fundamentally an odds game & only pain can truly teach that. The caveat is it comes with many wrong lessons. That’s where judgment comes in.
How to refine judgment?
Games of chance can speed up the process. Only with money on the line though. Enter pain.
The bad news is we learn slowly. Losing when the odds are on our side & winning when they aren’t teaches volatility but also bad habits. Enter time.
Knowing about odds teaches risk management but it teaches nothing about stock picking.
Risk management is more fundamental & yet more elusive but must be learned first.
Great stock pickers are made via thousands of hours reading balance sheets, cash flow & income statements. Also cannot be taught.
Those are the basics but ensuring success is another story. Likely comes down to:
“It is not only necessary to be good you also have to play well.”
If you are human you will fuck up the second part over and over. Fear & greed will make you. Enter the cycle of pain & add time.
(The above was originally just a series of tweets, ergo the format. Long time no write on here so I thought why not make it into a blogpost.)
hammerinvesting 