My grandfather was a cattle rancher who always said your profit was made when you bought the cattle, not when you sold them. If you overpaid, you paid for it later. Simple as that.
He wasn’t a sophisticated man, but he understood that principle better than most people with degrees.
I think this applies to anything you can buy or sell. Cattle, real estate, crypto. Most of the time, assets trade at or above what they’re worth. If you buy just because you feel like buying, you’re usually overpaying and hoping the price goes up for no real reason. When the market corrects, you find out the hard way that your “profit” was built on randomness and wishful thinking.
But assets aren’t always priced correctly. People don’t always know what their stuff is worth. Sometimes they’re in a hurry and need to sell fast, which shrinks the pool of buyers and forces them to lower the price.
Your job is to get good at knowing the real value of something. It doesn’t even need to be a financial asset. Just learn to price something correctly. Once you can do that, all you need is patience. Wait for the moments when someone is willing to let go of a good asset for less than it’s worth. That’s your chance. Step in, buy it, and let the market do the rest.
Do that enough times, and you have a real business. A simple one, but a profitable one.