Back in 2018 I came across a blog, ran by value investor Joshua Kennon. I spent two years reading and rereading articles by him and other investors. Before that there was a period in 2015 when I opened up my first brokerage account. Before that, I’ve never owned any stocks, and I’ve never been on an investment platform.
I had used Acorns a little bit before that in 2014.
But what Acorns does is that it takes away all the investing decisions for you and instead it just rounds up your change and invests it in a portfolio of your choice based on the level of aggressiveness you want. You don’t see the mechanics of the market or the charts or choose individual companies. At least that’s how it was when I used it back in 2014.
When I was ready I opened my first account with Robinhood just to understand what an investing platform looked like, and how it function. I bought a few stocks, if I remember they were Barnes and Noble, a Californian Bank, and Arrow Pharmaceuticals. And on each one I made a small profit, in total it was $20 of profit because I didn’t invest much. I took advantage of fractions.
After selling out and taking my money off the platform I didn’t invest another cent until 2020. Because it was with Robinhood in that moment that I knew I wanted to become a serious investor and not someone that just gambled in the market.
Right before March 2020 before the market began to bleed, I bought Coca-Cola as my first serious stock at $55 a piece, and because I spent two years before that reading and understanding what it meant to be an investor I didn’t panic when I saw the share prices drop.
Instead I kept buying, and since then I’ve done okay. I also had a little bit more disposable income during that time and I kept every single one of my stimulus checks because my basic needs were met so I was able to save and invest them.
But now I’m a college student again and I don’t have disposable income like to I use to.
I’ve always been low income, and even when I did have disposable income it wasn’t much and so I had to get really frugal.
- I rarely ate out.
- I didn’t do outside entertainment.
- I went to food banks to save money on groceries with the purpose of making sure that every extra dollar that I did keep was able to be either saved or invested.
These weren’t hard things for me to do because years before that I came from a hard place and knew what it was like to struggle with more month than food.
It made it slightly easier when it became a choice to eat PB&Js weekly for lunch, tortilla chips and salsa as a snack, and dinner was what was leftover from the night before. I got away with spending $200 a month on food for a year before the pandemic began.
Knowing that I wanted to build a financial nest egg, the idea of spending on outside entertainment didn’t appeal to me. Years before that, 2016, I had purchased a Nintendo Wii for $25 at a local pawn shop and that was my entertainment alongside Netflix.
Here it is now 2024.
I have managed to build my first portfolio and am now starting over with my first investment fund with the goal of it becoming a serious private investment company with a current $105 aum (assets under management).
That $105 aum is hundreds, not thousands, or millions. I am starting at the bottom of the barrel, scraping change, gathering dollars and investing what I can while focusing on my studies.
On my journey I made mistakes, learned to trust my instincts, became aware of how even experienced investors can develop cognitive dissonance in their decisions, get caught up in a hot stock or growing industry. All these things are experiences that I think one has to go through or be observant of, to get on the other side and become a better investor.
It is not enough to just blindly follow online advice whether from reputable investors or reddit forums. Eventually you will have to build your own understanding of what it means to become an investor, understand that even some of your favorites operate with different theories.
Even though you will often find every successful well-known investor operating with the same fundmental rules and principles, their formulas might be different.
For example, Warren Buffett doesn’t use DCF (discounted cash flow) as measurement in his valutions, but another successful value investor will insist that using DCF is important in valuing a company and one shouldn’t invest without it.
Going back to how I started reading finance blogs in 2018, taking a great liking to Joshua Kennon’s blog, there was a point that I thought if I didn’t use DCF and other advanced formulas, that he uses then I had no business investing, even though my returns have said otherwise.
This is something that beginner investors fall trap to, we often think that we need to invest just like our role models or those we look up to in the investing world, and if we don’t then we shouldn’t even try to invest.
The thing is, when we are reading articles, books, listening to podcasts or watching YouTube videos from the investors we admire, it is important to remember this one thing…
we are gaining insight from their perspectives in which they operate.
These are not rules set in concrete that we must follow but instead these insights from their world allow us to take what we need and apply it to our own investing journey. What doesn’t apply we can graciously leave behind or use down the road. It is important to not try and wholly become your favorite investor.
You have to put some skin in the game and be willing to make the mistakes, learn the ins and outs of what it means to invest, own quality businesses, take responsibility for your wins and losses. That is the only way someone can become a better investor.
The other option is being the person who refuses to invest in index funds, buys the hottest stock touted on reddit, only to write a 10 paragraph message months later on how the stock went from a high $50 to a low $6, and now their only ‘hope’ to recoup losses is through a class action lawsuit, that likely isn’t going to go anywhere.
The Broke College Student 
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