The best investment I ever made (under $250)

Hello everyone,

To celebrate International Women’s Day last week, I’ll share a painful truth most men don’t want to acknowledge:

women are on average much better investors than men.

There’s a simple reason for this: men tend to be overconfident in their ability to manage their portfolios.

As a result:

• they get an illusion of control which leads them to trade more than twice as often as women - which translates into higher trading costs, and
• they get the urge to buy and sell during downturns and upswings - which leads to more impulsive decisions than women, which tend to be bad on average.

If you want a good example of that - take my grandmother.

She’s 91, full of life, and is the best investor I know.

She checks her portfolio once a year during a meeting with the bank.

The rest of the year, she takes walks on the boardwalk, hangs out with her boyfriend, and reads romance novels.

And that’s it. That’s the story. Her returns are extraordinary - because she doesn’t do anything. She just lets time work in her favor.

I’ve said this time and time again but it bears repeating: picking the right investments is never the hard part of the job. In fact, it’s the easy job.

Holding onto them for long periods of time is the hard part.

Great investing is not a matter of IQ - but emotional control.

In the words of Warren Buffett himself - “the most important quality for an investor is temperament, not intellect.”

We think we need strategies, tools, techniques, and tips to become better investors.

And I try to bring you that in this newsletter.

But what really makes the big difference is how you manage that 2 million-year-old soft, fatty thing between your ears.

And what better way to learn to manage your emotions than to cram yourself in a freezing stadium with 12,000 people, no sleep, no food, no breaks, for 16 hours a day for 4 days straight?

Well, the best investment I ever made was exactly that…

In July 2018, I attended Tony Robbins’ seminar - Unleash The Power Within.

Now, some people think seminars are totally cuckoo. I get it, I’m European.

But Tony is a whole different beast.

Yes, you’ll be jumping around to electronic music at 10 in the morning with 12,000 strangers screaming “NOW I AM THE VOICE!!” from the top of your lungs, and hugging an uncomfortable amount of people.

But if you play full out, you’ll also change your life.

There’s a reason he’s coached 4 presidents, top athletes like Serena Williams and Conor McGregor, billionaire traders like Paul Tudor Jones, and everyone in between.

His methods work.

Now, I won’t attempt to summarize everything you’ll learn there because it’s not just about what you learn, but what you experience.

But one of the things you WILL learn is how to literally hardwire yourself to change a specific behavior or pattern.

Yes, that includes making impulsive investment decisions that sabotage your returns like 95% of people.

Pretty handy skill, right?

With a little bit of perspective, you’ll quickly realize that the $1,000 to $3,000 you’ll spend on the seminar will be the best investment you ever make.

To this day, the seminar has been the most powerful thing I ever did. Since then, my life has compounded in a totally different direction than before.

But if you don’t want to attend a seminar, I get it.

If you want to learn the methods Tony Robbins teaches, he has an audio program called Ultimate Edge, which is a condensed program of what he teaches in his various seminars - and it’s only $250.

I listen to it every single day, first thing in the morning.

If you’re committed to making sure your brain doesn’t get in the way of your achievements - just get it.

Rapid-Fire Best Insights

Best book I revisited this week: The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. Do yourself a favor and read it.

And if you’re feeling the Tony-flavor of today’s newsletter, you should also pick up his book Awaken the Giant Within.

Best interview I re-watched this week: if you want to know how a female self-made billionaire thinks about success, watch this (my wife credits this interview as one of the most powerful she’s ever heard).

The full episode is on Spotify right here.

Anything else I think you should know:

My favorite documentary of all time is Human, produced by Yann Arthus Bertrand.

And this week, in honor of International Women’s Day, Yann Arthus Bertrand released Woman - to see the world through a woman’s eyes.

Last week, my mum interviewed the co-director of Woman - Anastasia Mikova - as part of her project, Women For Humanity, where she interviews women making a difference - change-makers from all around the world.

You can watch the interview here and the trailer for the new film here.

(my mum also sends out her interviews every other week via email, so sign up for her newsletter on her website if you’re interested!)

Next week, I’ll talk more about how to invest in sustainability and walk you through the story of how Al Gore became very rich doing exactly that.

Of course, I’ll show you exactly how you can do it too.

Until then - and hasta la vista -

Alex.

This free newsletter was sent out Friday morning to thousands of entrepreneurs looking to invest in a changing world. If you want to receive it directly to your mailbox every Friday morning, simply head to alexmoneton.substack.com.