Rapid-Fire Best insights of the week🔥
Rapid-Fire Best insights of the week🔥
& the day I wore a space suit in China
Happy Friday everyone!
Another week in the books. Here’s a breakdown of my best insights, tools & strategies for the week:
Book I just bought: Viral - The Search for the Origin of COVID-19
This book won’t be available for another 2 months, but Matt Ridley is one of my favorite authors and I have no doubt this book is going to be amazing.
On a more business-y note, I also bought Anything You Want - 40 Lessons For a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers and Code Breaker - The Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson (it was a busy week!)
One of the questions I’ve been trying to ask myself more is: "what if I can only subtract to solve problems?"
You can apply this question to almost every area of your life - and particularly to investing.
You’re going to get much better investment results if you:
stop reading the news
don’t look at the prices of any stocks you own
delete all stock tracking apps from your phone & computer
focus on acquiring fewer high-quality assets rather than dozens of mediocre assets just for the sake of diversifying.
Then, every 6 months, check-in for an hour and rebalance your portfolio if needed.
That’s because great investing is almost exclusively about doing less.
It’s about hacking your psychology into not getting fearful or greedy - which is when you panic-sell, change your mind every 2 hours, question every decision you make, etc.
That’s why so many people do better in real estate. They don’t check the price of their house daily, so they’re able to hold on for much longer.
Successful investing isn’t hard. But buying the right asset is just 5% of it.
95% of it is holding on for long periods of time and letting compounding do its work.
Like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s business partner would say -
“Understanding both the power of compound interest and the difficulty in getting it is at the heart of understanding a lot of things in life”
Damn Charlie, that’s deep.
Speaking of Charlie Munger, a trend that’s worth paying attention to is China.
Charlie Munger has been a lifelong investor in China, and he keeps repeating to anyone who will listen that the strongest companies in the world are in China - not America.
With that said, China has gone through a lot of changes in the last few months.
For example, China banned children under 18 from playing video games for more than 3 hours per week (a rule I’m sure my parents would have been thrilled with when I was a teenager…)
They’ve also banned private tutoring companies that help with school curriculums.
This sounds drastic, but make no mistake - these changes are voluntarily made with the long-term prosperity of China in mind.
I believe China’s role in the world will only continue to grow, which has fascinating implications for us as investors. I’ll be writing more about this in the short future.
In the meantime, I think billionaire venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya is right when he says…
“The Chinese are so smart. They send Fentanyl & TikTok to us so that we get addicted, and teach their kids science & technology so that they can take over the world. It’s brilliant.”
Anything else I think you should know: I wrote a step-by-step guide to buying your first NFT.
NFTs are like the wild west of crypto right now. But the risk-reward is very much worth it.
If you’re interested in buying your first NFT and participating in the craziest ride in the crypto world, you can find my detailed guide right here. It has all the steps you’ll need:
Sending you much love - and I’ll see you all next week,
Alex.
P.S: Speaking of China - when I was 17, I was on a game show on Chinese national TV. 200 million people watched it. This is what I wore for my 15-minutes of fame:
I then had to pretend to be Australian - and wear a kangaroo suit - because the role of the French was already taken by the guy next to me (Louis XIV wig and rose in left hand)…
Ah, the good old days. I hesitated to share this, but it’s Friday - so why not.
See you next week!