When I was in high school we were asked to pick ten stocks that would be checked for growth at through the year in my economics class. I was in the class and they talked about how on average the average market always goes up. The teacher pointed this out. I asked him if you could simply buy an index and he said no, so I picked the biggest capitalized companies, top ten, and did pretty well. He asked me why I picked them, and I said the index was the 500 biggest companies, so I looked up what ten companies made up the biggest part of that index and bought them (ETFs were not a thing at that time). He looked disgusted and moved on to the next student.I learn to live below my means from my parents.
I got interested in investing by a friend at work who was showing me how to invest in individual stocks. I picked up the interest and moved to a different direction using mutual fund. During high school, my school ran an exercise in investing in stock and basically virtually everyone was bad at it.
My portfolio did not come from life experience but through a series of misteps.
I spend a good part of my childhood overseas, but I can't say it influenced my portfolio. I say it's a combination of a lot of reading and experimention.
I asked him about any company that would do something similar, letting you copy the performance of the average, and he looked kind of defeated and disgusted and wrote down the web address of Vanguard. I was not able to invest because I was under 18, my Father called the stock market a Casino and never invested in it when he had the choice, and the minimum amount was $3000 at the time.
A co-worker I met, a friend of mine, was super into Gold, only invested in gold, and he wanted to throw some money into the stock market for individual stocks, and I wanted to buy stocks as well, and I wanted an index fund. Our workplace was right across from an Edward Jones. That is where I got started investing, and my "advisor" was a pretty good dude, he avoided the high commission funds, but after his two years (that is when they start making you live off the commissions) he and his assistant left and they gave my account to someone else, and I moved most of my contributions to Fidelity, M1, and later Vanguard. My friend never decided to go forward with it because he did not want to give anyone his SSN to set up an account and thought of the stock market as purely a gamble on paper and thought only gold was a real investment.
Funny thing is, I did not think about investing until we just happened to be sitting across from a brokerage, it was actually the gold bug that motivated me to enter the market, but I knew from the start to go index funds. Later I read the book The Three Fund Portfolio, and loved its simplicity.
Statistics: Posted by Benjamin Buffett — Thu Nov 21, 2024 3:26 am