Successful investing is hard work because it means disciplining your mind to do the opposite of human nature. Buying during a panic, selling during euphoria, and holding on when you are bored and crave action.

More from Ian Cassel

One of my favorite

Forbes estimates that Beanie Baby creator Ty Warner’ net worth is $2.7 Billion. This is an amazing achievement considering a bulk of it was earned during a 3-year time frame selling a $5 per unit stuffed animal.

The fact that Ty Warner’s Beanie Babies were able, without the benefit of a single ad, to outpace the combined annual profits of the largest toymakers in the world for even a few years is unprecedented.

To illustrate how quickly the bubble grew - In 1995, Ty Warner’s company Ty Inc had sales of roughly $28 million. In 1996 sales were $280 million with $90 million in pre-tax income. By 1998, Ty Inc sales reached $1.34 billion with pre-tax income of $700 million.

In Ebay’s 1998 Annual Report it disclosed Beanie Babies as material. “At times, approximately 7% of our listings involved Beanie Babies”. Furthermore, it was said that 10% of Ebay sales at the time were derived from Beanie Babies.

Ian Cassel
@iancassel

Your portfolio will naturally concentrate itself, the way it should be, into your winners if you just stay out of the way.

Ian Cassel
@iancassel

Great post. Lots of similarities with how you invest and successful microcap investing. The first bet is about the broad strokes. The subsequent bets is when you see the details fill in and average up. Buy low and then don’t be afraid to buy higher - sometimes aggressively.

Spoke to a group of students from London School of Economics this morning. So many great questions. As usual, multiple Qs gravitate around \u201chow do you know?\u201d Or how did you know or how could you know? It\u2019s the reason I wrote this. https://t.co/aECMjIFxw0
— Ho Nam (@honam) June 27, 2021

Ian Cassel
@iancassel

Poor Investors often disguise inexperience with arrogance. Rich investors disguise experience with humility. The richest person in the room is usually the quietest one in the room. The poorest person in the room is usually the loudest one in the room.

Ian Cassel
@iancassel

I became financially independent in 2008 at age 27. Or as my Father likes to say, I retired. Yeah right. It’s more like you exchange security for total insecurity.

I get asked a lot about how much capital you need to become a full-time investor. That answer will be different for everyone. It’s a personal decision. I was single with no kids living in Lancaster, PA. It was a great time to make that decision.

I would say a much better question is how much pain can you endure.

Can you sustain a 30-40-50% drawdown while also drawing it down to pay bills?

How would this affect you emotionally, psychologically?

Would two or three bad years in a row cripple you?

At what point would your investment strategy start to crumble by these emotions?

At what point does my advantage of “focus on the long-term” shift to “this next quarter needs to be good” or else..

Am I mentally prepared to perhaps go to my wife and tell her I failed and can’t support us anymore? That I need to get a job, that she needs to get a job.

More from Wise investing

KSL3d
@ksl3d

@InvestmentBook1 @may27capital @soicfinance @Investmental1 Added watchlist, for weekend 😊

Vetris_stocks
@vetris_stocks

Investing tid bits..

Size of your
REWARD and TALENT

Stock market is the only place where the size of the REWARD is far higher than the TALENT

I am an above average ordinary individual. But the markets have rewarded me hugely.

All it needs - Passion, Learing & temperament

Mish
@investmish

@HurriCap What a great summary.

This one struck a chord with me:

"With small companies, you're better off to wait until they turn a profit before you invest."

Many on Fintwit think otherwise.

safalniveshak.com
@safalniveshak

The amount you invest in stocks should not be decided as much by how much you earn and save as by how much you can lose and still survive to stay in the game.

Daniel
@MnkeDaniel

Li Lu is a well-known Superinvestor who has achieved a compounded annual return of about 30% since 1998.

He is also known for managing the money of his good friend Charlie Munger.

Today, he turns 56 years old, and on this occasion, here is some of his timeless wisdom👇🏼

1. Why Value Investing Works

The market isn’t created for value investors.

It is built in a way that increases the urge to speculate.

That’s why businesses are so often misprized in the short term.

Value investors can benefit from this circumstance.

2. Understand Who You Are

You’ll be more interested in some industries/topics than in others.

And in investing, you can choose in what industries you’ll look for opportunities.

Investors should use this advantage and be sure about their circle of competence.

3. Be a Journalist

Being an investor is a lot like being a research journalist.

You have to dig into the company on a level that journalists do when they research their stories.

You also need to clearly articulate your thesis and research and bring it to paper.

4. Find the Truth

A journalist also has to find the truth before he publishes a story.

Same goes for an investor. It could be fatal if he makes a decision before he knows “the truth” about a company.

Thus, he has to avoid all sorts of biases and misleading influences.

A thread on HN about bad code in legacy projects both makes me think how little we've learned as a discipline over the years and, honestly, how little credit we give ourselves for some pretty major

Fun going down this list and thinking: "Hmm, plausible at a well-run modern software shop", "Hmm, possible, but requires implausible tradeoffs", "Literally disallowed by languages", and "If you were to attempt doing that our test suite wouldn't let you merge."

I think we as an industry celebrate (not quite the right word) failure too much and don't celebrate success nearly enough. There is no DailyWTF for competent execution, word of which generally stays pretty local to the source while incompetence passes into legend.

Alrighty let me try to thread the needle on being the change I want to see in the world while not giving away anything that will get me in trouble:

Ruby has wonderful developer ergonomics. Typed languages are easier for machines to guarantee the correctness of. We built a type checker for Ruby (and I believe it is slated for OSS release sometime).

c.f.

Vibhu Vashisth
@VIBHU_Tweet

Rani Chennamma of Kittur was one of the first women rulers of India who fought against the might of the British Empire in 1824. Rani Chennamma was born in 1778 in a small village of Kakati in Belgaon distt of the State of Karnataka.

She was born into the Lingayat Community to a man named Dhulappa Desai. From a very young age she was trained in horse riding,sword fighting, archery and diplomacy. At a very young age of 15 yrs, she was married to the King of Kittur and became the Queen of Kittur.

It is said that King of Kittur Mallasarja was once moving around in the neighbouring kingdoms to find support to fight Tipu Sultan. It is then, when he came across Chennamma and he immediately got attracted to her sheer confidence and bravery.

Rani Chennamma and King Mallasarja had a son together who died very soon after the death of King Mallasarja in 1816. As the Queen of Kittur, Rani Chennamma immediately adopted Shivalingappa as her son and declared him the heir to the throne of Kittur.

This did not go well with the British East India Company who was enforcing the Doctrine of Lapse those days, according to which the adopted children of the Indian rulers were not allowed to become their heirs and if the native rulers did not have children of their own, their...

Noah Smith
@Noahpinion

Krugman is, of course, right about this. BUT, note that universities can do a lot to revitalize declining and rural regions.

One thing I've been noticing about responses to today's column is that many people still don't get how strong the forces behind regional divergence are, and how hard to reverse 1/ https://t.co/Ft2aH1NcQt
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) November 20, 2018

See this thing that @lymanstoneky wrote:

And see this thing that I wrote:

And see this book that @JamesFallows wrote:

And see this other thing that I wrote: