The art of unemotional investing
The art of not caring about your investments follows from a different perspective on life. It can be achieved by studying zen and Dao. One of the most important points of these philosophies is to open the mind to the fact of relativity. Relativity means that everything exists exists as a polarity of the same underlying thing and are therefore one, such as a wave always has a crest and a trough. This is often depicted with the yin and yang symbol. You can see for yourself in reality that this is the case.
The same principle applies to investing. I realize that the price of a stock does not matter, truly, I do not care. Why? Because profit is the yang and a loss in the yin, they are of the same polarity. If the stock is low you have a lot of expected return. If the stock is high you have low expected return. Therefore it does not matter where the stock price is, you see. On the long term all there is is the wave. Where you are on it does not matter.
If you can let go of caring about your investments, you will be a very good and unemotional investor. This is required to take a contrarian view. Most of the time the best thing to do is to do nothing.
Further readings
If you want to become a good investor, here is a list of books that might help
- Ray Dalio, big debt crises – to understand the general economy and macro
- Ray Dalio, changing world order – to understand the general economy and macro
- Nassim Talib, black swan – to understand the general economy and macro
- Lao Zu, Dao Te Ching – to stop caring about your investments
- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind Beginners Mind – to stop caring about your investments
- McKinsey valuation bible version 5 – to learn about value investing (super deep not required at all, all you need (more or less)is a P E ratio to understand if a company is cheap, but if you enjoy being a nerd it’s a very good read)
Acknowledgements
The following investors helped shape my view of markets and investment philosophy and deserve to be mentioned: Warren Buffet, Genti Arapi, Tavi Costa, Chingxiao Shao
DISCLAIMER. This page does not contain investment advise. I know that I don’t know the future.
The best of luck!