Shhh! The truth about investing

Want to know the truth about (low-risk) investing? The secret, if you like, that makes growing money from money possible is …

… investing is boring.

• Boring as in it’s a long-term game not an overnight get-rich-quick scheme.
• Boring as in there’s very little drama or excitement, just slow, small, steady increases over time.
• Boring as in safe. There’s very low risk to the kind of long-term, low-risk investing I teach on my course.

I have a friend who, whenever I’ve talked about this, has always been so extremely risk averse that he’s too afraid to invest even a little bit of his money in case he loses it all. Yet, after a few conversations, he finally realised I was talking about yearly returns of 8-14%, compounding over time, not dramatic doubling or trebling of wealth in one shot. 

And, guess how he felt?

Disappointed. “Oh, this is not so interesting,” he said. 

He wants the big gains but with no risk.

Unfortunately, that just doesn’t exist. 

You can have small, steady gains in exchange for low risk OR you can have potentially massive gains in exchange for the probable outcome of losing most or all of what you put in. 

It’s exactly what’s happened to lots of people who put all their money in crypto in the last couple of years. Potentially massive wins turned into as high as 60-70% losses for them. You might be lucky and 10x your investment. Probably not. There’s a word for that and it’s not investing, 

It’s called gambling.

I don’t teach that. Which is why there is no section on my course on forex trading, NFTs, cryptocurrency or any other form of speculating.

My friend has still not enrolled on my course. I suspect he never will. But he has given his teenage son 1000 euros to invest in crypto as his teen is sure he can 400x the original stake. I wish them luck, truly. But I expect the result will be an expensive lesson that will scare them both off what they think of as “investing” for life.

So, while the secret of investing is that it’s kind of boring, I promise my beginner investing course is fun. 6 weeks of live online classes and workshops with a Slack group to ask questions and share articles or interesting things you’ve read. (Yes, you probably will find yourself reading things you would have previously scrolled past and want to share them in the group, just like my last cohort did. In fact, the crypto article I’ve linked to above came from one of their Slack posts). 

Read all the course info here, and join us on the November course, starting Nov 2. For just 485 euros (plus 21% VAT if you’re within the EU) you’ll have all the tools, knowledge and mindset to be investing before winter. 

Now, that, I think, IS exciting.