Are you an investing junkie? Do you read every book, listen to every investing show and attend seminars that promise to make you millions of dollars by this time next month?
Are you glued to your desk following the ticker for hours at a time?
Honestly, that’s not the way to make money in the stock market. You have a choice: spend your time doing unproductive things or make a conscious decision to learn what has worked well in the past and use it to become a stock market millionaire.
However in order to achieve this goal you need to do something radically different from what the average (or even above-average) investor is currently doing. The best advice I’ve ever heard about winning is simply, “If someone is doing something better than you are, learn what they’re doing and do the same thing.”
So rather than spending your time randomly following advice from people who have never achieved real success, it’s far better to devote your time analyzing the strategies and tactics of super-investors such as Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger and Peter Lynch.
If you do that, you have the greatest chance of uber-success, because these investors have actually accomplished what most can only dream about. Just about anyone who follows a proven value investing strategy ends up wealthy. Of course not many people do this because it is a strategy that takes time, requires patience and goes against the grain of what most people are doing.
And since human nature likes to be part of the crowd, and shuns going against the crowd, it also takes a great deal of discipline to successfully implement value investing ideas.
But if you think about it, it makes no sense to follow the crowd in this particular endeavour because the crowd is not successful at investing. If the crowd were all stock market millionaires and billionaires, then following the crowd would be a superb idea. But they’re not. They’re not even close. So why would you want to do what is obviously not working.
On the other hand, investors who follow the ideas of Warren Buffett are millionaires and billionaires. Warren Buffett himself used exactly what he teaches to make many billions of dollars. That’s why it makes sense to piggyback on Buffett’s teachings and implement his ideas in your personal portfolios.
Value investing has been hailed as a money miracle for thousands of people and it can work for you too. But first you have to learn what it is and how to implement it correctly.
Then you have to be so confident that it will get you where you want to be, that you simply follow it regardless of what your emotions (and your well-meaning friends) are telling you to do.
Perhaps the biggest cause of failure for most investors is their lack of discipline. They allow their emotions, particularly fear and greed, to affect their investment decisions and that usually leads to large losses.
However if you believe in your value investing system, that will determine your actions. And your actions will be based on a proven strategy that works rather than ad-hoc, emotion-driven actions that have been shown over and over again to produce continual losses over time.
Of course there’s quite a bit of skepticism about making lots of money in the stock market. Many think it can’t be done or that it’s gambling or that only those with the right connections can do it.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Obviously the investing realm is filled with the dreamers, the greedy and the scam artists. But the fact is, there are quite a few people who have become rich by investing correctly in the stock market. And right now is, with the technology and vast amounts of quickly accessible information available to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, the greatest opportunity in history to create huge amounts of wealth in the stock market over your investing lifetime.
Today, more people are making more money in the stock market than at any other time. Unfortunately more people are also losing more money than at any other time.
The world has changed dramatically in the past few decades and it will continue to change as we move forward. However the basic concepts built into value investing don’t change. The methods we now have to implement these concepts change rapidly, but the actual concepts are timeless.
So remember this: Technological change will continue at an ever-increasing pace and you must harness this change to better implement the unchanging concepts that have been proven to build substantial wealth in the stock market.
The sooner you start, the better off you and your family will be in the future.
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