this is probably too much to remember but I am going to try. I got really into personal finance when I was in college
I continued to watch Graham Stephan and found myself visualizing myself buying real estate properties and renting them out. over time the strategy I liked most shifted as i learned, but I learned a lot form him like why having credit is important, the importance of not just saving but investing, and listening to people that are where you want to go. Don’t take advice from random people because everybody has an opinion. As college went on I listened to about 300 episodes of the bigger pockets podcast, just trying to pick up on random little nuggets and learning a lot of the strategy involved in buying real estate. I was too risk averse to try and buy something with no money, even though there is a lot of evidence and ways to get property for low or no money down. Other Podcasts I got really into were The Drive (Dr. Attia) which wasn’t money related at all and My First Million which is really a business idea podcast that I love to this day. They got me way more interested in entrepreneurship and the tech world. there are two more major influences from this time period. Ryan Holiday with the daily stoic email and podcast. and Alex Hormozi who will probably go down as one of the greatest business minds in the world, not because of his actual businesses, but his ability to share the information about business to the masses.
here’s the breakdown of the major influences at this time in my life
Graham Stephan
Alex Hormozi
MFM podcast
bigger pockets
Ryan Holiday
making more money side hustling The Beginning Of Side Hustles
As I mentioned, I learned the importance of actually investing and not just saving. So I dumped the majority of my money into VTSAX when I was 18 and opened a secured credit card so I could grow my credit for that eventual big purchase. With the last couple thousand dollars I had, i decided to try something new. So i started getting into the side hustle game. When i wasn’t studying or diving, I would search facebook market place and craigslist for couches that I could flip. And that’s what I did for about 2.5 years on the side to make more money I could invest. This side hustle would make me about 8’000 dollars in my free time over those years… which again, wasn’t a lot but it was all going into the market during a really great bull run leading up to the 2020 crash.
I stopped flipping couches right around my senior year and sold my trailer and all the inventory I had over winter. I was losing interest and I wanted to focus more on the main priorities I had at the time. It was super fun while it lasted and whenever i calculated it out i was making 60-80 dollars an hour for this fun side project that was honestly pretty simple. It worked really well because people in a college ton are constantly moving and they don’t ever bring their stuff with them I would get it for cheap and i would be able to deliver to people that didn’t have any way of getting couches to their homes. It is a really great market to be in and people will pay a premium for quality used couches that you can deliver and help move in.
Investing and Trading
Another side hustle I did well in was stock trading. I knew that the boring index funds would always keep running in the background and I would have an automatic payment every month to my index funds, but I wanted to learn how to properly value and judge the market to hopefully do what very few people ever do. Beat the market, consistently. I got interested in individual stocks when the market tanked hard in march of 2020. My $9,000 in VTSAX plummeted but I had a bit of a cash position lined up on the sidelines so I deployed that into some stocks that were devastated by the shut down. I had two main positions and all I wish I had was more money to dump into companies, because by may or june I ran out of money to invest and I just had to wait.
I chose to put all of that remaining cash into Bank Of America and Delta airlines stock. This was only about 2,000 dollars at the time, but it is what I had to work with. My investment thesis on these two trades were that the travel industry was going to be devastated and therefore the stock would be far undervalued what they had in assets and would eventually rebound when the whole thing blew over. I didn’t know how long it would take to come back but i felt confident that delta was a large enough org and they would be able to weather the storm whether it was on their own or through a bail out. That was my thinking at the time. I held for long term capital gains about a year later and redeployed after that into other companies as my investing philosophy changed. The bank of America pick was silly in hindsight. I will no longer invest in any bank stock. It returned well for me over the next year but As I learned more about the banking business, I just don’t like the way its structured and relies so heavily on people taking less than their money is worth to let other people gamble with it.
The next year 2021, the market was going wild with speculation due to stimulus money and a frenzy of people being let out of the house again. Commerce boomed and the era of wall street bets was among us. The gamestop rally was interesting to watch from the outside and I stayed aware of it all. I just kept learning how to look at companies financials and tried to put together simple yet effective strategies to test myself. The money that I had made in the initial bull run kept rolling into other stocks that I picked for short term capital gains. These trade were more along the lines of swing trades anywhere from 1 week to multiple month holds. I didn’t trade a lot, I spent more time focussing on school and learning than actually doing it myself. I was still working with very small numbers but I knew that If I could figure it out, I would be able to do this forever and sustainably make money in the future as my money grew.
My investment thesis at this point was basically to discern whether a company was over bought and stay away from them. I think anybody could make money in that market because of how much money poured into the market. I would be more tested in the next couple of years.
In 2022 I made about 3000 dollars from trading. The market was very hesitant and began to slow down as we entered a recession. I stayed conservative and was patient in all of my positions. I had two Investing theses that I was testing this year. I wasn’t out for the crazy gains that people get from margin. As far as I am concerned, margin = death. I do not want to lose my money and it is a sure way to lose it all and then some if you don’t know what you’re doing. And I don’t.
Thesis 1 is more conservative. Take a list of the top 100 companies in the s and p. wait for bad news to come out, that a-doesn’t mean anything long term, and b-creates an emotional movement in the stock price. then I would buy and wait for it to recover. It is important to note that this is more dangerous when a company is trading at a local high or all time high. If it is not over bought then it is okay, but discerning overbought from overvalued is difficult and you don’t want to be left holding the bag. That is why you should stay away from local highs, unless you are in it for the long term. then it does not matter. This strategy is for increasing your velocity of money and lets it grow faster. The reason it is more conservative is because it is only used for large cap super big companies that likely have some sort of moat or are so large that the risk of going out of business is very small.
Thesis 2 is a little more risky but it is where more money can be made. There are some similar rules, like do not buy into hype. only buy when it is going down. It is scary to do that but in order to buy low you have to buy low and average down as it drops. Here is how it works. look for a sector or industry that you believe is growing. this can be based on trends or emerging technology or just a logical up stream sector to products that are used every day. This logic could look something like…coca cola and other large companies need plastic for their products, therefore there is always going to be demand for plastic precursors, what are the small companies that do that? It is important that you limit the search to small cap companies because they are the most volatile and will oscillate between prices often. Sector identified. then look at all the companies in the sector and identify the top 1 or 2 based off of profitability or competitive advantage if possible. then look at the last year of prices and see if there is oscillation. does it seem like it movesup and down a lot and in a predictable pattern? then you may have found a winner. There is one more step i think that makes it less risky. After you think you have a good company that is in a growing or stable market that has good volatility and past performance of oscillating prices, then you can look at their form 10-k or another financial document to look at their cash flow, profitability, and debt if they have it.
the reason I do so much diligence is because if I am going to play the timing game on a stock, I want to be confident that it isn’t a shitty company and that i believe in it long term. This makes me feel better about losing money temporarily if it goes down when i am trying to time it. This also prevents me from buying into failing industries, bad companies and hopefully allows me to make more money over time.
Other rules and helpful tips I have learned are to know that you will not time the bottom or the top perfectly. All you need to be is directionally correct. If you can take a 5% gain a handful of times throughout the year, it will be good for you. 2022 was about 6 months of actual stock practice. I was graduating college and focussing on my honors thesis and finishing my athletic career, so I had less time to devote to working on trading and flipping furniture.
Outro
So, that’s basically it. I grew a ton in those years and I was able to learn a lot while I was at school. After college I tried to do some entrepreneurial things and I will get to that in the next post. But I knew one thing for sure. It was worth sacrificing a time to save and heavily invest while I was young and could keep expenses extremely low. My goal leaving school was to reach financial independence by the age of 30. To me, that meant I would need total assets around the 5-10 Million dollar range. Time will tell. but I look forward to sharing the rest of the journey starting with year 2023.
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