Young UK people are being sold a lie that they need to be investing in stocks at 22.
Stock portfolios are nearly useless to most people in their twenties because the amounts they can realistically invest are too small to matter.
£100 a month in an ISA over 5 years grows to maybe £7,000 — not life-changing money, a few months of rent.
What actually moves the needle in your twenties is increasing the salary the £100 came out of. Going from £30K to £60K in 5 years isn't unusual for somebody who deliberately invested in their skill set. That's an extra £18,000-£20,000 of after-tax income, every year, for the rest of your career.
The maths is brutal: every hour you spend optimising a small investment portfolio is an hour you didn't spend learning the skill that would double your earning capacity.
Stocks are a tool for the wealth you've already built. Skills are how you build the wealth in the first place.
Most 22-year-olds reading personal finance Twitter would be much better off ignoring it entirely for 5 years and putting that focus into becoming worth 3x more in the labour market. Compound interest on a skill compounds harder than compound interest on £100 a month.
STANLEY DRUCKENMILLER AVERAGED 30% RETURNS FOR 30 YEARS WITH ZERO LOSING YEARS
His approach to risk: "I like putting all my eggs in one basket and then watching the basket very carefully."
"Most people make 70-80% of their money on 2 or 3 ideas, even though they have 30 or 40 things in their portfolio. My concept was to put into those 2 or 3 ideas I had the most conviction in."
"Too many investors look at the present. The present is already in the price. You have to visualize 18 to 24 months from now what the world is going to be."
"What a company's been earning is ridiculous. It doesn't mean anything. If you can see something 2 years out that's entirely different than the conventional wisdom, that's how you make money."
"My first boss used to say: the obvious is obviously wrong."
I don’t think people nowadays understand the fun of souvenir skins. They’ve completely lost all appeal and it’s sad, they used to be unique and cool, now they’re just dead
More I think about it the more I like this trade.
Options are pricing in prolonged tariffs but:
A) they are paused for 30 days
B) they make no sense from a game theory or strategic perspective
Chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin developed a process to achieve peak performance in any craft or career. He’s applied it to the world of investing, professional sports, science and more. The MIQ Process. It is not a quick fix, but rather a rewiring of your default settings.