Morgan Housel

I remember this young person tweeting me and basically saying,

if you can't double your money every month, you have no idea what you're doing in investing.

And I remember being like, yeah, good luck to you, sir.

But I also don't fault that because I think if you started investing in 2021 and you just started buying options on meme stocks, you're like, oh, this is easy.

Just double my money every week.

It's not that hard.

You have no context for what the base rate of success is.

And so I think that's really important.

Becoming a student of investing history

And understanding what to expect historically and the base rates around that is very, very important because you can become so influenced and blinded by the expectations of your first six months of investing, good or bad, in a way that can lead you to really poor expectations.

Do you know the investor Jeremy Grantham?

Yeah.

Very famous investor, very smart investor, successful investor, notoriously known for being bearish.

Not always, but historically tends to be pretty bearish.

I remember reading this thing that he began his career in the teeth of a vicious bear market.

That was his early experience.

And everything we know about psychology is like early experiences leave scars.

They stick around for a long time.

So you can easily imagine an alternative history of where Jeremy Grantham started his career during a tech bubble and became a momentum investor, like sky's the limit kind of person.

Maybe not, but I think that tends to be true that we are all just like products of our early experiences.