Breaking the Biggest Wealth-Destroying Habits

If I'm a listener saying, okay, Barry, I hear you.

I want to get better.

I've made mistakes.

So I'm asking this even personally.

I've made mistakes in my portfolio, sometimes overconfidence, sometimes being too timid.

What would you do then to say to get better in those driving skills?

So first of all, read, read, read is a good start.

And there are plenty of books out there.

I said, you know, there's tens of thousands of books and most people are mediocre investors.

There's a dozen classics and we all know their names, but there are several books outside of finance that are about psychology.

And when you realize your own limitations, when you figure out, hey, if I'm reacting emotionally to all this news flow, that's not going to have a good outcome in my portfolio.

Warren Buffett said, hey, if you have 150 IQ points, you'd be better off selling 30 to someone else.

You don't need more than 120.

What you really need is the ability to control yourself, to be disciplined.

It's not just the smartest person wins.

It's the person who's in most control of their reactions to all this firehose of input.

You know, There was a shocking piece during the I don't remember if it was the pandemic or 2022 about a young investor who said, you know, I'm just going to take a third of my portfolio off the table because I'm concerned about this.

And my answer was, you're 30 years old.

You have three or four decades left.

Before, do you really think in 2060 what you did with your portfolio in terms of reducing your growth portion is going to be the right outcome? You have to think in terms of decades, not hours or days.

And it's the same thing with timing the broad market.

You have to be right twice when you get in and when you get out.

And too often investors are wrong on both sides.

So, you know, it's funny because – The easier thing to do, and I have to caveat this up, the easier entry point or exit point to see is the bottom because bottoms are these things.

Big event.