“People who lie to themselves about investing are the same as overweight people who blame their genes for their obesity.” – Robert Kiyosaki

Lessons From “Losing a Million Dollars”

Growing up in a family of teachers and artists, I came into my adulthood knowing next to nothing about money. Curiously, that didn’t stop me from making a good deal of it. After a two-year stint teaching English Literature at the University of Chad for $50 a week, I began my “real” career in publishing. And during the next 10 years, I brought my income up from $35,000 a year to a whole lot more than that.

Figuring out how to make money happened pretty fast. After consciously deciding to “get rich” in 1983, I was in the top 1% of earners by 1985 or 1986.

But here’s the thing: I wasn’t getting richer. I think I may have even gotten poorer during those first several years. I went from having a net worth of maybe $30,000 to having a net worth of less than zero!

What happened is easy to explain: As my income went up, so too did my spending. Some of it was on depreciating assets – things like luxury cars and furniture and watches and jewelry. Some of it was on luxurious experiences – like first-class travel and expensive restaurants.

But most of it was on what I thought were “investments.”

Those quotes are to highlight a point. My ignorance of investing at that time was profound. Looking back at it now, I’d describe my idea of investing as “putting money into something that might make me richer somehow, some way, and some day.”

During those early years of investing that way, I had one or two memorable triumphs and dozens of disappointments. Which I promptly forgot. That was how I was able to get poorer while my income was soaring.

When you think of investing as something as nebulous as putting money into opportunities that might make you richer one day, you forgo the chance to understand the primary difference between investing and building wealth. So, let’s start with that – the difference between building wealth and investing.

Defining Our Terms 

Building wealth is a good and sensible objective. Investing, on the other hand, is not an objective at all. It’s an activity. Something you do with your money. Just like exercising is something you do with your body.

If you want to build strength, there are many forms of exercise you can do to achieve that goal. Some work very well. Some are less effective. And some can actually weaken you. If your goal is to increase your wealth, you should likewise recognize that there are many activities you can engage in towards that objective. Some work very well. Some are less effective. And some can likely make you poorer.

In What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, Jim Paul makes some very useful distinctions between 5 money-related activities that are sometimes lumped into the sobriquet of investing. This particular statement caught my eye:

“Most people who think they are investing are speculating. And most people who think they are speculating are gambling.”

That sounded like wisdom to me. I took notes. Here are Paul’s definitions:

1. Investing – parting with capital with the expectation of a return on it over a longish time horizon, with those returns coming from interest/income and capital appreciation.
2. Trading – making a market on (buying and selling) a particular asset over a specified amount of time. The time frame is usually short. The trader tries to make money from the spread between the price he pays to buy the asset and the price he gets for selling it (a long position) or vice versa (a short position).
3. Speculating – buying an asset with the expectation that its price will go up sometime in the future. Speculating is about foresight, about believing you know that something will happen in the future that will affect the price of a certain asset.
4. Gambling – A derivative of speculating, gambling usually involves a game, but it can also involve an asset class. Almost anything. The gambler’s primary motivation is entertainment. He gambles because he likes to gamble. He also likes to make money with his gambling, but that is not his core desire because he will continue to gamble even if he consistently loses money.
5. Betting – Betting is also about risking money on the outcome of a certain event. It also involves chance. But the bettor’s primary motivation is being right, not entertainment.

Paul’s definitions are helpful because they identify not just the strategic and technical differences between these activities but also their different psychological motivations.

That is very important.  Our mental/emotional approach to making money almost always drives our decisions. If we are unaware of our inner objectives and motivations, it’s easy to make bad decisions and then to keep repeating them.

Our investment psychology is complex. It includes our risk tolerance, our capacity for deferred gratification, our mathematical IQ, our willingness to learn, our attention to detail, and also such things as attention span, compulsiveness, and even our ego attachment to our decisions.

When you break it down like that, you can see why it is the principal factor in our ability to build wealth.

This was certainly true for Jim Paul. As he explains in the book, his early approach to making money on Wall Street wavered between gambling and betting. He thought of himself as an investor – even a brilliant investor, when the dice were rolling his way. But after losing a million dollars and nearly ruining his life, he figured out that what he was doing was anything but investing. What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars is a blueprint for how he reinvented his financial life.

Paul’s definitions are perfect for people who, like him, have an affinity for risk taking. The definitions below are my attempt to interpret them for people that have a relatively low tolerance for risk and for anyone that, like me, has little interest in investing but a great interest in building wealth.

Betting and Gambling 

Paul makes an interesting distinction between the gambler and the bettor. The gambler, he says, is looking for entertainment, whereas the bettor is interested in proving himself right. If you are addicted to either gambling or betting, these distinctions are crucial. What is motivating you? Is it the fun of playing? Or is it the ego gratification of being right?

From a wealth-building perspective, however, gambling and betting are synonymous: foolish and habitual activities virtually designed to make you poorer. As a wealth builder, you should do neither of them. Ever.

Trading 

Paul’s definition of trading is straightforward: making a market on (buying and selling) a particular asset over a specified amount of time.

The trader’s goal is to build his wealth one trade at a time by making a profit from the gap between bid and ask. His time frame is usually short, the risks are usually significant, and the trades themselves are sometimes complicated.

To succeed, the trader must be willing to spend a good deal of time on his trading. It’s not something one should do casually or impulsively. I see trading as an occupation like entrepreneurship, where you must work hours every day and keep up to date on your business. But it’s also a complex and sophisticated business, one that requires knowledge, intelligence, and discipline.

I’d like to think that I could be a successful trader. But on a deeper level, I know I don’t have the mentality to do it right. I don’t have the patience. I don’t have the discipline. And I’m not willing to put in the hours to learn what I’d have to know. Trading would definitely be a wealth-depleting activity for me.

My advice to anyone that wants to try his hand at trading: Be humble. Assess your mental and emotional qualifications. Move slowly. Never make a trade that you don’t fully understand. And don’t put money at risk that you are not prepared to lose.

Speculating 

The speculator wants to build wealth by buying assets that he believes are either currently undervalued or will become more valuable. He makes his buy and sell decisions based on expectations of the future.

By that definition, most individual investors are speculators and most of what they do, which they think of as investing, is speculating. When you buy or sell stocks based on stories you hear about the economy, sectors of the economy, individual industries, and even individual companies, you are speculating.

There is nothing inherently wrong with speculating. Like trading, it is a perfectly legitimate way to build wealth. But there are smart ways to speculate and there are dumb ways to speculate. Wealth builders speculate smartly by doing what smart traders do. They learn as much as they can about what they are doing. They move carefully. And they limit their risks through a combination of diversification, position sizing, and stop-loss mechanisms.

Investing 

Paul defines investing as parting with capital with the expectation of getting a return on it over a longish time horizon, with those returns coming from interest/income and capital appreciation.

The long-term time frame is key. It provides a level of safety that you cannot get with any of the other financial activities named above. To be a successful investor, you have to have or develop an aversion to risk and an ability to wait. But those are good qualities to have. They are, to me, the essential characteristics of a wealth-building mindset.

Paul’s definition of investing also mentions income and appreciation (or growth). These are worth parsing.

* Growth Investing – Growth investing is putting your money into an asset or business whose value you expect to increase over the long term. In other words, you hope to profit from some circumstances that will make the business or asset more valuable in the future.

* Income Investing – Income investing is putting your money into an asset or business for the purposes of generating income (or interest) from that activity. Lending money to someone or some business is a form of income investing. So is buying municipal or corporate bonds.

* Growth & Income Investing – This is my favorite type of wealth-building activity: putting money into a business or financial asset that will give me both current income and future appreciation. The best of both worlds.

Rental real estate is a perfect example. If I invest $100,000 or $1 million in a small apartment complex, I am usually looking for an annual return, cash on cash, of about 6% ($6000 or $60,000). Before buying the property, my partners and I do a lot of work to make sure that our net ROI will be 6%.

But I’m also counting on the growth of my equity – i.e., on property appreciation.

The historic ROI for real property is about 4%, which would bring my total ROI on that $1million to about $100,000 or 10%, cash on cash. This is just the beginning. The wonderful thing about the real estate market is that it’s both local and easy to understand.

Because I know my local real estate market, I know the value dynamics of the neighborhood in which I’m investing. In one part of town, I can bet I’d be lucky to get an annual appreciation of 3% or 4%. But in an up-an-coming area, I might expect to get 8% to 10%. And because real estate is relatively easy to understand, I can safely finance a portion of my investment and thus dramatically improve my long-term ROI.

You can get both current income and equity appreciation by investing in dividend-yielding stocks, too. Some of the best companies in the world are of this type.

The point is this: If you are interested in building wealth, you must understand that many of the financial activities that promote themselves as investing are actually forms of gambling and betting. You should also understand that to succeed as a trader, you must treat what you’re doing as a complex and risky business. And, finally, you should understand the differences between speculating and investing and the three types of investing.

Understand the activity. And understand your motivation.

You can tell yourself, for example, that when you buy crypto currencies you are investing. But if you analyze the strategy by using the definitions above, you will see that buying crypto currencies is a form of speculation.

Bitcoins are not businesses. Nor do they produce income. They are currencies whose values rise or fall depending on myriad future possibilities, not current facts. Buying bitcoin right now might be a smart speculation. It might even be a way to make a good deal of money. But because it is based on future possibilities rather than current facts, it is nevertheless a speculation.

Buying a bunch of gold bullion coins because you believe the world is on the verge of a debt-fueled economic crisis is not investing. It’s speculating. It is speculating because the decision is based primarily on the belief that the value of gold will go up in the future because of a variety of factors that are not possible to predict with any certainty. This does not mean that buying gold coins is a bad idea. In fact, it may very well be a good idea. But it is not investing according to the definition established above. It is speculation.

Putting your money in a tech stock that has huge revenues but no earnings may be a brilliant move. But it is not, according to the above definition, investing.

Again, I’m not saying that speculating is wrong. On the contrary, it’s a perfectly good way to build your wealth… if you do it right. But that means accepting the fact that you are making your decision based on future expectations, not current facts.

Alas, What Most People Do 

Most “individual investors” buy and sell stocks and bonds based on information they have been told or read about, hoping that information will make them richer. The same is true for most people that buy gold and other precious metals. Their motivation is to profit from some imagined future event.

Most people that trade options do so because they have read about some systematic way to profit from options, without ever really understanding what they are doing. I myself traded options for a year or two – selling puts – and did about as well as I would have done putting my money in an index fund. At the end of the experiment, I had increased my wealth, so it met the test of being a wealth-building activity. But I don’t think the 10% return I got on my money would be enough to satisfy most people that trade options.

Today, almost everyone I know, young/old and rich/poor, is trading stocks. The new digital platforms have been designed to make trading incredibly simple and easy. What these people know about trading – or even the stocks they are trading – is next to nothing. But they think they know. What they are doing is not any form of wealth building. It is not investing. It’s not speculating. And although they call it trading, they are doing it with limited experience and even less knowledge. They are the equivalent of novice poker players playing with pros.

It might be argued that the above are arbitrary definitions. I cede that point. But I do think they are helpful in forcing us to pay attention to what we are actually doing when we put our money at risk. We need to understand the game we are playing – the costs, the benefits, the risks, and the potential rewards. We must also understand what sort of mentality we are bringing to these games.

We must take the time to ask ourselves: “What, exactly, am I doing?”

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