In investing Boredom is fun. True investing or Intelligent Investing incorporates boredom and requires boredom as one of its components. It’s a fact. It is one of its main traits. If you are capable of a sound big decision you don’t wiggle around much. It’s not only the fourth law of motion by Buffett (“For Investors as a whole returns decrease as motion increases”) but it’s just the nature of the game for a “business mind” that knows what is doing and knows what he owns.
In fact if you have a participation in a business that is a wonderful business and you are confident that is going to do well and be profitable for the next 10 or 20 years or more you don’t think about selling it, right? Actually if you paid a reasonable price, so that you have a margin of safety, you want to find the time to keep an eye on it to see if you just can buy more pieces of that same business.
It’s as simple as that. So why few people think this way when it comes about owning stocks that are pieces of a business? Because the type of education makes all the difference. It’s about the approach. We agree with Buffett that the reason is “just because it is so simple” and people want to feel they are in the big league of the business world and they think they can be pros in that world only if they apply arcane formulas or concepts they only can learn through complexity. It is difficult to teach the opposite: simplicity. I can tell as a teacher that to make things simple is a difficult task. But it is the only strategy that pays off in the stock market and in business.
Teaching is a way to learn. It is a way to clarify your thoughts and ask yourself always the right questions. You master a subject for real only if you are able to explain that subject to a 6 years old or at least a 10 years old. If you want to be a “learning machine” you want to help and teach others. You challenge yourself in passing along what you have learnt in a way that is comprehensible. You can’t make it more simple than how it is, but you have to sharpen your skills in enunciating your thoughts when it comes to investments. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t think you know if you are not able to explain what you know.
I’m not talking about a language barrier or something of the sort, even though language is key and you can’t blink to somebody else in the dark, right? But If you really know what you know, you will find a way to communicate.
Having said this let’s come back to Boredom. Boredom is part of our life. A friend of mine would say that Boredom is a “happy accident”. Because you can turn it into something different if you have the right mind set and if you worked on yourself enough to control your emotions. You will discover than in true Investing Boredom is your friend. Let me say this:
I think you invest with Intelligence, Speculate with some emotionality (every now and then if you feel to) and day-trade with a big passion for gambling (that is a strong trait of human nature).
I can do some intelligent speculation every once in a while and I did. Multiple times, and I made a few bucks too. But I knew that I was not investing. I didn’t fool myself. The third activity, day-trading is just not my game. It’s not my personality, like I don’t sell short anything and I don’t like options. I just love the first activity. That’s who I am. I love to work a lot on something I like. I become obsessed in pursuing an interest or a goal and getting to a conclusion and if i do I make the purchase. Subsequently I stick with that thing. I was partly born that way because I remember I was that way as a small kid and then meeting Buffett strongly re-enforced this trait of my temperament. That’s what blikebuffett is about. Like I said multiple times blikebuffett is a catchy way to teach you that it is first and foremost about temperament.
You can blikebuffett and you can’t, but it’s not determined by how much money you manage or how many hours you spend reading financial reports and 10ks. If you think so you don’t know that much about investing and you don’t know that much about Buffett. Don’t get me wrong Buffett was and still is more disciplined than you and I combined together, but before that (and not only) first he has the “right mind set”.
It’s first the “How” and then comes the “What” he does. Today 2022 you can’t replicate the “What” but you can replicate the “How”. I put my Money on that, so to speak. I still do. And I’m so confident in doing so that I turned even boredom into something else, maybe a “happy little tree”. Actually I became that little tree so much that now I love Boredom, because it gives me plenty of time to do what I like!
Happy Investing!
Marco Turco
Feel free to reach out to me if you find my thoughts about investing interesting enough to break your boredom
marco@blikebuffett.com
Now you can also text me if you are interested in “Sunrise Wise” my educational program about “Value Investing”
+1 (954) 632 96 89