Someone emailed me this question:
“For the past months I've dug into your posts on Gurufocus…in this article you write about Warren Buffett's early years:
‘Warren Buffett was thinking about compounding wealth. He was interested in getting rich.’
This sentence piqued my curiosity a little. What (are) your goals and objectives in the stock market? Is it getting rich, saving for retirement, or something not money related?”
I have zero interest in getting rich. Investing is a purely intellectual exercise for me. I love writing and I love investing. My only financial goal is to make enough money so I never have to do any work that isn't either writing or investing.
A lot of people email me asking if I'd ever be interested in managing money.
The answer is no.
If I was interested in getting rich, the answer would be yes. The way to get rich in the stock market is to manage other people's money and manage it well. That's what Buffett did.
For myself, I'd be really happy if I could:
- Save some money every year
- Put all the money I saved that year into just one new stock
- Keep that stock for the rest of my life
- Repeat annually till dead
I can do the likely compound math and see that would ensure an adequate result in my case. I'd like the intellectual challenge of picking one and only one stock a year and never being able to reverse that decision. But what I'd really love would be never being troubled by the constant irritation of active portfolio management.
The only thing I like about investing is picking stocks. Nothing else about it appeals to me.
So, those bullet points are the routine I'd follow if I was just investing for myself and not having to write about it for anyone else.
