₦airaland Forum

Opzyyy:
how do i get it nau. I jave signed up

It's a referral program where you sign up with her link and you both get shares this is subject to VERIFICATION by trove

obayendo1010:
If you are serious I have a business plan that can fetch 100k weekly after expense...legal business in Nigeria even in your neighborhood.
Hit me up if interested

The people to invest in such business should be the promoters friends, families, employees, neighbours, classmates, church or mosque members not to be marketed to random people on social media who can't vouch for the promoters integrity, experience, knowledge and Business acumen

Drenimarcus:
Inflation? The inflation now is mild compare to the incoming one. Sir, I will remind you in coming weeks like I said. Some bubble ‘bout burst WS.

Please talk o! make we know when to exit the Market immediately

Bid/ask

The bid price refers to the highest price a buyer will pay for a security. The ask price refers to the lowest price a seller will accept for a security. The difference between these two prices is known as the spread; the smaller the spread, the greater the liquidity of the given security.

As the current price represents the market value of a financial instrument, the bid and ask prices represent the maximum buying and minimum selling price respectively.

*************************************************
A dividend trap is a company offering a good yield that you can picture yourself retiring on. Behind that high yield, there is a company with a flawed business model. Be careful with them.

$SOS Ltd. Announces Pricing of $125.0 Million Registered Direct Offering at $5 a share

By Yazga

Below are the Trade Ideas for March 30th 2021

The Market:
Futures flat right now with S& and Nasdaq slightly red.
Imo we’re coming close to a reversal of tech and growth sectors, visual on QQQ is in inverse head and shoulder pattern and can see breakout when it breaks the downtrend. Key support is going to be at ~$308 for pattern to stay intact.

On SPY, closed above key level at $395.5, on a green open should continue to act as support with next support levels at $393, $391. Next resistance levels $398, $400.

 
Swing Plays for Today:
*Reminder: my buy/sell alerts is just what I’m doing and should just be used for ideas. Not every entry/exit will be perfect timing.

$VIAC & $DISCA: both plays from institution liquidations, share prices have obviously been overinflated but after the drop are down to healthy levels. Heavily oversold and both companies are larger-caps, so should get bought up and bounce here imo. Watching support levels $43 on VIAC, $40 on DISCA to hold for reversal.

$AMD: watching if it can break the short-term downtrend, has room for the breakout up to $80-85 range. Would stay away if it can’t breakout in the next 1-2 days since that would look likely for a breakdown and gap down below $74.

$MARA: if BTC continues momentum MARA can see a breakout up to past highs at $50. Tough one to swing since anything can happen with crypto overnight, higher risk/high reward play

$AAPL: coming close to end of descending triangle, if it breaks out can see quick to $125. $120 is key support to hold

$ROOT: watching this one closely, has 40% short float and will see breakout and likely squeeze on a break above $15. Potential bounce area $12-13 range

$IRDM: should get buying pressure from ARKX (4.2% of ETF), more of a mid-cap company at about $5B but smaller cap than any of the other top holdings. Targeting $42 as first target and on a break above can see a gap-up to $45

$TRMB: Looking like it’ll be the top holding in ARKX at about 8.5% of ETF, should give it lots of buying pressure over the next couple days. Targeting $80-85 on swing. Has been holding 200 MA as support on 4hr

$EH: coming close to end of descending triangle, $30 is gonna be key support to hold and can break out towards $40 on the break of downtrend.

 
Day Trade Setups for Today:
*Reminder: Day-Trading is very risky and only for those who understand the risks and how to read technical analysis!
$PLTR:
Long Above 22.06 Targets: 22.34, 22.86
Short Below 21 Targets: 20.76, 20.60, 20.25, 20.12
(Big buyer at 21 on ARCA INET)

$SLV:
Long Above 23.06 Targets: 23.25, 23.26
Short Below 22.47 Targets: 22.25, 22.04, 21.75, 21.50

$NIO:
Long Above 36.20 Targets: 36.50, 36.73
Short Below 34.80 Targets: 34.50, 34.39, 34.22, 34, 33.28, 33.10

$IQ:
Long Above 17.50 Targets: 19.92, 18.03
Short Below 16.50 Targets: 16.32, 16.09, 15.87, 15.54, 15.18, 14.52

Kingdemu:
Hi Yazga, how u doing? You banned again?

I think so because she requested you send her a dm

samguru:
Guinness is fast approaching my bus stop 35-40.

You are indeed a gurus, I made tasere cash from your call. Thanks

yMcy56:
COURT VILLE:
Full bid @0.22kobo.........
Now Una no go allow penny stock lovers to enjoy dividend of their commitments......

My bid didn't go through.

calcal:
Sure your past won't haunt trading on Binance, once you can make money freely, you are good to go.

It's free Boss

You have FREE coin waiting! Join #Binance and we'll both get $50 of either KCS, KLV, ONE, EOS or BNB FOR FREE. Sign up with https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=H1R24WDO
Use the link to register we both get FREE coins

Nwaotu10:
Yes of course, but currently, I don't have any meaningful savings.

it's free you don't need any money

You have FREE coin waiting! Join #Binance and we'll both get $50 of either KCS, KLV, ONE, EOS or BNB FOR FREE. Sign up with https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=H1R24WDO
Use the link to register we both get FREE coins

yeme7:
I'm a graduate of theatre Arts and media management

I can teach drama if u can connect me

Can I connect you to CryptoCurrency and stock?

yeme7:
I have been developing myself since before my pc got crashed... U see were of my problem started...

it's not a problem as long as you have a phone

heniford2:
bros is well we are in the same shoe

You have FREE coin waiting! Join #Binance and we'll both get $50 of either KCS, KLV, ONE, EOS or BNB FOR FREE. Sign up with https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=H1R24WDO
Use the link to register we both get FREE coins

heniford2:
bros is well we are in the same shoe

I pray for you and today, receive jobs and n Jesus name

Nwaotu10:
Mine is since 2017. No single hope to keep me going.
I'm already experiencing a severe depression symptoms.

Deep down me, I know I'm already dead. A walking corpse!

I look forward to resting in peace, brother.

I reject it for you in Jesus name, you are alive and strong, when there is hope there is life.


Would you like to try CryptoCurrency?

My Abuja People I have landed,

I bring you good News

You have FREE coin waiting! Join #Binance and we'll both get $50 of either KCS, KLV, ONE, EOS or BNB FOR FREE. Sign up with https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=H1R24WDO
Use the link to register we both get FREE coins

kennyade3h:
My qualification is Bsc Accounting. I am in osogbo at d moment . I can relocate if need arises. 08100992591

Google Audit firms in Osogbo.

if you don't get any result, then you have to switch to CryptoCurrency

You have FREE coin waiting! Join #Binance and we'll both get $50 of either KCS, KLV, ONE, EOS or BNB FOR FREE. Sign up with https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=H1R24WDO
Use the link to register we both get FREE coins

Who is the winner?

Your past will Always haunt you no matter what especially in a country like ours

You have FREE coin waiting! Join #Binance and we'll both get $50 of either KCS, KLV, ONE, EOS or BNB FOR FREE. Sign up with https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=H1R24WDO
Use the link to register we both get FREE coins

You have FREE coin waiting! Join #Binance and we'll both get $50 of either KCS, KLV, ONE, EOS or BNB FOR FREE. Sign up with https://www.binance.com/en/register?ref=H1R24WDO
Use the link to register we both get FREE coins

Robnectar:
hey bro,... u in lag or. abj?

Bitht

*LETTER TO A YOUNG INVESTOR*

Recently my firm was hiring a junior analyst – someone who’d work directly with me. In the past we’d post an advertisement and get hundreds of resumes and we’d have to dig through them trying to identify a candidate with the right pedigree and relevant experience.

We have probably employed thirty interns over the years to help us with research. We have learned from experience that educational background, prior experience, and even working toward the CFA designation had very little predictive power as to whether a person would end up doing great or just mediocre research. I decided to take a slightly different approach to hiring for this position. There was only one factor that really mattered to me this time – passion.

Yes, passion!

Investing, though it can be an incredibly intellectually stimulating and rewarding endeavor, can also be (and often is) very frustrating. Thoroughly researched and well-thought-out decisions don’t always result in the expected outcomes (you can thank Mother Randomness for that). But even when decisions do pan out, the time for gestation to fruition may be years.

Passion is the fuel that keeps a diehard, process-driven value investor going through the times when the markets are divorced from reality, when it feels like you are living Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

There is a saying in basketball: You cannot teach height. In investing, you cannot teach passion.

How do you find out if applicants actually have passion?

Build barriers for candidates to climb. I intentionally made applying for the job a very time-consuming exercise. We asked for the following from the candidates: List the books you’ve read over last twelve months (not limited to just investment books); give us a sample of a stock idea analysis; write a few paragraphs about two people (dead or alive) who impacted you the most and tell us why; tell us about three books that have impacted you the most and why; and finally, write us a cover letter to tell us why we’d be making the biggest mistake of our professional lives by not hiring you.

We contacted local universities and posted this position on social networks. Someone on Facebook opined that he would not want to apply for a job that required so much effort. My reply was, I only need one person (and it was not him).

We received four dozen applications. Most of them were just resumes with a standard cover letter that predictably said something along the lines of “Dear hiring manager, I am awesome. Hire me” – we completely ignored them.

However, we received a dozen submissions that answered every question posed by the job description. We carefully studied these submissions, conducted several interviews, and hired a person who went far and beyond what we asked for in our questionnaire.

After this process was completed, I felt that I owed the candidates who had done their homework the courtesy of at least paying them back with my time. I contacted them and offered to meet them in person or over the phone.

Here is why…

I know exactly how most college graduates feel. I remember that when I graduated from the University of Colorado in 1997, felt completely lost. I had no idea what to do next. As I was thinking what advice I’d give our candidates, I realized I just had to think what advice I’d give myself twenty younger. I did what I usually do when I think – I sat down to write.

So here it comes.

A Letter to a Young Investor (or my younger self)

To quote Mark Twain, don’t let schooling interfere with your learning. I recall that when I graduated from university, I was feeling invigorated by Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). I was ready to calculate betas and go on the expedition to look for the efficient frontier … only to discover that MPT, though it won Harry Markowitz the Nobel Prize, was not used by practitioners. It is used by academics and consultants (the latter being academics who could not quite make it in the real world).

MPT is a model, and just like many economic models, it comes with a warning label in small print: Ceteris paribus, which translates from Latin as “other things being equal.” Be very wary when you see this phrase; it is asking you to ignore what did not fit into the elegant formula, which in this case is the assumption that humans are rational. Creating a theory based on this assumption is as useful as building a plane by using physics that assumes the world is flat or puts gravity in ceteris paribus small print.

I have had thousands of conversations with other professional investors, and I have yet to have a deep and meaningful conversation or debate about beta or the efficient frontier.

Find yourself. Investment strategy is like a piece of tight clothing: Just because it fits and looks good on someone else, doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for you. Your investment strategy has to fit your personality; it has to wrap around your biases and life experiences. You’ll only discover your strategy, the one that fits your personality when rubber hits the road, when you start putting real money to work.

Which brings me to the next point.

Just do it. The best way to learn investing is by doing it. Don’t do paper portfolios. Take as much money as you are can afford to lose (because you may lose it), and invest it –. Look at this sum as real-world tuition and start investing one stock at a time. The most difficult part of investing is staying rational when you get punched in the face by the markets. Paper portfolio doesn’t punch you in the face; the worst they’ll give you is paper cuts. Understanding the emotions that losses and gains evoke in you and dealing with these emotions is incredibly valuable.

Don’t focus on building a properly diversified portfolio. Your initial focus should be stock analysis, not portfolio construction. You simply won’t have the time to do enough deep research to build a diversified portfolio of 15 to 25 stocks. At this point in your career, depth is more important than breadth.

Invest, don’t gamble. Do the analysis with the diligence and care that you would bring to investing your parents’ retirement savings.

Document your research. Imagine you are working as an analyst at a mutual fund and writing a pitch for a stock to a portfolio manager. And then after he has listened to your advice, you are updating him on what to do next. I promise you this: You’ll learn a lot from documenting and writing up your research. This will keep you rational. And there is another important benefit: When you apply for an analyst job, you’ll have something to share that sets you apart from everyone else (many with better educational pedigrees) applying for the job.

I’d recommend browsing through investment writeups on ValueInvestorsClub.com. This website was started by Joel Greenblatt – a terrific investor who wrote The Little Book That Beats the Market and You Can Be a Stock Market Genius. (By the way, I highly recommend both books.) It has 250 members (I am a member). It is very difficult to become a member, but you can browse every idea that has ever been posted there with a 90-day delay. This is where you can learn what the depth and rigor of your research needs to be. Writeups there are posted by diehard value investors, not academics, who put their money where their mouths are.

How do you start? What stocks do you begin analyzing first? Recently I was asked this question by a fellow who had undergraduate and graduate degrees in aerospace engineering. What do you think my answer was? I said “You probably know more than most people your age about the aerospace industry. Create a map of the industry and then learn about each company in the industry.”

If you got yourself through college working at a restaurant, and if you are not sick of it, restaurants and food distributors would be a great place to start. It is easier to start analyzing something you already understand. By doing so you are removing an extra layer of complexity involved in learning the physics of an industry.

Embrace ambiguity. When you solve physics problems you expect the answers to extend several digits beyond the decimal point. Physics is an exact science. In investment classes you were given precise inputs to punch into mathematical models and thus were expected to spit out exact answers. But unlike the inputs you were given in your classroom problems, real-world inputs are imprecise; indeed, they can be downright hairy. Thus heed John Maynard Keynes’ advice: “I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.” Vague rightness comes from understanding how things work and the relationships among variables.

Learn to say I don’t know. You cannot be expert in everything. Someone who has an answer for everything probably knows very little. Saying I don’t know when you don’t know requires honesty and self-confidence, and it opens doors for learning.

Make investment friends. My life over the last twenty years has been enriched by having great investment friends around me. Today my investment friends are really just my friends, with whom I share and debate stocks, though we also talk about what your normal topics – family, kids, etc. Investing doesn’t have to be a solitary, sterile journey; in fact it should not be one. Every investor, without exception, will go through a period where he or she feels like a complete idiot – the market will do this to you at times (trust me on this one). If you have surrounded yourself with the right (humble, non-arrogant, empathetic, pull-you-up and never-push-you-down) investment friends, they’ll provide the support that will help you cope with this difficult time. Also, if you surrounded yourself with friends who are smarter than you, then you’ll have an endless opportunity to learn from them.

Here are some books that I’ve found helpful.

I’d start with Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb, which will make you deeply appreciate the role randomness plays in investing.

There are a lot of books written by about Buffett, but my favorite is still The Essays of Warren Buffett, Buffett’s annual reports edited into a book by Lawrence Cunningham. Then there’sPoor Charlie’s Almanac, if you want to understand the second half of Berkshire Hathaway – Warren Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger – which also includes Munger’s speeches.

Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics has taught me more about economics than all my economics classes combined.

Margin of Safety, by Seth Klarman – one of the most brilliant investors of our time. Though the book is out of print, you can find it online if you’re resourceful. If you fail to find Margin of Safety, Howard Marks’ The Most Important Thing Illuminated is also filled with Klarman-like wisdom.

I was a big fan of the Little Book series long before I wrote a book for that series. However, the process of writing one made me appreciate the series even more. These books are usually written by great thinkers and practitioners (we’ll exclude yours truly), who often have taken their “big” books (as I did) and simplified and condensed them into smaller, more accessible works. This process of simplification and condensation forces you to keep what matters the most. My two favorite books in is series are The Little Book of Behavioral Investing, by James Montier, and The Little Book That Builds Wealth, by Pat Dorsey.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, written in 1923 by Edwin Lefevre, tells from a first-person perspective the fictionalized tale of the early years of the great trader Jesse Livermore. It is rumored that this book was actually written by Jesse Livermore and edited by Lefevre.

Though traders and value investors fish in the same pond – the stock market – and may even catch the same fish at times, their approaches and analytical timeframes are diametrically different. However, they do share a common element: Both activities are carried out by humans and thus are impacted by emotions. Reminiscences provides a great introspective look inside a trader’s mind and teaches many behavioral and common-sense lessons. My favorite edition is the one annotated by my friend Jon Markman. Jon’s annotations are like a book within a book; they take you behind the scenes of Lefevre’s story and give important insights into the key characters and the backdrop of that very interesting time period.

This is anything but a complete list, but it’s a good start for learning about investing.

I don’t want to end with empty platitudes, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t stress the importance of having an unstoppable, insatiable thirst for knowledge. Learning doesn’t cease when you graduate from university; it continues and never stops. As I look at my investment role models, all them, without exception, have that quality. If you don’t have that thirst, cut your losses and find another career or hobby.

A value investor needs to have a growth mindset.

By Vitaliy Katsenelson

*LETTER TO A YOUNG INVESTOR*

Recently my firm was hiring a junior analyst – someone who’d work directly with me. In the past we’d post an advertisement and get hundreds of resumes and we’d have to dig through them trying to identify a candidate with the right pedigree and relevant experience.

We have probably employed thirty interns over the years to help us with research. We have learned from experience that educational background, prior experience, and even working toward the CFA designation had very little predictive power as to whether a person would end up doing great or just mediocre research. I decided to take a slightly different approach to hiring for this position. There was only one factor that really mattered to me this time – passion.

Yes, passion!

Investing, though it can be an incredibly intellectually stimulating and rewarding endeavor, can also be (and often is) very frustrating. Thoroughly researched and well-thought-out decisions don’t always result in the expected outcomes (you can thank Mother Randomness for that). But even when decisions do pan out, the time for gestation to fruition may be years.

Passion is the fuel that keeps a diehard, process-driven value investor going through the times when the markets are divorced from reality, when it feels like you are living Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

There is a saying in basketball: You cannot teach height. In investing, you cannot teach passion.

How do you find out if applicants actually have passion?

Build barriers for candidates to climb. I intentionally made applying for the job a very time-consuming exercise. We asked for the following from the candidates: List the books you’ve read over last twelve months (not limited to just investment books); give us a sample of a stock idea analysis; write a few paragraphs about two people (dead or alive) who impacted you the most and tell us why; tell us about three books that have impacted you the most and why; and finally, write us a cover letter to tell us why we’d be making the biggest mistake of our professional lives by not hiring you.

We contacted local universities and posted this position on social networks. Someone on Facebook opined that he would not want to apply for a job that required so much effort. My reply was, I only need one person (and it was not him).

We received four dozen applications. Most of them were just resumes with a standard cover letter that predictably said something along the lines of “Dear hiring manager, I am awesome. Hire me” – we completely ignored them.

However, we received a dozen submissions that answered every question posed by the job description. We carefully studied these submissions, conducted several interviews, and hired a person who went far and beyond what we asked for in our questionnaire.

After this process was completed, I felt that I owed the candidates who had done their homework the courtesy of at least paying them back with my time. I contacted them and offered to meet them in person or over the phone.

Here is why…

I know exactly how most college graduates feel. I remember that when I graduated from the University of Colorado in 1997, felt completely lost. I had no idea what to do next. As I was thinking what advice I’d give our candidates, I realized I just had to think what advice I’d give myself twenty younger. I did what I usually do when I think – I sat down to write.

So here it comes.

A Letter to a Young Investor (or my younger self)

To quote Mark Twain, don’t let schooling interfere with your learning. I recall that when I graduated from university, I was feeling invigorated by Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). I was ready to calculate betas and go on the expedition to look for the efficient frontier … only to discover that MPT, though it won Harry Markowitz the Nobel Prize, was not used by practitioners. It is used by academics and consultants (the latter being academics who could not quite make it in the real world).

MPT is a model, and just like many economic models, it comes with a warning label in small print: Ceteris paribus, which translates from Latin as “other things being equal.” Be very wary when you see this phrase; it is asking you to ignore what did not fit into the elegant formula, which in this case is the assumption that humans are rational. Creating a theory based on this assumption is as useful as building a plane by using physics that assumes the world is flat or puts gravity in ceteris paribus small print.

I have had thousands of conversations with other professional investors, and I have yet to have a deep and meaningful conversation or debate about beta or the efficient frontier.

Find yourself. Investment strategy is like a piece of tight clothing: Just because it fits and looks good on someone else, doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for you. Your investment strategy has to fit your personality; it has to wrap around your biases and life experiences. You’ll only discover your strategy, the one that fits your personality when rubber hits the road, when you start putting real money to work.

Which brings me to the next point.

Just do it. The best way to learn investing is by doing it. Don’t do paper portfolios. Take as much money as you are can afford to lose (because you may lose it), and invest it –. Look at this sum as real-world tuition and start investing one stock at a time. The most difficult part of investing is staying rational when you get punched in the face by the markets. Paper portfolio doesn’t punch you in the face; the worst they’ll give you is paper cuts. Understanding the emotions that losses and gains evoke in you and dealing with these emotions is incredibly valuable.

Don’t focus on building a properly diversified portfolio. Your initial focus should be stock analysis, not portfolio construction. You simply won’t have the time to do enough deep research to build a diversified portfolio of 15 to 25 stocks. At this point in your career, depth is more important than breadth.

Invest, don’t gamble. Do the analysis with the diligence and care that you would bring to investing your parents’ retirement savings.

Document your research. Imagine you are working as an analyst at a mutual fund and writing a pitch for a stock to a portfolio manager. And then after he has listened to your advice, you are updating him on what to do next. I promise you this: You’ll learn a lot from documenting and writing up your research. This will keep you rational. And there is another important benefit: When you apply for an analyst job, you’ll have something to share that sets you apart from everyone else (many with better educational pedigrees) applying for the job.

I’d recommend browsing through investment writeups on ValueInvestorsClub.com. This website was started by Joel Greenblatt – a terrific investor who wrote The Little Book That Beats the Market and You Can Be a Stock Market Genius. (By the way, I highly recommend both books.) It has 250 members (I am a member). It is very difficult to become a member, but you can browse every idea that has ever been posted there with a 90-day delay. This is where you can learn what the depth and rigor of your research needs to be. Writeups there are posted by diehard value investors, not academics, who put their money where their mouths are.

How do you start? What stocks do you begin analyzing first? Recently I was asked this question by a fellow who had undergraduate and graduate degrees in aerospace engineering. What do you think my answer was? I said “You probably know more than most people your age about the aerospace industry. Create a map of the industry and then learn about each company in the industry.”

If you got yourself through college working at a restaurant, and if you are not sick of it, restaurants and food distributors would be a great place to start. It is easier to start analyzing something you already understand. By doing so you are removing an extra layer of complexity involved in learning the physics of an industry.

Embrace ambiguity. When you solve physics problems you expect the answers to extend several digits beyond the decimal point. Physics is an exact science. In investment classes you were given precise inputs to punch into mathematical models and thus were expected to spit out exact answers. But unlike the inputs you were given in your classroom problems, real-world inputs are imprecise; indeed, they can be downright hairy. Thus heed John Maynard Keynes’ advice: “I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.” Vague rightness comes from understanding how things work and the relationships among variables.

Learn to say I don’t know. You cannot be expert in everything. Someone who has an answer for everything probably knows very little. Saying I don’t know when you don’t know requires honesty and self-confidence, and it opens doors for learning.

Make investment friends. My life over the last twenty years has been enriched by having great investment friends around me. Today my investment friends are really just my friends, with whom I share and debate stocks, though we also talk about what your normal topics – family, kids, etc. Investing doesn’t have to be a solitary, sterile journey; in fact it should not be one. Every investor, without exception, will go through a period where he or she feels like a complete idiot – the market will do this to you at times (trust me on this one). If you have surrounded yourself with the right (humble, non-arrogant, empathetic, pull-you-up and never-push-you-down) investment friends, they’ll provide the support that will help you cope with this difficult time. Also, if you surrounded yourself with friends who are smarter than you, then you’ll have an endless opportunity to learn from them.

Here are some books that I’ve found helpful.

I’d start with Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb, which will make you deeply appreciate the role randomness plays in investing.

There are a lot of books written by about Buffett, but my favorite is still The Essays of Warren Buffett, Buffett’s annual reports edited into a book by Lawrence Cunningham. Then there’sPoor Charlie’s Almanac, if you want to understand the second half of Berkshire Hathaway – Warren Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger – which also includes Munger’s speeches.

Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics has taught me more about economics than all my economics classes combined.

Margin of Safety, by Seth Klarman – one of the most brilliant investors of our time. Though the book is out of print, you can find it online if you’re resourceful. If you fail to find Margin of Safety, Howard Marks’ The Most Important Thing Illuminated is also filled with Klarman-like wisdom.

I was a big fan of the Little Book series long before I wrote a book for that series. However, the process of writing one made me appreciate the series even more. These books are usually written by great thinkers and practitioners (we’ll exclude yours truly), who often have taken their “big” books (as I did) and simplified and condensed them into smaller, more accessible works. This process of simplification and condensation forces you to keep what matters the most. My two favorite books in is series are The Little Book of Behavioral Investing, by James Montier, and The Little Book That Builds Wealth, by Pat Dorsey.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, written in 1923 by Edwin Lefevre, tells from a first-person perspective the fictionalized tale of the early years of the great trader Jesse Livermore. It is rumored that this book was actually written by Jesse Livermore and edited by Lefevre.

Though traders and value investors fish in the same pond – the stock market – and may even catch the same fish at times, their approaches and analytical timeframes are diametrically different. However, they do share a common element: Both activities are carried out by humans and thus are impacted by emotions. Reminiscences provides a great introspective look inside a trader’s mind and teaches many behavioral and common-sense lessons. My favorite edition is the one annotated by my friend Jon Markman. Jon’s annotations are like a book within a book; they take you behind the scenes of Lefevre’s story and give important insights into the key characters and the backdrop of that very interesting time period.

This is anything but a complete list, but it’s a good start for learning about investing.

I don’t want to end with empty platitudes, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t stress the importance of having an unstoppable, insatiable thirst for knowledge. Learning doesn’t cease when you graduate from university; it continues and never stops. As I look at my investment role models, all them, without exception, have that quality. If you don’t have that thirst, cut your losses and find another career or hobby.

A value investor needs to have a growth mindset.

By Vitaliy Katsenelson

*LETTER TO A YOUNG INVESTOR*

Recently my firm was hiring a junior analyst – someone who’d work directly with me. In the past we’d post an advertisement and get hundreds of resumes and we’d have to dig through them trying to identify a candidate with the right pedigree and relevant experience.

We have probably employed thirty interns over the years to help us with research. We have learned from experience that educational background, prior experience, and even working toward the CFA designation had very little predictive power as to whether a person would end up doing great or just mediocre research. I decided to take a slightly different approach to hiring for this position. There was only one factor that really mattered to me this time – passion.

Yes, passion!

Investing, though it can be an incredibly intellectually stimulating and rewarding endeavor, can also be (and often is) very frustrating. Thoroughly researched and well-thought-out decisions don’t always result in the expected outcomes (you can thank Mother Randomness for that). But even when decisions do pan out, the time for gestation to fruition may be years.

Passion is the fuel that keeps a diehard, process-driven value investor going through the times when the markets are divorced from reality, when it feels like you are living Einstein’s definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome.

There is a saying in basketball: You cannot teach height. In investing, you cannot teach passion.

How do you find out if applicants actually have passion?

Build barriers for candidates to climb. I intentionally made applying for the job a very time-consuming exercise. We asked for the following from the candidates: List the books you’ve read over last twelve months (not limited to just investment books); give us a sample of a stock idea analysis; write a few paragraphs about two people (dead or alive) who impacted you the most and tell us why; tell us about three books that have impacted you the most and why; and finally, write us a cover letter to tell us why we’d be making the biggest mistake of our professional lives by not hiring you.

We contacted local universities and posted this position on social networks. Someone on Facebook opined that he would not want to apply for a job that required so much effort. My reply was, I only need one person (and it was not him).

We received four dozen applications. Most of them were just resumes with a standard cover letter that predictably said something along the lines of “Dear hiring manager, I am awesome. Hire me” – we completely ignored them.

However, we received a dozen submissions that answered every question posed by the job description. We carefully studied these submissions, conducted several interviews, and hired a person who went far and beyond what we asked for in our questionnaire.

After this process was completed, I felt that I owed the candidates who had done their homework the courtesy of at least paying them back with my time. I contacted them and offered to meet them in person or over the phone.

Here is why…

I know exactly how most college graduates feel. I remember that when I graduated from the University of Colorado in 1997, felt completely lost. I had no idea what to do next. As I was thinking what advice I’d give our candidates, I realized I just had to think what advice I’d give myself twenty younger. I did what I usually do when I think – I sat down to write.

So here it comes.

A Letter to a Young Investor (or my younger self)

To quote Mark Twain, don’t let schooling interfere with your learning. I recall that when I graduated from university, I was feeling invigorated by Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). I was ready to calculate betas and go on the expedition to look for the efficient frontier … only to discover that MPT, though it won Harry Markowitz the Nobel Prize, was not used by practitioners. It is used by academics and consultants (the latter being academics who could not quite make it in the real world).

MPT is a model, and just like many economic models, it comes with a warning label in small print: Ceteris paribus, which translates from Latin as “other things being equal.” Be very wary when you see this phrase; it is asking you to ignore what did not fit into the elegant formula, which in this case is the assumption that humans are rational. Creating a theory based on this assumption is as useful as building a plane by using physics that assumes the world is flat or puts gravity in ceteris paribus small print.

I have had thousands of conversations with other professional investors, and I have yet to have a deep and meaningful conversation or debate about beta or the efficient frontier.

Find yourself. Investment strategy is like a piece of tight clothing: Just because it fits and looks good on someone else, doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for you. Your investment strategy has to fit your personality; it has to wrap around your biases and life experiences. You’ll only discover your strategy, the one that fits your personality when rubber hits the road, when you start putting real money to work.

Which brings me to the next point.

Just do it. The best way to learn investing is by doing it. Don’t do paper portfolios. Take as much money as you are can afford to lose (because you may lose it), and invest it –. Look at this sum as real-world tuition and start investing one stock at a time. The most difficult part of investing is staying rational when you get punched in the face by the markets. Paper portfolio doesn’t punch you in the face; the worst they’ll give you is paper cuts. Understanding the emotions that losses and gains evoke in you and dealing with these emotions is incredibly valuable.

Don’t focus on building a properly diversified portfolio. Your initial focus should be stock analysis, not portfolio construction. You simply won’t have the time to do enough deep research to build a diversified portfolio of 15 to 25 stocks. At this point in your career, depth is more important than breadth.

Invest, don’t gamble. Do the analysis with the diligence and care that you would bring to investing your parents’ retirement savings.

Document your research. Imagine you are working as an analyst at a mutual fund and writing a pitch for a stock to a portfolio manager. And then after he has listened to your advice, you are updating him on what to do next. I promise you this: You’ll learn a lot from documenting and writing up your research. This will keep you rational. And there is another important benefit: When you apply for an analyst job, you’ll have something to share that sets you apart from everyone else (many with better educational pedigrees) applying for the job.

I’d recommend browsing through investment writeups on ValueInvestorsClub.com. This website was started by Joel Greenblatt – a terrific investor who wrote The Little Book That Beats the Market and You Can Be a Stock Market Genius. (By the way, I highly recommend both books.) It has 250 members (I am a member). It is very difficult to become a member, but you can browse every idea that has ever been posted there with a 90-day delay. This is where you can learn what the depth and rigor of your research needs to be. Writeups there are posted by diehard value investors, not academics, who put their money where their mouths are.

How do you start? What stocks do you begin analyzing first? Recently I was asked this question by a fellow who had undergraduate and graduate degrees in aerospace engineering. What do you think my answer was? I said “You probably know more than most people your age about the aerospace industry. Create a map of the industry and then learn about each company in the industry.”

If you got yourself through college working at a restaurant, and if you are not sick of it, restaurants and food distributors would be a great place to start. It is easier to start analyzing something you already understand. By doing so you are removing an extra layer of complexity involved in learning the physics of an industry.

Embrace ambiguity. When you solve physics problems you expect the answers to extend several digits beyond the decimal point. Physics is an exact science. In investment classes you were given precise inputs to punch into mathematical models and thus were expected to spit out exact answers. But unlike the inputs you were given in your classroom problems, real-world inputs are imprecise; indeed, they can be downright hairy. Thus heed John Maynard Keynes’ advice: “I’d rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong.” Vague rightness comes from understanding how things work and the relationships among variables.

Learn to say I don’t know. You cannot be expert in everything. Someone who has an answer for everything probably knows very little. Saying I don’t know when you don’t know requires honesty and self-confidence, and it opens doors for learning.

Make investment friends. My life over the last twenty years has been enriched by having great investment friends around me. Today my investment friends are really just my friends, with whom I share and debate stocks, though we also talk about what your normal topics – family, kids, etc. Investing doesn’t have to be a solitary, sterile journey; in fact it should not be one. Every investor, without exception, will go through a period where he or she feels like a complete idiot – the market will do this to you at times (trust me on this one). If you have surrounded yourself with the right (humble, non-arrogant, empathetic, pull-you-up and never-push-you-down) investment friends, they’ll provide the support that will help you cope with this difficult time. Also, if you surrounded yourself with friends who are smarter than you, then you’ll have an endless opportunity to learn from them.

Here are some books that I’ve found helpful.

I’d start with Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Taleb, which will make you deeply appreciate the role randomness plays in investing.

There are a lot of books written by about Buffett, but my favorite is still The Essays of Warren Buffett, Buffett’s annual reports edited into a book by Lawrence Cunningham. Then there’sPoor Charlie’s Almanac, if you want to understand the second half of Berkshire Hathaway – Warren Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger – which also includes Munger’s speeches.

Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics has taught me more about economics than all my economics classes combined.

Margin of Safety, by Seth Klarman – one of the most brilliant investors of our time. Though the book is out of print, you can find it online if you’re resourceful. If you fail to find Margin of Safety, Howard Marks’ The Most Important Thing Illuminated is also filled with Klarman-like wisdom.

I was a big fan of the Little Book series long before I wrote a book for that series. However, the process of writing one made me appreciate the series even more. These books are usually written by great thinkers and practitioners (we’ll exclude yours truly), who often have taken their “big” books (as I did) and simplified and condensed them into smaller, more accessible works. This process of simplification and condensation forces you to keep what matters the most. My two favorite books in is series are The Little Book of Behavioral Investing, by James Montier, and The Little Book That Builds Wealth, by Pat Dorsey.

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, written in 1923 by Edwin Lefevre, tells from a first-person perspective the fictionalized tale of the early years of the great trader Jesse Livermore. It is rumored that this book was actually written by Jesse Livermore and edited by Lefevre.

Though traders and value investors fish in the same pond – the stock market – and may even catch the same fish at times, their approaches and analytical timeframes are diametrically different. However, they do share a common element: Both activities are carried out by humans and thus are impacted by emotions. Reminiscences provides a great introspective look inside a trader’s mind and teaches many behavioral and common-sense lessons. My favorite edition is the one annotated by my friend Jon Markman. Jon’s annotations are like a book within a book; they take you behind the scenes of Lefevre’s story and give important insights into the key characters and the backdrop of that very interesting time period.

This is anything but a complete list, but it’s a good start for learning about investing.

I don’t want to end with empty platitudes, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t stress the importance of having an unstoppable, insatiable thirst for knowledge. Learning doesn’t cease when you graduate from university; it continues and never stops. As I look at my investment role models, all them, without exception, have that quality. If you don’t have that thirst, cut your losses and find another career or hobby.

A value investor needs to have a growth mindset.

By Vitaliy Katsenelson

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