Let's explore the world of investments together!
Launch: Interview series with founders and investment experts
Hey friends 👋
Happy April! We’re already a quarter into 2023, winter is almost in the rear view mirror, and markets are soaring despite bank runs in March. The markets feel like they should be rocky, but the S&P 500 is very close to its 2023 high 🤷🏻♂️.
Piggybacking off the good vibes, I’d like to formally announce the launch of a podcast series focusing on demystifying investing. My interview with Chris Rawley, the CEO of agriculture investing platform, Harvest Returns, got a lot of great feedback. So I’m doubling down on interviewing experts, and doing so publicly, so that anyone can benefit from the insights I gather.
It's no secret that our society doesn't prioritize education around personal finance, even though it's so crucial in our daily lives.
We rely on banks to store our money, but they don't have any incentive to help us optimize our finances. Their goal is to increase their depositor base so that they can lend off of that base.
With no foundation in personal finance, education around investing is even less of a priority. The wealthy pay people to optimize their wealth, but everyone else has to figure it out for themselves.
Like a lot of people, I too have been on this journey of optimizing my finances. I built a solid knowledge base in the workings of the banking, the economic and financial system through a decade of working in financial services, but when it came to my own personal finances, I was pretty lost.
As I started educating myself, a few things became very clear:
Assets build wealth: So if you are not able to build an asset or contribute to the building of an asset, the next best thing is to invest in assets.
Time is the only finite resource: That's true in life, but could not be more true in investing. So it's best to get started as early as possible.
Money not put to work is money wasted: Money is an investment tool, whether we use it to invest in ourselves by, for example, building skills or getting a degree. Or we use it to invest in things that we enjoy or things that we believe in, such as assets. At the end of the day, money is an investment tool at our disposal. The earlier we start thinking of money that way, the more likely we are to optimize how we use it.
Compound interest combines these three concepts - time, money, and assets - into a very beautiful formula that lets your money work for you. I talk a lot about this in Survival of the Financially Literate:
The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes that investing is no longer a nice-to-have. It's now a must have. With advances in technology over the last 50 years, investing has become more accessible now than ever before. So, today, if we're not investing, we're falling behind.
I think there's something very beautiful about investing. It's not about speculating in stocks, it's about putting your money into something that you believe. It’s a way of contributing to building our society. It's our stake in the world. Our ownership of what we believe in.
I am starting this podcast series to level the investing playing field. There are a ton of assets that we can invest in, but we're only exposed to those most talked about in mainstream media (e.g., the stock market). The goal is, therefore, to understand the depth and breadth of assets that we can invest in to help you and me become better investors.
So join me on this journey as I sit down with investment experts and founders that are making investing more accessible to learn about how they think about investing their greatest insights, and how they see the investing world evolve.
We'll dive into the pros and cons of traditional assets, such stocks and bonds, versus unconventional, alternate assets, suck as startups, wine, whiskey, art, and more, that are over time becoming more and more mainstream.
We'll explore investment portfolio composition and challenge the status quo such as the 60 40 stock bond split.
We'll talk markets, economy, financial systems, and everything else under the sun, and we'll dive into the founder.
And we’ll discuss why founders are building in this space.
Stay tuned for a ton of great conversations and insights!
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