Seven Investing Principles

Posted on by
Reply

“To be successful, you don’t have to be special. You just have to be what most people aren’t – consistent, determined and willing to work for it. No shortcuts.” — Tom Brady

Seven Investing Principles outlined by Schwab:

• Establish a financial plan based on your goals. This involves examining needs and objectives, taking concrete steps to achieve them, and periodically reviewing progress to make necessary adjustments.

• Start saving early and investing today. Because investing is a long-term endeavor, investing now can lead to potentially greater benefits in the future.

• Build a diversified portfolio based on your tolerance for risk. This requires considering your comfort level with temporary market losses and investing in different asset classes to weather market volatility.

• Minimize fees and taxes. Even small fee reductions can increase yield growth over time, and minimizing taxes helps to maximize overall returns.

• Build in protection against significant losses. To manage market volatility, use defensive asset classes such as cash and bonds to help protect a portfolio.

• Rebalance your portfolio regularly. Periodic reviews and adjustments ensure that investments remain aligned with your specific risk tolerance.

• Stay focused on your chosen path. Maintaining a balanced portfolio and sticking to fundamentals helps investors stay on course even when markets fluctuate.

Master your mindset.
Invest with a margin of safety.
Focus on value, not market noise.
Protect capital first — returns come later.
Discipline beats prediction. Always.

Financial Illiteracy is Harmful

Posted on by
Reply

“Once you understand the power of investing and the magic of compound growth, your only regret will be not having started earlier.
Save (Pay Yourself First).
Invest (Long-Term).
Build Wealth (Financial Freedom).”

When it comes to financial literacy (FinLit), what you don’t know will hurt you! Since what you don’t know can leave you in debt, broke and bankrupt!

“When it comes to money, ignorance is NOT bliss. What you don’t know can hurt you.” — Sandra S. Simmons, financial literacy educator and the founder of Money Management Solutions

Why Socialism and Socialist Societies Fail

Posted on by
Reply

“We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” ~ Old Soviet-era joke

The failure of socialist systems and societies—historically defined as state ownership of the means of production and central planning—is a topic that economists and historians generally attribute to three core “mechanical” failures.

While many critics point to corruption or specific authoritarian leaders, economists argue that the system itself has structural hurdles that make long-term prosperity difficult to sustain.

1. The Knowledge & Calculation Problem

This is the most famous economic critique, popularized by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

• The Issue: In a market economy, prices act as signals. High prices tell producers to make more; low prices tell them to stop. They reflect millions of individual preferences and the relative scarcity of resources.

• The Failure: A central planning board cannot possibly know the exact needs, desires, and local conditions of every citizen in real-time. Without a supply vs. demand price system to tell them what things are worth, they end up misallocating resources—producing thousands of left shoes but no right ones, or building massive factories for goods nobody actually wants.

2. The Incentive Trap

Capitalism relies on the “profit motive” to drive efficiency. Socialism generally prioritizes “equity,” which often unintentionally breaks the link between effort and reward.

• Lack of Innovation: In a state-run system, there is little incentive to take risks or innovate because the “upside” is taken by the state, while the “downside” (failure) might be subsidized. This leads to technological stagnation.

• Labor Productivity: If everyone receives the same benefits regardless of output, the “free rider” problem emerges. As the old Soviet-era joke went: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

3. The Efficiency of “Extensive” vs. “Intensive” Growth

Socialist economies often look very successful in their early stages.

• Extensive Growth: They are great at “mobilizing” resources—using state power to force a rural society to build steel mills and dams quickly.

• Intensive Growth: They struggle when it’s time to be efficient. Once the dams are built, the economy needs to grow through better technology and smarter management. Centralized systems are historically poor at this transition, leading to “diminishing returns” where the state has to spend more and more money just to stay in the same place.

Socialist systems fail because they lack an Internal Rate of Return. Without a way to measure if a project is actually generating more value for its citizens than it consumes, the state eventually runs out of capital.

References:

  1. Mises and Hayek: Two Complementary Critiques of Central Planning | AIER https://aier.org/article/mises-and-hayek-two-complementary-critiques-of-central-planning

Steve Jobs on Hiring

Posted on by
Reply

Apple’s founder and CEO Steve Jobs on hiring:

“It seems like all the good people I really want to hire, it takes me a year to hire them. It’s always been that way, even at Apple.”

“I usually meet somebody that is really good. And you can’t get them. And then you go try to find other people. And nobody measures up.”

“When you meet somebody that good, you always compare them to this one person. And you know you’re going to be settling for second best if you compromise.”

“And I’ve always found it best not to compromise, and just keep chipping away.”

His VP of Marketing took a year and a half to hire.

“And they’re all worth it.”

Steve Jobs is a company founder and leader with scar tissue explaining what he

On hiring:

“It seems like all the good people I really want to hire, it takes me a year to hire them. It’s always been that way, even at Apple.”

“I usually meet somebody that is really good. And you can’t get them. And then you go try to find other people. And nobody measures up.”

“When you meet somebody that good, you always compare them to this one person. And you know you’re going to be settling for second best if you compromise.”

“And I’ve always found it best not to compromise, and just keep chipping away.”

His VP of Marketing took a year and a half to hire.

“And they’re all worth it.”

This talk is Steve Jobs at his most unfiltered. A founder with scar tissue explaining what he learned the hard way.

This MIT lecture will teach you more about building companies than every startup book you’ve read combined.

Steve Jobs’ 1992 MIT lecture will teach you more about building companies than every startup book you’ve read combined.

Steve Jobs What’s the Most Important Thing He Learned

Posted on by
Reply

A MIT student asked Apple’s founder and CEO: Steve Jobs what’s the most important thing he learned at Apple that you’re doing at NeXT?

Jobs thought for a moment.

“I now take a longer-term view on people.”

“When I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn’t to go fix it. It’s to say, we’re building a team here. And we’re going to do great stuff for the next decade, not just the next year.”

“So what do I need to do to help so that the person that’s screwing up learns, versus how do I fix the problem?”

“And that’s painful sometimes. And I still have that first instinct to go fix the problem.”

“But taking a longer-term view on people is probably the biggest thing that’s changed.”

On not knowing your own competitive advantage:

“A lot of times you don’t know what your competitive advantage is when you launch a new product.”

“When we did the Macintosh, we never anticipated desktop publishing. Sounds funny, because that turned out to be the Mac’s compelling advantage.”

“We anticipated bitmap displays and laser printers. But we never thought about PageMaker, that whole industry really coming down to the desktop.”

“But we were smart enough to see it start to happen nine to twelve months later. And we changed our entire marketing and business strategy to focus on desktop publishing.”

“And it became the Trojan horse that eventually got the Mac into corporate America.”

The same thing happened at NeXT.

They built software to help developers create apps faster. Their target customers were Lotus, Adobe, WordPerfect.

Then big companies started showing up and saying: “You don’t understand what you’ve got. The same software that allows Lotus to create their apps faster is letting us build our in-house apps five to ten times faster.”

“And you dummies don’t even know it.”

Jobs admitted: “It took them about three months before we finally heard it.”

Steve Jobs About Management

Posted on by
Reply

“We don’t pay people to do things. That’s easy, to find people to do things. What’s harder is to find people to tell you what should be done. That’s what we look for.” ~ Steve Jobs

Apple’s founder and CEO Steve Jobs talked to MIT students about management:

“I’ve never believed in the theory that if we’re on the same management team and a decision has to be made, and I decide in a way that you don’t like, and I say, come on, buy into the decision.”

“Because what happens is, sooner or later, you’re paying somebody to do what they think is right, but then you’re trying to get them to do what they think isn’t right. And sooner or later, it outs.”

His approach:

“The best way is to get everybody in a room and talk it through until you agree.”

Then this:

“We don’t pay people to do things. That’s easy, to find people to do things.”

“What’s harder is to find people to tell you what should be done. That’s what we look for.”

“So we pay people a lot of money, and we expect them to tell us what to do. And when that’s your attitude, you shouldn’t run off and do things if people don’t all feel good about them.”

Steve Jobs On Competitive Advantage

Posted on by
Reply

In 1992, Apple’s founder and CEO Steve Jobs talks to MIT students about competitive advantage:

“Hardware churns every 18 months. It’s pretty impossible to get a sustainable competitive advantage from hardware. If you’re lucky, you can make something one and a half or two times as good as your competitor. And it only lasts for six months.”

“But software seems to take a lot longer for people to catch up with.”

“I watched Microsoft take eight or nine years to catch up with the Mac, and it’s arguable whether they’ve even caught up.”

On technology windows:

“You can use the concept of technology windows opening and then eventually closing.”

“Enough technology from fairly diverse places comes together and makes something that’s a quantum leap forward possible. And a window opens up.”

“It usually takes around five years to create a commercial product that takes advantage of that technical window opening up.”

“And then it seems to take about another five years to really exploit it in the marketplace.”

He gave examples from his own life:

Apple II lasted 15 years. DOS lasted 15 years. Mac was eight years old at the time and would easily last another five.

“These things are hard. They don’t last because it’s convenient, or even because it’s economic. They last because this is hard stuff to do.”

Steve Jobs on Getting Fired from Apple

Posted on by
Reply

In 1992, an MIT student asked Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs the following question: where would Apple be if you hadn’t left?

Jobs paused.

“I’ve obviously thought about this a lot. I think everybody lost. I think I lost. I think Apple lost. I think customers lost.”

“And having said all that, so what? You go on. It’s not as bad as a lot of things. Not as bad as losing your arm.”

That’s Steve Jobs. Getting fired from the company he built, comparing it to losing a limb, and shrugging.

He spent the rest of the talk explaining what he learned about building companies.

Steve Jobs on Consulting

Posted on by
Reply

“Consulting is like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it’s only two dimensional. Without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional.” ~ Steve Jobs

Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs walked into a room full of MIT MBA students and asked how many were going into consulting business.

Many hands went up.

He said their careers would be “like a picture of a banana.”

“You might get a very accurate picture. But you never really taste it.”

He spent the next 60 minutes explaining what actually builds careers:

“Without owning something over an extended period of time, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one’s recommendations, where one has to see one’s recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes and pick oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can.”

He continued:

“Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better.”

“You do get a broad cut at companies, but it’s very thin.”

Then the line that made the room go silent:

“It’s like a picture of a banana. You might get a very accurate picture, but it’s only two dimensional. Without the experience of actually doing it, you never get three dimensional.”

“So you might have a lot of pictures on your walls. You can show it off to your friends. You can say, look, I’ve worked in bananas, I’ve worked in peaches, I’ve worked in grapes.”

“But you never really taste it.”

This was 1992. Jobs had been fired from Apple seven years earlier. He was running NeXT. He had scar tissue.

Fear of Missing Out

Posted on by
Reply

“The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” — Warren Buffett

The concept of “FOMO” (Fear of Missing Out), in the world of high-conviction investing, is a proven mathematical hazard for long term investing success. FOMO is the force that tempts you to abandon your “buy box” for a story.

Here is a breakdown of why FOMO is a structural risk to a long-term portfolio:

FOMO: The “Silent Killer” of Compounding**
In a market driven by AI narratives and momentum, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) is the most expensive emotion an investor can feel. It is the psychological pull that convinces you to buy a “Tier 1” company at a “Tier 10” price.

For the disciplined investor, FOMO creates three distinct mechanical failures:

1. The Eradication of the Margin of Safety**
When you chase a stock like hot stocks at their 52-week highs, you aren’t just buying growth; you are paying a massive premium for the *privilege* of being late.

The Math: Buying at a **40-50% premium** to intrinsic value means the business has to over-perform for years just for your investment to break even. FOMO turns a great company into a terrible investment.

2. The “Quality Dilution” Trap**
FOMO often strikes when a specific sector (like Semiconductors) is rallying. If the high-ROIC leaders are too expensive, FOMO whispers that you should buy the “laggards” just to get exposure.

The Reality: You end up holding companies with weak cash flow and no competitive moat. When the cycle turns, these “sympathy plays” drop 70% while the leaders only drop 20%.

3. The Reset of the Compounding Clock**
Compounding is a game of endurance. FOMO causes high portfolio turnover—selling a “boring” high-quality compounder to chase a “fast” momentum stock.

The Result:** You trigger capital gains taxes, pay transaction costs, and reset your holding period. You are effectively cutting down a growing oak tree to plant a dandelion because the dandelion grew six inches in a week.

How to Fight Back: The antidote to FOMO is JOMO (The Joy of Missing Out).

Stick to the 200-Day MA: If a stock is trading significantly above its 200-day moving average, it’s not “leaving without you”—it’s overextended.

Patience is waiting for the mean reversion.

Focus on the Yield, Not the Price: If the FCF Yield is below your hurdle rate, the stock is a “Pass,” no matter how many green days it has in a row.

Filter the Noise: Financial media highlights what *happened* (the past). Your technical analysis (ROIC, CAGR, Debt-to-FCF) predicts what will last (the future).

Bottom Line: The market is a machine designed to transfer wealth from the impatient to the patient. If you miss a rally because the valuation didn’t make sense, you haven’t “lost”—you’ve successfully defended your capital.

Are you currently feeling the “pull” of a specific stock that’s running away, or are you finding it easier to stay disciplined by looking at those names currently sitting below their 200-day moving averages?**