Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
25 Thoughts, Mantras, and Concepts For Business and Life 5-16-25
16 May 2025
In this webinar turned podcast, Scott Becker shares 25 powerful lessons for life and business.
Full Episode
This is Scott Becker, and today we've got a longer form podcast webinar. This is the recording of a webinar we had done with an audience on 25 thoughts, mantras, and concepts for business and life. We hope you enjoy this greatly. The first concept is, it's an investing concept, and this has come up so much often as the market's been up and down
You know, either one of the kids, an in-law, a colleague asks me, oh, should I buy the dip now or should I sell the dip now? Should I sell now because the market's crashing and I'm scared? And the first concept we start with in everything, and people have heard this a million times, but it's been so pertinent recently, is you can't time the market.
There are so many stats published about how the average turn of the S&P over 100 years is 8% or 9% or 10%. But the actual average that most investors get is far less than that because they end up trying to time the market. They end up selling out at the wrong time, buying in at the wrong time.
And there's a ton of history that shows that if you miss just 10 days a year in the market, a few days a year in the market, you've missed most of the year's returns. Like there was one day a few weeks ago when the market went up 10%. If you had panicked and sold out before that, you missed that. And you can't time the market, trying to time the market, trying to buy the dip, not buy the dip.
These are just fool's errands. And so constantly with that thought, and then the concept related to this that we use, and again, on your list of concepts, this is 25th, but it's not 25th in terms of importance. You shouldn't invest in individual stocks. Your core investment portfolio, at least for the huge majority of us, It should be built around index funds.
And if you want to screw around with individual stocks, go ahead and do so, but recognize it shouldn't be the core part of your portfolio. So many people you talk to, you don't hear – you hear about so much, oh, I invested in Apple. I invested in Nvidia. I invested in this.
I can assure you that most of those colleagues that tell you that have not done that successfully over the long run and don't talk to you when Apple's retreated, when Nvidia's retreated, or about their other stocks have done poorly. I was fortunate to invest in a company called Palantir, which has done great. It now went down 12% the other day as it had less growth than expected.
Another individual stock I invested in was Astera Labs. Astera Labs is famous for being one of the greatest losers this year in the stock market.
The concept, and again, it's a very small part of the portfolio that I invest in individual stocks, but you get constant reinforcement as to why it's a bad idea and why you're far better off not timing the invest, not timing the market, and sticking to index funds. So that's sort of mantra one. Don't time the market. Don't invest in individual stocks. The second concept is this.
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