Investment Time Wasters | Part 1
Time. The most valuable asset on earth and the most generous of gifts. Use it or lose it. Make it or waste it.
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The Things That Waste Your Time | Part 1
The Biggest Time Wasters in Investing and How to Avoid Them
Marcus Padley | July 19th 2024 | Education Corner
TIME We are all flying through life. Busy busy busy. Important things to do. So very important. Can't talk, can't stop, can't go, can't come, can't make it, can't do it. Busy. We all have our own reasons. I write an average 6600 words a day, 250 days of the year. That's 1.65 million words per annum. The average length of a novel is 60,000 words. I write 27.5 novels a year. Excuse me then if I'm a bit busy. Then there are four kids that demand a little bit of attention. We all worry about money but the truth is that the most precious gift you can give anyone these days, especially your family and kids, is time, and all this technology-driven rushing about that's going on has elevated its value to immeasurable heights. Simply turning up, ringing up, listening and being there is now the biggest compliment you can ever pay anyone. I remember a story about one of Packer's Birthday guests famously saying when asked whether they had bought a present for Packer's birthday, "I'm here, that's enough isn't it?" It is. The next time someone turns up on your doorstep give them a big hug and say "Thanks".FUGAZI - INVESTMENT THINGS THAT WASTE YOUR TIME
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"Fugayzi, Fugazi, it's a Whazy, it's a Woozy, ttss whoo heee hew whoof ff ts sa...its Fairy Dust, its doesn't exist"
With Time being so precious I am going to tell you how to save time in the financial markets, because when it comes to the stock market there are a lot of things that waste your time.
They include:
Powerpoint presentations, Webinars, Zoom Meetings
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Sorry. But without us really noticing, software has killed the art of presenting. PowerPoint, Webinars and Zoom Meetings have sucked the art of entertainment out of the presentation process by empowering even the most unimaginative, reclusive, bland but credentialed introvert to present ''well''.
Meeting technology is so good, it's bad. The time has come to call the ball, we've seen enough.
Presenting is a privilege and an art form and that art isn't found in the reproduction of a text book in slide form. Presentations take originality, imagination and some hard work. Presenting is a “Show” and presenters have a duty to the audience that have donated their time, to perform.
There is a fantastic book called “Storytelling in Business for Dummies”. You’ll get the idea in the first couple of chapters. It talks about left-hand brain and right-hand brain and how a lot of presenters appeal to the left-hand brain, which handles information. But if you want to make an impact you have to present to the right-hand brain. That means telling a story full of courage, cowardice, bravery, success, failure, character, luck, anything that provokes emotion because emotion engages the right-hand brain.
You can present information, even really important information, but, if the audience can’t remember your name, you have failed. In the days when a small USB can carry more information than we could ever absorb in the whole of our lives, you begin to realise that the big issue with humans is that their input mechanisms are terribly slow. We have eyes and ears, not a USB port. You cannot download to a human the way you can to a computer. On that basis humans are completely overwhelmed with the volume of information they could absorb, which means we have to choose very carefully what we bother to read and listen to.
Listening is the slowest input method, reading is faster, so if we are going to listen to anybody it had better be good because if you’re just passing information, sorry, but we can read that in one-tenth of the time. So put on a show. Bottom line, face-to-face contact is very inefficient so choose carefully who you listen to, otherwise you’re simply wasting your time.
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Click Bait
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I am appalled at the way the Internet has shredded good content. It used to be that intelligent considered people provided us with thoughtful, intelligently crafted content, through mediums like the newspaper. But, faced with the limitless pages of the Internet the institutions that are (some of which are now 'were') responsible for the integrity, quality and value of financial content, have sacrificed it in the pursuit of the volume of clicks, and a legion of intellectual, interesting and committed journalists has been sacrificed with it.
An example for me was an editor telling me that I should write using financial 'keywords'. He sent me a list of the top 35 financial click bait ready keywords for stock-market content. I only had 700 words for my articles but in my next article I managed to weave in the 35 financial bits of clickbait, numerous times. Which involved mentioning Warren and Buffett as many times as possible. 'Warren' and 'Buffett' are the two most powerful financial clickbait words by a mile, and whilst I understand their use, I abhor the relentless use of Buffett in the output of many of my financial colleagues and competitors, even the previously insightful ones. They have debased themselves.
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At the end of my clickbait article I wrote, “This is possibly the most valueless article I have ever written, but it will almost certainly be the most popular”. It was the only article this particular editor ever refused to publish, before, since or after. The point being that any writer or corporate that uses clickbait has perverted the integrity of their content to suit the Internet, not serve the reader.
To me, the "10 best stocks" and the "5 things you must know about investing" is an insult to, in my experience of thousands of Members, the quite sophisticated financial press readers. Clickbait articles might be an imperative these days for the marketing department of a financial product, but it is a sad evolution that has forced good content into the background. I hate the idea that I have to write articles about “the 10 dividend stocks you have to own” but my business will get left behind if I don’t. Bottom line, financial clickbait is a disgusting degradation of financial content, but what are we to do? Not read it is the answer. Or in my case, not write it.
Media talking heads
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This one is from experience (!).
Imagine if you will a daily coin-flipping contest conducted across the whole of the Australian nation. Everyone’s in. On the first day 24 million Australians flip a one-dollar coin. The rules are that if you flip heads you stay in, if you flip tails you give your dollar to the ones who flipped heads. Every day the losers drop out and the $24m pool of money is shared amongst fewer and fewer people. After day one there should be around 12m people left in the game and each will have won a dollar and each, and, if they were smart, could write books called "How I doubled my money in a day". This process goes on and every day the value of being in the game grows and the stakes rise for those left in. Assuming the honesty of the losers, after ten days of flipping there will be around 23,500 people left in the game and each will have won just over $1,000. At this point there will be 23,500 people walking around Australia feeling pretty chuffed with themselves and their ability to turn one dollar into one thousand dollars in ten days.
Pretty impressive. And no doubt some of them would begin getting a bit of mileage out of their position, dropping it into the conversation at nightclubs, expounding their theories on how to throw heads at dinner parties and generally making hay. The media would be stirring and the water coolers abuzz with talk of the local hero still in the game. Five days of flipping later there would be 732 people left, each worth $33,000. Another five days later and there would be just 23 people left. By this stage, each flipper would have thrown heads twenty times on the trot and each would have cracked the magic sum of just over one million dollars each. From one dollar to millionaire in twenty days. Wow. Stop the contest and Australia would be swarming over the twenty, the flipping “elite”. The “Smartest” flippers in the nation.
And they would make global headlines. And they would write books. “Flip for Success”. “20 Top Flips”. “The Psychology of Flipping”. “Flipping for Dummies”. “The Idiots Guide to Flipping”. “Rich Flipper Poor Flipper”. “The Way of the Flipper”. “Common Flips and Uncommon Profits”. “The Intelligent Flipper”. “Mastering Flipping”. “The Flipping Way”. “How I made one million flipping dollars in twenty days” and the most recent record-busting bestseller of them all, “Coin Flipping Secrets” by Marcus “The Big Flipper” Padley. And we would buy them. And some would arrange motivational seminars on how to flip yourself into a luxurious retirement, starting with just one dollar.
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And the investment banks would launch capital guaranteed leveraged flipping products that charge you a hidden 16% before you make a dollar. And we would buy them. And we would trade online with E*Flip and CommFlip for a fraction of the cost of a full service flipper and the unsuspecting would trade highly leveraged “Contracts for Flippers”, "Non Fungible Flips" and "Cryptoflips". And we’d buy ten CD Flipping Courses plus steak knives in three easy payments on the 1300 number on the late-night infomercial.
And the irrefutable proof of the benefits of flipping would be the 20 people left in and their results. How could we argue with that? They exist. Flipping can clearly transform your life and yes, you too can flip.
Of course the results would have been the same had twenty-four million Orangutans been doing the flipping, but then Orangutans don't have the skill to build a CFD platform that allows you to trade flipping forex, and they don't look quite as good on the ABC as people like Marcus Padley. The point being that you can waste a lot of time listening to orangutans like me on the TV. Most are 35-year-olds with no assets, a million-dollar mortgage and no investment portfolio anyway, despite the fact they talk as if they run a billion-dollar hedge fund and are seen on the adverts trading Forex on their mobile phones as they step out of a Limousine on Wall St.
Yes we are on TV but we have no more ability to predict the future than anyone else. So don't credit us with anything more than looking good and sounding intelligent. It’s a show, but for an investor, it’s a waste of time.
More about the author – Marcus Padley
Marcus Padley is a highly-recognised stockbroker and business media personality. He founded the Marcus Today Stock Market Newsletter in 1998. Over the years, the business has built a community of like-minded investors who want to survive and thrive in the stock market. This is achieved through a combination of daily stock market education, ideas and activities.
