It is always easy to get carried away by noise. An investor needs a lot of learning, patience, and skill to know what is important and what works in Investing. Every investor is searching for the magic pill - whether it is for health or wealth.
The smartest people in the world - men and women - know what sells, what makes money and what is good. Like the CEO of a big food company who famously said, “I do not allow my children to consume this sugary syrup”. Similarly in investing too what works is simple. Start early, earn well, live within your means, save (and later invest) well. That is all. Imagine I have to say this time and again a zillion times without the reader (viewer) feeling that I am repeating myself. It is not easy.
It is difficult to set up a newspaper or a magazine. However, to reach people it has become much easier now. All a person has to do is to create a blog or a video channel. Many people will not like to hear simple advice. Mostly, they want to hear words like ‘Futures and Options’, ‘Momentum Trading, doing a SIP in chosen stocks, etc.
These at best are the tactics - you need to know that UNDERSTANDING your goals, and sitting tight during tough times are very important. Sadly what is being thrown at you is ‘Financial Porn’ - it excites but does not help you in creating the relationships that are needed in life. All these terms like ‘FnO” etc. are good only to excite, but not in creating a nice corpus.
We also need to understand the difference between looking good when the video (or blog) is being made and creating Wealth for yourself in the long run is very important. It is easy for me to tell you “Cash is King” - may sound brilliant on the day of the Ukraine war, but be absolutely stupid just 45 days later when the market goes up. However, on the day you see my video I look like a brilliant investor. YOUR investing has to make money for you. My video has to look good on the day I make it. Remember this is a very big difference.
Unfortunately, for most people it is easy to get excited than to build a long relationship. Similarly in the field of investing advice most people want great advice - at least, that is their stated agenda. However, when you talk to them about ‘n’ - the number of years being more important, power of compounding, they switch off. Their message is loud and clear - give me a quick fix. How do you save an investor from himself (not original, Graham asked this question long ago, Jason Zweig talks about this often).
Given such a situation one shudders to think about what happens to a person who walks out in the wild near a big tiger safari park. Well he knew that there were no tigers in the morning - so he is taking a chance in the night!
How do you save this man from himself?
He is looking for fun and adventure - self-preservation be damned.
PV subramanyam
writes at www.subramoney.com and has authored the best seller ‘Retire Rich - Invest C 40 a day’