Thread by @TihoBrkan

1/ Investing is so difficult. Firstly, you have the difficulty of finding good investments or deals. Assets which aren’t overpriced & have upside.

You also have the difficultly of protecting capital & applying risk management. Other difficulties, too.

But one worth talking...

2/ ...about today is the difficulty of being mesmerised by other investors. If you’ve read Livermore’s book you’d know he also felt for this trap.

Be very afraid of people who are super sure of themselves. Their track record speaks louder then their convictions & narratives...

3/ ...which they consistently put across in such an influential ways.

They will tell you great stories on how they are betting on deflation, on hyper inflation, on banking collapses, on currency pegs breaking, on oil spikes & market crashes.

They are great story tellers.

4/ Regardless of the outcome, regardless of whether they get 1 out of 100 of these calls right, they will claim they “called it.”

You must be strong & wise to resist their influence & stay the course, because real money is on the line & it’s easy to lose it on some narrative...

5/ ...someone sold to you & convincingly pushed you into trading.

Why are the old, tested, proven ways so unpopular & what is it with human being’s need to speculate, gamble, predict & entertain the mind that is so desperate for these addications like a gambler on a riverboat?

6/ Why do Warren Buffett’s (stocks) or Sam Zell’s (real estate) proven methods of wealth accumulation fall on death eats time &time again?

Ye, these greats have given you the “secrets” and told everyone out there the whole blue print to riches...

7/ What is it with people who have the need & desire to be amongst all the macro swings, entertained by volatility, as if they are apart of a finance Hollywood film or envision themselves as the next George Soros...

8/ ...playing along the news stories and media writers of fear and gloom as they are short this thing and long that thing, hedging this investment and throwing out macro slang any Greek would be proud off (gamma, delta, beta, alpha, etc, etc)

9/ Discipline.

The old friend of the successful.

Mr Discipline never visits the masses who are mesmerised by the promise of the next great macro bet, some narrative a celebrity hedge fund manger did in a recent interview you saw, which is a wild trade, asymmetrical payout...

10/ Instead of being a fantastic fiduciaries of people’s money, these “gurus” are chasing glory by taking on countries & risking not only their clients capital, but influencing so many on the sidelines, who buy into their stories & forgetting proven, timeless investment methods.

11/ I’m convinced most people are not into investing for the wealth appreciation and capital growth.

They are in it for the ego trip, for the intellectual stimulus & the addiction + need to always be doing something.

Always be in the next trade, next Big Short...

12/ Only those who have passed the discipline test and know it’s traps / pitfalls can understand how money is actually made and what it takes to grow it from nothing towards millions as you achieve financial freedom.

13/ But most are actually not after money nor freedom... that’s the thing I’ve realised.

They don’t care about being extremely profitable or financially independent.

They just tell themselves those lies.

14/ So you go & bet on a global recession, on a currency peg collapsing, on hyperinflation, on the next war or a market crash.

Good luck to you Macro Guru.

I’ll stick to simple ways of investing my hard saved money into stocks (when cheap) & real estate (only good deals).