Archives for June 2022

I met a 26-year-old investment analyst yesterday, who sought my single biggest advice to, well, a 26-year-old investment analyst, on what she should be doing to do well in her career as an analyst and an investor.

Despite being involved in this work for the past 11 years of offering advice even when I am not asked for, her question led me to think, and so I sought some time to get back to her with my response.

There are, after all, so many things I can advise to a young investor or analyst, based on what I have learned in the past 17 years, that is, since I was 26 myself –

• Invest with an inner scorecard – Don’t change who you are to fit in.
• Have courage, even in the face of adversity – and there are a lot of adversities you would face in investing.
• Accept whatever outcome you attain, for what’s in your control is how you react to the outcome, and never the outcome itself – you can either rue over a bad outcome or take it as a lesson and move on.
• Keep learning, for nothing builds an investor’s career better than continuous learning. Learn from your own experiences and mistakes but more importantly from the experiences and mistakes of others.
• Avoid predictions, because you are rarely going to make a correct one. Also work with the intellectual humility that you know nothing, even if you are the smartest person around.
• Be patient, like a grasshopper, for that is how wealth is created.

All this is very useful advice. But since I have to offer just one advice as requested by that young investment analyst, it would be something that I learned from Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett many years ago –

Not losing money is a critical part of the stock investing process. Successful investors say it in different ways, but the point is always the same.

Warren Buffett has often said – “Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.”

But he has also said – “If you don’t make mistakes, you can’t make decisions.”

You see, the problem is not in making mistakes. The problem is in not knowing when you have made a mistake and thus not learning from it.

Unfortunately, openness to making mistakes and recognizing them is beyond most of us. Why is that?

Two reasons. The first, our society’s phobia for making mistakes, something that begins at school, where we learn to learn what we are taught rather than to resolve problems. We are fed with facts, and those who make the fewest mistakes are considered to be the smarter ones. So we learn that it is embarrassing to not know and to make mistakes. We feel bad when we find out we have made a mistake or do not know something.