Top Investment Advice For Beginners and Experienced Traders
- By Bilal Hafeez
To celebrate our 100th podcast episode, we have curated the very best tips for investors recommended by our podcast guests. Through decades’ worth of shared investment wisdom, these tips will help you manage your risk and emotions, and keep you focused during turbulent times. Please feel free to bookmark and share this page, as we will keep adding to the list on our journey to 200 podcasts!
1. Do Double Up, Don’t Double Down
“Losers, average losers and winners press winner. I’ve been very lucky. I had a mentor, Julian Robertson for a couple decades. He had an uncanny ability to double up. He would never double down. If something went in against him, he would say, “We’re wrong, admit, you’re wrong. Take the loss and live to fight another day.” He said, when he was right and things were going his way, he had an uncanny ability to double up to press the winner. And I think that’s definitely the best advice I ever got.”
Mark Yusko (14 Jan 2022, The Right Asset Allocation, Avoiding Crypto Scams and 2022 Trades)
2. With Risk Comes Reward
“Simply put, take risks, know what you can afford to lose and know where you can go with it, sure. But some of the best things from investing is on some of the biggest risks.”
Rick Seeger (10 Jan 2022, Avalanche, DeFi and GameFi)
3. Have Conviction
“Know enough to have conviction… know enough to build a thesis that no one else or maybe not a lot of people have. And that will also actually carry you through the investment and have you hold it through the ups and down. “
Mark Stanwyck (10 Jan 2022, Avalanche, DeFi and GameFi)
4. Position Sizing
“In theory, risk is only sizing. So, if you think Bitcoin is too risky…you could size it at 0.1% of your portfolio or 0.001%. Too risky is never a reason not to own an asset. If something is positive expected value, risk adjusted, and relatively low correlation, you have to own it.”
Ari Paul (17 Dec 2021, Valuing Bitcoin, Ethereum Killers and Metaverse Bubbles)
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5. Patience is Key
“Patience is really important to do well when investing. So, don’t feel bad if you’re just making five or six percent a year. If you do that year in and year out, you’ll do really, really well”
Bilal Hafeez (14 Dec 2021, Inflation, Crypto and Investment Lessons)
6. Your Bonus
“Do not spend your bonus until you’re paid your bonus. I think that was a good one. I do live and breathe that.”
Nancy Davis (30 Nov 2021, How to Position for True Inflation Risk)
7. Aggressive ≠ Underdisciplined
“The sky is the limit. Being aggressive does not mean being undisciplined. You can be disciplined, but you should not set your targets low in financial markets”
Alex Gurevich (9 Nov 2021, Trading COVID, Inflation and Games)
8. Buckle Up
“It’s always hard… this is never going to be easy, so either quit or sort of man up, to a certain extent. But also, just know that there’s going to be swings and roundabouts, and ups and downs, and have a robust process and a robust self-belief, which, frankly, is a lot easier said than done. Don’t expect it ever to be particularly easy. That’s also, to a certain extent, what makes it continuing to be interesting”
Todd Edgar (4 Nov 2021, Managing Money, China and Advice from Paul Tudor Jones)
9. Know & Control
“I like to analyse that question from the opposite side, which is where I lost all of my money. What has caused me to lose money? There’s two things. One is how much do I really know about what I’m investing in? I’ve lost most money in esoteric investments around energy or things that I just don’t really understand. And then the second is how much control can I exercise over the investment? And I’ve learned throughout my life that control is almost more important than price.”
Scott Lynn (29 Oct 2021, Scott Lynn on Investing in Art, Diversification and NFTs)
10. What’s the Rush?
“You don’t have to do it. So a pass is as good as getting into it. And so don’t ever feel that pressure of I’ve got to chase this and I’ve got to get into it now. And I can’t stick to that, but it does sit with me that sometimes you should just let it be and either hold cash for a bit longer or leave your position where it is. So, itchy trigger fingers – not very welcome”
Azeem Azhar (27 Oct 2021, The Exponential Age, Unlimited Companies and Tech Challenges)
11. What do you Value?
“Every value investor does a different thing and distinguishes themselves in a different way. And so his advice was, you have to find your own style, not just your own genre, but really your own flair. You can’t just say, “I’m a value investor,” but you have to find what about the way that I value invest distinguishes what I want to invest.”
Nikhil Shamapant (20 Oct 2021, Ethereum to $150,000, Triple Halving and NFTs)
12. Forget Taxes
“Don’t be driven by tax. I’ve seen many personal investors, retail investors make mistakes, including myself historically, by making a decision that was driven by tax rather than by the underlying investment rationale.”
Marc Rubinstein (11 Oct 2021, Understanding Banks, the Crypto Challenge and Private Equity)
13. Love a Product? Buy Their Shares
“If you find a product that you really love, don’t just buy the product, buy some of the shares of the company behind that product. Because if you love it, then probably a lot of other people are going to as well. And so it’s more like retail investment advice, but it’s getting back down to the brass tacks of the product itself.”
Richard Muirhead (6 Oct 2021, VC Investing, Picking Winners and Web 3.0)
14. Just Five Minutes
“The best investment advice basically was kind of a very funny one – before you click, leave the room and come back after five minutes.”
Anas Alhajji (5 Oct 2021, The Energy Outlook, Climate Change and Arctic Oil)
15. Take Caution and Take Profit
“Only invest in assets which one can really understand. And that is very important. I made a mistake in investing in a FinTech because I really didn’t understand quite what they wanted to offer. I understood the product, but I didn’t ask sufficiently the question how we are going to monetize that. And that is more challenging in many cases. But really what you understand.”
“Sometimes people tend to be too greedy and to stay in too long, the trend will continue. And I learned the lesson that if you have a nice profit and you think the trend is coming to an end, better sell. Because even if it goes on a little bit more, and I always say the opportunity cost just doesn’t outweigh the losses. I think that’s true in many areas of life, opportunity costs, you may regret, but this is something you can accept, but losses are a bit more difficult.”
Josef Ackermann (22 Jul 2021, Running a Bank and the Future of Banking)
16. Risk Management Comes First
“I think the best investment advice I ever received was that any investment process should begin, not end with risk management. That is, you actually have to have a very clear idea of what risks you’re taking, and how those risks will be managed. Before you originate and execute or act upon any actual idea, you need to have that in place.”
John Butler (22 Jul 2021, Stagflation, Gold and Bitcoin)