The Man Who Figured Out How to Turn $1 Into $30...Without Ever Watching a Stock Price

And maybe kind of turning to Divbro now and understanding investor psychology.

I mean, one of the most fascinating parts of your strategy is, as we were talking about even before we started recording, this behavioral component of What do many investors, why, I should say, do many investors struggle to hold great companies for the long term?

So we have a saying here, which is where your attention goes grows.

Now, investors have two key considerations to be able to succeed in investing.

The first one is what instruments to hold.

And there are lots of different options and they're all valid.

But then there's also the second consideration of, are you able to stay the course to actually get the benefit of that thing you selected, assuming you selected well? Now, if you look at the data, you can see that it doesn't matter so much what the instrument is as long as it's quoted or tradable.

So let's separate things like real estate, farms, things that have, once you own it, it's relative, there's a lot of friction in trying to trade it and therefore the process is slowed down.

But in stocks, in bonds, in options, in cryptocurrencies like the the picture behind you.

And when an instrument is tradable, there's this temptation all the time of maybe I should do something.

And there's a constant flow of information.

There's the business media, there's your friends, there's all sorts of advisors, consultants, et cetera.

And it is very, very difficult to basically sit on your hands and do nothing.

Now, where does DivGrow kind of excel here? We believe that if you follow the progress of the dividend of your company that you own and the dividend is rising at a consistent high rate year after year after year, then you have the signpost all the time saying, the thing that you chose is going just fine, as expected.

If you had an internal expectation based on your analysis that the dividend will grow at 12 or 14 or 15% per year, and that's happening inside that range or slightly wider range, year after year after year, and you receive that dividend quarterly and you watch it grow, you're getting almost a secret language from that company telling you, all the fundamentals are in place, your thesis is likely playing out, don't have to be so active.

And by blending analysis and psychology, we think it creates a higher likelihood that investors instead of having these very short holding periods and all the data shows that investors holding periods are getting shorter and shorter and shorter every year, you can extend the timeframe and you have a better chance of ultimately succeeding with your compounding journey.

How about what's the biggest emotional mistakes that you see investors making in volatile markets?

We opened to outside investors in August 2019.

Okay.

And it wasn't long after that COVID arrived.

I don't think anybody necessarily was expecting it.

But what our investors told us at that point in time, because it was a very uncomfortable environment as humans, you know, there was this scary virus out there that for a long time people didn't really know much about.

And the whole world temporarily kind of shut down.

And people experienced a high degree of panic.

If you go back and you read what the newspaper was like, you look at the traded volume in exceptionally high quality companies, for a while it didn't even matter what the companies were.