Thread by @rajivmehta19

Another short investing story to help put successful investing into context.

David loves games, which is a bit of an understatement. He owns 756 board games, which I assume is a record if record-keepers kept track of such a thing.
#invest #nifty #investors

I found David playing an old arcade game at our office. I asked if he prefers board games to video games. He wasn't sure, so I asked a different question, meant as a joke but it elicited a great response.

"If you had to give up board games, video games, or stocks, which would you quit?" I asked.

"Stocks," David said, without hesitation.

This surprised me. David's passion for investing is part of what our company relies on.

But he explained why this makes sense.

Games are hands-on by design. They are meant to played, not left alone.

But a good portfolio can prosper for decades with minimal intervention. A basket of stocks is not a board game with turns and rounds. It's something that should be mostly hands-off.

After a proper allocation is set up, one of the biggest strengths of individual investors is what they don't do. They don't trade. They don't fiddle. They don't require daily monitoring. They let businesses earn profit and accrue to shareholders in uneven ways.

David's point was that he could be happy never touching his investments again, because he currently owns a big, diverse set of companies whose long-term future he's bullish on.

He probably won't do that, because he'll continue searching for companies to add to his portfolio.

But his point is that the game of investing is often won by the investor whose strategy is to "play" as little as possible – quite literally the opposite of a board game.