Why Most People Will Never Be Good at Investing

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August 7,
2019

…because most people in the stock market, most of the time, don’t do investing, which
is…

Thinking how markets work,

Understanding how people behave,
Studying businesses,
Sticking only with what is simple and what they understand, and
Buying stocks at appropriate valuations.

Instead, they are busy…

Envying (others making money fast or losing money slow),

Cloning (others’ stock ideas mindlessly),
Predicting (future of markets, stock prices, and economy),
Fearing (missing out on future gains),
Regretting (past mistakes),
Avoiding (accepting current mistakes),
Denying (reality, especially when it’s harsh), and
Indulging (in useless information and noise)

And if that’s not all, these often lead us to –

Trading (frequently, which adds to our costs),
Averaging down (on bad businesses),
Boasting (about our lucky short-term gains), and sometimes
Trolling (other investors on social media, who have not performed as well as us in
the recent past).

With such a busy schedule, where is the time to practice investing?

You see, to become successful at anything, we don’t need to always add more things but
give up on some of them.

However, when it comes to investing, giving up on everything mentioned above isn’t as

easy as it sounds. All these (mis)attributes and (mis)behaviours make us human (except
trolling others), and thus there is no point trying hard to eliminate all of them from our
lives at one go.

But if we work towards minimizing these – some starting today, and others over a period
of time – we may end up with an outcome better than we had ever imagined.

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I would leave you with a couple of quotes from the Upanishads, which signify how what
we think and do now, help us create our destinies –

Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.
Watch your actions; they become habits.
Watch your habits; they become character.
Watch your character; for it becomes your destiny.

You are what your deep, driving desire is.

As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed, is so is your destiny.

For good or bad, investing does not follow any other path.

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