Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Andrew Stotz on learning from your worst investment ever

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, fellow risk-takers, and welcome to my worst investment ever, stories of loss to keep you winning. Now, here, after 350 episodes, I've analyzed all of the episodes to try to break them down into the most common mistakes, and I'm just going to go through them right now. The number one out of six most common mistake is failed to do their own research. number two failed to properly assess and manage risk the third most common is driven by emotion or flawed thinking the fourth is misplaced trust the fifth is failed to monitor their investment and the sixth is a catch-all account invested in a startup company those are the six most

Starting point is 00:00:49 common mistakes welcome to the get invested podcast where we share great conversations with experts from all walks of life to uncover their secret know-how and where they invest their time, their skills and their money and the benefits that this has created. You see, the truth is that everyone invests. Every minute of every day, we're investing our time, our skills, our energy and our money in something. Some of us are investing consciously, some unconsciously,

Starting point is 00:01:16 sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes for no impact. get invested will help you to start living by design not by default i'm going to help you to make it happen not let it happen you'll hear the top tips on how you can live with conscious intent so that you can live more work less and leave a living legacy by investing now listen to the show to discover the top tips on how to get started make the most of your investment journey and ultimately to be living your dream not someone else's more episodes can be found on iTunes or at bushymartin.com.au forward slash getinvested. Thanks for listening and now let's get invested. Hi Freedom Fighters. What's been your worst investment ever? How often do you lose

Starting point is 00:02:09 money when you invest? On your shares, on your property, on your crypto or any other latest instant money making craze that grabs our attention. Now, we all have coulda, shoulda, woulda stories about lost money and investing. You know, that red hot share tip from the Uber driver that you never saw coming. Or your brother-in-law's stupid business venture that you lost a bundle on. Or that now valuable collectible that you tossed out years ago. Or how about that time that you got caught with a timeshare where you were conned into buying something when you're on holiday that's still taking money out of your wallet every year.

Starting point is 00:02:52 Or maybe your long-forgotten venture into some multi-level marketing company that was going to make you millions at the expense of your family and friends. Or the shares that you bought in that new-beaut company that was going to the moon but plummeted overnight and are now worth next to nothing.

Starting point is 00:03:13 But you're still holding on to them, hoping that one day you'll get your money back if you just hang in there long enough. Or the most recent exercise where loads of people sold their shares when prices tumbled following the announcement of the global pandemic and the resulting lockdowns, only to see the same shares go up in value substantially since then. You see, the options to lose money are endless.

Starting point is 00:03:39 And while some financial faux pas are very easily shrugged off, others just can't be forgotten quickly because the dollar amounts end with way too many zeros so what's the worst investment or financial decision that you've ever made chances are you've made them but you don't want to admit it

Starting point is 00:04:00 you don't want to talk about it or you don't want to know about it we just conveniently ignore it or forget it hoping it will all go away as we sweep our past mistakes under the carpet. Or worse still, we blame something else or someone else for our investment performance. Or, yet even worse again, we don't invest at all

Starting point is 00:04:26 because we're too scared that we're going to lose money. But what if our worst investments create the seeds of our biggest learnings and our biggest opportunities? only if we're prepared to look and reflect serious on them though because here's the rub over the decades that i've personally been investing and researching the most sustainably successful investors there's one consistent theme amongst them all they all make lots of mistakes and even more importantly they learn the most from their mistakes so let me ask you again What has been your worst investment ever?

Starting point is 00:05:08 I want you to really reflect on this because your worst investments to date will hold the keys to your best investments if you take the time to really reflect on them and to learn what you will do differently next time. It's the only pathway to improvement as well as sustainable success in anything. You need to act, reflect, revise and repeat.

Starting point is 00:05:36 Just make sure that you see bad investments as stepping stones and don't let one poor investment stop you from continuing. To get started on thinking about your worst investments ever, reflect again on the six most common mistakes that investors make that today's very special guest mentioned in the opening extract from our engaging conversation. to make it easier for you let me restate them because chances are the mistakes you've made in your past worst investments will be captured by one or more of the following firstly you fail to do your own research secondly you fail to properly assess and manage your risk thirdly you were

Starting point is 00:06:21 driven by emotion or flawed thinking. Fourthly, you misplace your trust. Number five, you fail to monitor your investment. Or finally, number six, you're invested in a start-up company or a brand new unproven financial instrument. Now, are any of these ringing any bells? More importantly though, what can you do about it? And what can you do to avoid these common money-losing mistakes in the future?

Starting point is 00:06:53 Well, that's where my great conversation with today's awesome guest, Dr. Andrew Stotts, comes to your rescue. Because he reveals the six strategies that you can adopt to overcome these common money-losing mistakes. and Andrew is extremely well qualified to identify and help you overcome investment mistakes and to assist you to become a successful investor. Andrew is the author of multiple finance and investment books, a recognised finance expert, an angel investor and a self-professed happy guy. He's an award-winning financial analyst with more than two decades of experience in leading positions in the industry, and as a university lecturer of finance. Andrew is driven by empowering and helping you to achieve your goals through sharing

Starting point is 00:07:45 his financial expertise, no matter if you're a student, someone who wants to take control of your own finances, a fund manager for a global institution, or a Fortune 500 CEO. He's also a hands-on business owner and as co-founder of CoffeeWorks, a leading specialty coffee roaster in thailand that has been trading now for nearly three decades in 2013 andrew retired from a 20-year career as an equity analyst at various investment banks in thailand to set up his own company his last senior corporate role was as portfolio strategist and managing director of the international business department at maybank kimeng securities in thailand As the founder and current CEO of ASTOT's Investment Research or ASIR, his company provides

Starting point is 00:08:38 institutional and high net worth investors with ready to invest stock portfolios that aim to beat the benchmark through superior stock selection. ASIR also provides institutional investors and fund managers with financial services such as valuation, stock selection and portfolio creation particularly in Asian markets based on his proprietary FVMR methodology. This unique methodology aims to not only favour one style such as value or growth, but instead considers the four elements of fundamentals,

Starting point is 00:09:16 valuation, momentum and risk, or FVMR. In addition, Andrew was the former president of the Chartered Financial Analysts or CFA Society of Thailand. and he's a renowned public speaker on topics such as investing, valuation and management related to the famous Dr. Deming's quality teachings. Over the last few years, Andrew and ASIR have made much of their research free and publicly available through their great initiative, Become a Better Investor. Andrew also offers his highly respected valuation masterclass with an aim to help people build

Starting point is 00:10:00 great careers in finance, with more than 1,000 students from over 30 countries currently completing it. He's a recognised public speaker and commentator on matters of investing in Thailand and Asia in general, and is often cited and quoted by Bloomberg, US News, The Star, and many other regional and global news outlets. Andrew is also a multiple award-winning author of a number of books, including How to Start Building Your Wealth Investing in the Stock Market, Transform Your Business with Dr Deming's 14 Points, 9 Valuation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them, and My Worst Investment Ever,

Starting point is 00:10:40 which echoes the title of his very popular and highly respected podcast of the same name. And what I really respect about Andrew is that his incredible personal and professional success has been achieved despite his extremely challenging childhood beginnings. that has helped him to maintain his humility and genuine warm empathy and care for others. You'll be really moved and inspired by his life story. In a nutshell, his early beginnings have inspired Andrew's multi-pronged financial education approach that helps you to create, grow, measure and protect your wealth. now breaking this down it helps you to create via his finance made ridiculously simple online course

Starting point is 00:11:29 his team mentors management teams to make their companies financially world-class he also helps you to grow via his how to start building your wealth investing in the stock market online course here his team creates ready to invest portfolios of etfs and stocks depending on your risk tolerance. He also helps you to measure via his Valuation Masterclass online course, where he helps companies to value their businesses and understand how to increase that value. And finally, he helps you to protect. As Andrew quotes from Otto von Bismarck, only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others in this regard you can join him on his mission with the my worst investment

Starting point is 00:12:25 ever podcast to help others avoid investing mistakes of which i was very honored to join him as a guest and i can say without hesitation that this was the most enjoyable energizing and engaging podcast interview that i've ever had so please do yourself a favor and subscribe to this great podcast, where he shares stories of loss to keep you winning. Make sure you have a listen and discover the best practices for risk management that will keep you investing successfully. Now, in today's great conversation, Andrew not only shares his six key strategies to avoid the biggest investment mistakes, but he also unpacks lots of immediately usable investment gold and answers all of your other key investment questions that include the

Starting point is 00:13:10 Two Proven Ways to Grow Wealth, his unique FVMR and Quantamental Investment Approach, How to Create a Cash Machine, the four key things you need to consider before investing in a business, amongst lots of other investment gems. We also talk about the TLC Challenge that we jointly created in the moment on his podcast. So make sure you have a listen out for this and email me at bushey at knowhowproperty.com.au with how you respond to the TLC Challenge. And if you'd like to join Andrew in any of his online courses,

Starting point is 00:13:50 just go to academy.astots.com, that's A-S-T-O-T-Z, that's academy.astots.com, or click the link in the show notes. and if property is more to your liking and you'd like to optimise your performance in property investment we're taking investors to new heights in our unique Freedom Flight program that gives you access to our Freedom Flight

Starting point is 00:14:15 live interactive information sessions and unique portfolio planning process to book your ticket or to find out some more just go to knowhowproperty.com.au forward slash Freedom Fighters or click the link in the show notes In the meantime, enjoy this heartfelt and instructive yet inspiring conversation with Dr. Andrew Stotts. Hi, Friendly Fighters.

Starting point is 00:14:47 Now, a few weeks ago, I was very humbled to be a guest on the My Worst Investment Ever podcast. And I've got to say, it was the most enjoyable and energizing conversation I've had the pleasure of participating in. And it was all because of the engaging warmth, the intellect, and the insight of its host, Dr. Andrew Stotts. And I enjoyed it so much that I couldn't resist the temptation to reverse the tables today and get Andrew to join us here on Get Invested, share his wealth of wisdom. So welcome, and let's get invested, Andrew. Bushy, it's great to be here and also to share what I've learned and what I've experienced with your listeners. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun, mate. You've got a wealth of wisdom to share and a really interesting, engaging story, mate.

Starting point is 00:15:30 And as a perfect entree to that, I'd love you to start by sharing with us who you are, what you do, but most importantly, why you do what you do, Andrew. Okay. Go back in time to when I was 14 years old. My father called the police on me. I smashed out the back window of the house. I was basically high on drugs and completely out of control. My parents had me arrested and put into juvenile detention. This was at the age of 14. By the age of 17, I had tried to kill myself a couple of times. I was involved in using drugs quite a bit and alcohol.

Starting point is 00:16:14 And I went into a treatment center in 1982. At that point, I came out of that treatment center and within four days I was high again and in serious trouble and then just kind of ran away and I was just turned 17 and somehow my parents got a hold of me and said you've got to go to the next treatment center and they had arranged it in Baton Rouge Louisiana my dad put me on a bus to go from Cleveland to Baton Rouge and he said just be careful we've given you enough money to survive to get down there. And, uh, I had, and they said, you know, don't use any drugs along the way, you know, who knows what could happen in the different cities you're going through on this bus. And of course I purchased drugs and alcohol the whole way down, spent everything I had.

Starting point is 00:17:02 And my dad told me it was, it was about two blocks to the hospital from the bus station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is a very tough town. So I spent my last quarter playing a video game at the age of, you know, 17 here. And then I went to this hospital and it turned out it was 22 blocks, not two. And so there I was walking through this very, very tough city. And basically what they said is my parents said, this is a one-way ticket. If you don't make it through the probation period and then get accepted into the treatment center, then you're on your own in louisiana and basically on my sixth day of the probation period they said we're not going to accept you into the treatment center and that was the moment where i went back

Starting point is 00:17:49 to my room in that locked ward and got down on my knees and realized that i'm not god i didn't know anything about god i didn't know anything about anything else but what i knew at that moment that everything I did, you know, was just driving me into the ground. And that was a moment of surrender. And that was September 15th, 1982. And that began the journey of my sobriety. And now that's been many, many years that I've been, you know, clean and sober. And so that is a foundational story of my life. And part of the reason why I, you know, what I try to do is when i talk to people and share with people is i like to talk about the emotion of our lives and you know what we're experiencing and help each other out i wouldn't mind just sort of digging in a

Starting point is 00:18:39 little bit prior to that that you know that crossroads moment uh and understand uh try and understand what led you down the the substance abuse the drugs and the alcohol path i'm just always interested to find how that even came about can you share with us your thinking and what you're feeling that sort of ended up there you know i had a friend of mine and whenever he drank milk he got a rash on his arm so he just stopped drinking milk turned out he was allergic to milk. I think after many years of thinking about it, I would say I'm allergic to alcohol and drugs. In fact, I'm just allergic to the high. However I get there is just the means to get to that point. And you could even argue that in my work and in my life, I'm still searching for the

Starting point is 00:19:35 high in the things that I'm trying to accomplish and the things that I'm trying to, it's just that you could say it's more of a positive addiction. But I would say that that was it because I mean, my family was a good family. I mean, we were middle class and I wasn't abused. I had the things that I needed in my life. So, you know, I would just say that I just am one of those people who it just doesn't work. I'm one of those people, you know, I'm the person that can sit at a party and see, I even say it to my mom who lives with me here in Bangkok, mom, you're going to finish that glass of wine? You know, just the idea that she would leave it, you know, with a little bit in there just doesn't make sense to me so i just would say you know there was a personality type

Starting point is 00:20:15 maybe it's genetics i don't know but that's kind of my explanation of it yeah do you feel uh you know this is from one addictive personality potentially to another i guess uh do you feel you have a sort of a an addictive personality you sort of touched on it there and said that you know you you might have diverted your attention to other areas and that's probably more a healthy addiction perhaps than than the other is is am i on the right track yes yeah in fact i met with a lady a while ago and she was i asked her what she did and she said she worked with students that had attention deficit disorder and hyperactive attention deficit disorder and i said so you know how do you like that or whatever she said i just really feel sorry for these kids

Starting point is 00:20:57 they just can't really focus like a normal kid and then you know i was just sitting there and i was thinking so wait a minute what's normal here you get 100 kids in a room and they're all quiet listening to a boring teacher teaching a topic that they don't want to hear and they're all quiet except for that one or two adhd type of kids like me that's going what what why huh you know and i think to myself let's reframe this i don't want to be if normal is sitting there and just getting bored out of my skull i don't want to be normal that's the first thing that i realized is that of course we're trying we try to you know label things and so i don't accept that label number one and the second thing is that it's a damn superpower the obsessive compulsive thing

Starting point is 00:21:45 you know if you if you channel it properly and and for those listeners out there who who have something like 80 you know attention deficit or hyperactive attention deficit disorder which is probably a little bit more of a description of what i have there is a something that's really cool and that's called hyper focus and basically i have the ability to just dive into something for four hours and you know for the listeners out there if you've ever dove into something for four hours and you come out and you go my god i just wrote you know three chapters or whatever it was that i did and so i learned that you know you know i think the best lesson i've learned in life is that our objective in life is to be more of who we are not to try to be someone else do

Starting point is 00:22:27 something else and and in each of us have weaknesses and each of us has strengths and we've got to play to those so to give you an example of how i've worked that and i explained this to this young woman i said look with this obsessive compulsive if it's directed in the right area you can accomplish a huge amount of stuff but also i when once i recognize it then i i hired and i work with people who are not the same as me my business partner for 20 years in my research business uh a time man uh he he is what i call steady eddie and i'm like shooting up crashing down but he's steady eddie and that's what i need in my life uh to handle you know my ups and down and so that's i would just say that uh for those people listening out there that have been labeled

Starting point is 00:23:11 and and the label comes across as something bad i don't accept it you know 100 we're very quick to label anything and everything that's normally critically labeled the the positive side doesn't get anywhere near as much attention but i agree with you i someone who's able to immerse themselves totally in something and and again suffer the same affliction andrew you know i just and i haven't heard that term hyper focus but i think that sums it up beautifully yeah you know the other thing that i would say is that i was just talking with a uh a recent guest and i'm publishing his his episode in the next week or so and he said he was listening to one of the podcast uh interviews that i was doing and he heard me say something that he said it really stopped him in

Starting point is 00:24:04 his tracks and i think it's worth saying is that you know i i work really hard to protect my brain my brain is the centerpiece as is all of our brains it is the source for us if you lose the brain capacity or it is distracted and diverted you will never be able to get where you're going and the point is is that the whole world whether it's labels like adhd or add whether it's it's advertisement, you know, whatever it is, the world is trying to take my brain. And so I really see it as an opportunity to just really protect my brain. And so that's, you know, something that I really believe in.

Starting point is 00:24:48 Yeah, I love that. I love that. Something that goes with that, and again, it's something that I've struggled with and been challenged with, but I also see it in people who have gone down the substance abuse road, is the concept of control. and there's a i think a misconception often that we think we're in control when quite often we're kidding ourselves what are your thoughts on your experience around that is is that part of the

Starting point is 00:25:19 the challenge yeah i think that you know what's when things are spinning out of control in our life the natural tendency is to grab on tighter and what i like to do is i have like a visualization and uh basically that visualization is me uh with let's say a bed a comfortable bed behind me standing up holding on to like some railing and i'm holding on super super tight and then all of a sudden i realize i can let go and i fall back into this very comfortable bed and the point is is that when you find yourself holding on super tight in life you know it may be time to let go and i think the covid crisis and the lockdowns and all this stuff was a time where i i literally you know found myself on my knees saying i i can't i can't you know i i'm scared i've got

Starting point is 00:26:16 businesses i've got my mom i've got my life i don't want to see these things destroyed but yet these powers are very very strong and so that was a time where i just really got knocked back and And I did just take comfort in letting go. And once I did that, it allowed me to come back stronger. And, you know, my conclusion is I refuse to allow a disease, a virus, a bacteria or any sickness and also any government reaction to that sickness to alter my life away from a great, happy life of success and fulfillment. I just refuse. 100% agree. And having the resilience to ignore that.

Starting point is 00:27:04 I guess my wife and I stopped listening to the mainstream media 25 years ago, Andrew, for a reason that's full of fear and greed, that the two only drivers that sort of seem to engage eyeballs and earbuds. So we just don't swim in that pool. And ignorance is bliss. I definitely dive into information that's relevant to my areas of interest, but beyond that, I don't need to know the rubbish that's often misreported anyway.

Starting point is 00:27:36 So, Matt, just back on that, because sort of back at that point where you're on your knees and you've made that decision to say, right, that's it, I'm not doing this anymore, how challenging is it now? How many did you say, 28 years ago or more that that occurred? Actually, it's close to 40 now. 40 years? Yeah, 38 years.

Starting point is 00:28:02 38 years, okay. 82, yeah, my maths wasn't good on that. So how challenging is it then in day-to-day life where we live in a world of constant temptation that you can get anything, anywhere, anyhow, at any time? how how challenging has that been for you on the journey well i think the principles that i learned in those days you know were and as most people know nowadays it's very common knowledge is 12-step programs that are available out there and those 12-step programs provide a blueprint

Starting point is 00:28:39 or a framework of thinking and action and of course there's also meetings that you can go to But that framework allows me, it gives me my structure of how I think about my life and the way I work. For instance, one of those 12 steps is saying something along the lines of, we admitted when we were wrong and, you know, promptly, you know, we promptly admitted when we were wrong. and you know it's one of the the big important things is the idea that when we make a mistake we immediately uh basically what i say is i say four a's the first is be aware of what's going on around you and what you're doing the second is admit admit when you're wrong number three is apologize and say and it doesn't take a lot it's just you know i am sorry i was wrong that's it and then the final one is amend and this is a hard one because sometimes when we

Starting point is 00:29:41 do something wrong we really do hurt someone we cause damage we may cause financial damage and you may say to yourself i don't have the money to be able to pay that but the truth is is that to truly be free of the baggage in our life we have to amend and that means that you may go to that person and say, I owe you $10,000 for this mistake and I don't have it, but I can pay you $100 a month and I will pay that every month until I can pay you more. And then you have done everything you can to clean up the wreckage of your past. And that allows you, this is what I learned 38 years ago. And so I live free of baggage. And anytime I accumulate baggage, i know the steps you know be aware admit when you're wrong apologize and make amends simple

Starting point is 00:30:30 yeah that's a great approach because uh and you pick up on a very good point because that all traces back to self-forgiveness and if you haven't forgiven yourself then it's going to keep kicking you in the backside uh all the way through until you've been able to come to to terms with it i imagine again i think i think you're right and the point is is that You can't just wish something away, something that you have done wrong. I give a lecture on ethics to thousands of young people around Asia in particular, in particular about finance. But I add on that I can teach you how to get out of trouble. And basically what I say is that majority of the trouble you'll ever face in your life will be caused by you.

Starting point is 00:31:16 and if you learn the four a's to be aware to admit to apologize and to amend you'll have solved most of the trouble that you have created in your life and the point is i believe you can't get the true release and true freedom in this world until you've you know really done those steps and so there are some people that try to muscle through and say you know i'm a better person now and all that but if you haven't gone back and cleaned up the wreckage of your past you just can't be as free as you could be and that that's my goal is to be you know and ultimately freedom of mind is the ultimate freedom and freedom of your heart you know of your emotion it is the ultimate freedom and i challenge the listeners out there that if you have something

Starting point is 00:32:09 that's in your heart or in your mind that you know is holding you back or know is something that you've done wrong consider going through those steps you know and by doing that you'll be released yeah very well said i think it places back to your level of self-worth you can't believe in yourself truly until you've come to terms with you know the issues that you've had in the past and once you've cleaned out that rubbish you're so well determined and then you have that level of self-belief that can then lead to confidence which then can start to build on itself and achieve

Starting point is 00:32:49 other well things in your life. And I guess that's a great segue I'm really into, you know, from that very challenging time at a very young age, take us through where you have invested your time, energy and money since then and what have you learned along that journey to get you to where you are today so i uh once i left my third treatment center i had been in three different treatment centers for almost a year and i was free and it was that day it was my high school graduation and i walked on the stage nobody even knew i was alive

Starting point is 00:33:22 anymore and i i walked on the stage and got my diploma and then i went out in the big world and i never looked back you know i just went forward and i think that you know what i thought was going to help me was just my passion my excitement and all that but really what i learned was i needed to learn i needed to become educated and i learned that through some hard knocks you know where i thought i went i went to the university i didn't have any money basically so i managed to get a small grant from the state of ohio where i was and i went into university and then i promptly quit after one term and thought now i can i can do this on my own and i went and did a sales job And it was just awful and it was painful. And then they ripped me off at the last minute when I was supposed to be paid. And I just thought, I really realized that education was my way out. And so that's where I started to go back to university and get serious. But I didn't have money to do it the way I would like to have. So I just had to kind of do it step by step.

Starting point is 00:34:19 But I do want to point out one point. And that is during this time, I had no money. My parents, basically my mom in particular, was quite strong. And she said, you got to move out when you turn 18. So I had just gotten out of the rehab and I was just back with my mom and dad. I think my dad would have liked me to be there. But mom was like, nope, you're ready. And so I had to move out. It was scary. It was painful. And I had nothing. And my parents said, you know, if you ever get hungry, you can come home, but don't ask for money. and so I didn't have much money but I did go to these 12-step meetings and I was out with the friends that I made there and what I can say is that I had no money but man I had a lot of fun and I was happy and that was an important lesson in my life that I've carried all through my life to realize part of my letting go when times are really tough is that I know that I could lose everything. And if I still have my friends and my family, I'm okay. And so that was a lesson that I carried up until today. And it's part of what helps me to let go when I'm holding on. So I think that's a big aspect of my beginning. But then I would just say, I followed a path of going to

Starting point is 00:35:30 university. Eventually I went to Cal State Long Beach, studied finance, did an MBA while I was working at pepsi in los angeles and that was kind of the ending of my period in the u.s why finance and what was the attraction i went into an economics class and the professor said there's 100 people in this room i'm going to draw a line down the middle 50 of you will be gone by the end of the term and out of the 100 or site it was yeah out of the there's 200 he said 100 of you will be gone and out of 100 that remain i'll give 10 a's and yeah that man i can't even remember his name i can remember i can visualize that moment so clearly but i said damn i'm going to be one of those 10 and it was

Starting point is 00:36:18 just that man that really challenged me and that's when i studied my first i got serious about studying and it was economics and i liked it and then i started you know i played around with accounting and other things but you know really finance is what got me most excited and so that's that's how i ended up in finance and it wasn't like i wanted to have a career in wall street or something like that i just really found it you know fascinating yeah and for someone with a analytical brain like yours that the structure and the almost the the uh to some degree black and white but but not so around that would have been fairly attractive uh at the time and then you throw that challenge on top of okay yeah there's only 10 that are going to get an a and

Starting point is 00:37:02 someone like yourself it'll be like okay i'm rising to the challenge i'm i'm going to show you was there a bit of that in there as well yeah definitely and i think that's a the point that i i've learned in my life is that you know you you don't get that many chances to have turning points in your life and when you when it comes grab it and that was one where you know and and i think If you think I think the other lesson that I've learned is that people can change. I was a disaster before I got clean and all that. And then and then I wasn't that interested in school or anything like that. And all of a sudden, I just found a new passion. And that was, you know, education and what that brought me. And so if you're looking at your own situation, you're looking at your children's situation, and you're distressed a bit, you know, stay positive because things can change. People can change. It may take some pain and suffering to get there, but people can't change. Such encouraging words there, mate, because there are a lot of people. In Australia, there's a nice ice addiction going crazy here in this country, mate.

Starting point is 00:38:12 Everyone's making in their laundry tubs, basically. So it's sort of gone crazy. and there's a tendency to, as you said before, label people and individuals carry that label, whether they're aware of it or not, but they aren't what they've done, is my read. Just because you've done something doesn't mean that you like that forever. It's just a circumstance and a situation. And if someone has the will and the courage and the determination,

Starting point is 00:38:41 then it's just a a learning point on the on the curve to bigger and better things well i think that's one of the things about my mom that i always you know respected it was painful and at the moment but she saw something in me that i didn't see in myself and i would say nobody else saw in me i think i was probably most likely to fail you know in high school let's say but she saw that i had it in me and she pushed me to to go out there and she didn't do it in a super strong way and she didn't lecture me on it but i just knew she saw something there and so i think that you know the lesson is uh for parents in particular they're dealing with kids that are having trouble with drugs and alcohol and all that type of stuff is that stay positive and the other thing is that

Starting point is 00:39:29 you know there are 12-step programs like you know alcoholics anonymous narcotics anonymous and many other programs now there's also alan on for people who are family members you know go check them out they're available right in your neighborhood yeah yeah okay so into the economics and obviously that that ignited a flame tell us about uh where you went from there so then i uh i got i was living in california so i was very interested in asia and i took a trip to japan and thailand and hong kong in 1989 but uh what happened was hong kong was facing mass protests because of the tiananmen square crackdown that happened and so i stayed in thailand for two weeks and then you know for anybody that could stay in thailand for two weeks you know at that

Starting point is 00:40:17 time in 1989 when it was one of the fastest growing economies in the world it was amazing and i was just hooked and so i went back to california finished my mba while i was working with pepsi worked for pepsi for three years in manufacturing and then i applied to teach finance in thailand and i got a job and so in 1992 they said yes could you come next month so i i sold everything i own i packed up boxes of stuff i got on a plane and i moved to thailand i closed all my bank accounts i did you know i just left america and i came to thailand i taught finance for a year and then i entered into the stock market as an analyst and so that was the beginning of my career and i was 28 years old and i think that's also a lesson that you know it takes time

Starting point is 00:41:01 it takes time for us all of us to find i think a lot of people see me now as an analyst and they think man you know you must have just walked right into this job and it's so perfect for you but no in fact it took me to the age of 28 before i really got that job that i i loved and and i've never let go of that job you know that the concept of being an analyst since then yeah what i love about what you're saying there also is that you don't have to uh from from uh first year high school you don't need to know what your life journey looks like and my father always used to say yeah boys don't grow up until they're at least 30 so they've got no clue about what where they're heading or what they're doing so don't make any major life decisions before that because

Starting point is 00:41:47 you're only going to get yourself into trouble so people ask me all you know what should i do i'm not sure. And I'm like, how old are you? And they're, if they say that they're under 30, I'm like, that's the whole point. You're going to be exploring so many things and you're going to find so many things you don't like. And, you know, one of the lessons I've learned in life is that there's a lot more certainty in the things that we know than in the things that we don't know. And that sounds a little weird, but what I mean by that is that when you're in a situation and you know you don't like it it's very clear but that doesn't mean that you know what you like it doesn't mean that you know where to go but my challenge to people is when you find something

Starting point is 00:42:30 that you don't like quit walk away and to me that's part of the key to happiness is the ability and the willingness to walk away from the things and many people just compromise and they stay in that situation because you know well how am i going to find a new job and what am i going to do and all that you know there's a moment where you're swinging through life on vines like a monkey and there's a moment where you just got to let go of the existing vine you have and you've got to search for that other one and there's that period of time where it's scary as hell but by letting go it's going to free you up to find that next direction okay so uh into time and i and you talked about happiness earlier having lived and worked in

Starting point is 00:43:15 thailand myself uh the thai people themselves there's a lot of them that have very little particular when you get out out into the country and yet the their happiness and gratitude to life is it's quite uh i can see why you love that environment it's a fantastic culture definitely yeah so the priority of you know money is number one for in america it's you know it's a number one thing in some ways but here relationships are more important whether that's a family relationship or relationships at work and i think back to when i was in the u.s and you know if anybody at my work said hey let's all get together and go out for the weekend you know hiking and camping i would be like what why would i spend any time with the people i work with

Starting point is 00:44:00 like that and here it's just a very common thing and people like you know we're working together every day we might as well just you know enjoy each other so the relationships is part of a huge part of why i like thailand and why i continue to like thailand i think i've shared with you on your podcast my wife and i actually eloped to uh thailand to get married and uh we just loved it we were treated like kings and queens by uh the locals where we were staying it was just a just we've got very very fond memories of that time because of the relationship approach of the of the thai people pure and simple yeah man so uh moving moving forward from there tell us about how the journey unfolded so basically uh within i took a job as a an analyst in the stock market

Starting point is 00:44:50 in september of 1993 the thai stock market doubled by january of 1994 and then that was its peak and now we're almost 30 years you know you know years later and the stock market hasn't come back to that point and it's an important lesson that when we have bubbles uh you know recovering from those can take decades so uh but anyways i i ended up very quickly being promoted to be the head of research at the number one foreign broker in thailand in 1995 and then you know my my ego my lack of experience kind of kind of got the worst of me and i i i fired someone that i really shouldn't have fired and i just because they were threatening my my world in some way and in and then basically that person got reinstated and then i said to my boss well then i'm gonna quit

Starting point is 00:45:44 and so i walked out of the top job you know that i love so much because i was twisted up in my own ego and i ended up going to a much lesser place to be a head of research just like i was doing at the prior place. And then, you know, meanwhile, in 1995, my best friend came to see me in Thailand and he and I set up a company called Coffee Works, which is our coffee roasting factory that we have in Thailand. And we set that up in 1995. And then by this time he was running that business and I was, you know, managing my career. I was making great money. That's for sure. So all the money that I had, he and I grew up in Ohio together, so we knew each other for a long time. So all the money that I had, I could put to that business. And so I know part of the questions that you'll

Starting point is 00:46:30 ask later is about how I invested. And I can say for my first 10 years of investing, really, it was about funding that startup. And basically in 1997, the Thai bot collapsed by 50% and the economy collapsed by 11%. And I lost my job and our coffee business, basically all of our customers dried up and we were stuck and so at that point i was out of work and i had some money but we had a factory and basically we just went to our landlord we said uh we want you to reduce the rent by 50 or else we're going to move and they said no and so we moved into the factory and we lived in a room in the factory you know out on the outskirts of bangkok and there's nothing going on in the factory we have some workers you know we're doing some work but you know there's not a lot of

Starting point is 00:47:19 customers and it's painful and that was 1998 and then uh in uh we had two beds in this room that was the accounting office we moved out all the accounting stuff and so it was like going back to university and then i can remember in 1998 in august it was a very rainy day if you could imagine a monsoon rains all day it's a dark day you could smell the the smell of rain and um dale and I were sitting on our beds talking and my sister called and we're already in the depths of depression you know and my sister said that her cancer has come back and she'd asked if I could come home quickly because they said she wouldn't live more than a month she had three daughters and my other sister has two daughters at the time and so when I hung up that phone Dale

Starting point is 00:48:09 and I just looked each other and just sobbed and we were losing I lost my career we were about to lose our business and then now i'm about to lose my sister and i got on the plane eventually you know as quickly as i could and i remember flying into boston and i just sobbed uncontrollably knowing that this was the last time that i'm gonna land in the u.s to see her i managed to spend uh one week with her you know and then she passed away and she taught me a lesson right at that last moment because when i arrived i got into the bed with her and was holding her and we were talking and i just sobbed and sobbed and then she looked at me and she's in very rough condition because of the cancer she said that doesn't help me and i realized that you know i was thinking about

Starting point is 00:49:07 how her death was impacting me i wasn't really there for her and she changed my thinking and it changed the way i look at you know when i experienced death that my objective in those situations is to think about that person and so i switched my mind pretty quickly and tried to be involved with taking care of her for that last week and uh you know it was i it was a great lesson and so i came back to thailand and i was depressed and i didn't have a job and i didn't have the factory you know it's no no question whether there was definitely a question of whether we could survive and so that was kind of my other bottom if you could go back to when i was dealing with drugs and alcohol that was one bottom and that's why i highlighted the message that i learned

Starting point is 00:49:59 when i got sober which was even if i had no money and no assets and nothing i could be happy and so i carried that message to that time when it appeared like all of my assets were being stripped from me and my family relationship with my sister and so that really allowed me to kind of slowly come back and then dale dale while i was gone in america dale said we've got to move out of the factory we've got to get to an apartment or something that we just can't be caught up in this too much we moved to that apartment we stayed there for a year or two till we rebuilt and then i got a job back into the industry in 1999 or 2000 and then you know my life you know then things started to really you know get better yeah okay we're in a very challenging

Starting point is 00:50:48 child on multiple fronts andrew and i'm sure apparently there's a lot of self-reflection that went along with that, but probably also prepared you better to handle the growth that then has since occurred in Thailand and across the world globally in relation to the financial markets that you're involved in. So talk to us a bit about how that followed out. So, you know, I think that it helped me to take a bigger perspective. I was no longer afraid of anything.

Starting point is 00:51:24 You know, if you're not afraid of death and you're not afraid of losing everything, what is there to be afraid of? Now, I'm not saying that I'm careless and I just go into situations fearless, you know, but the point is, is that when I can strip away all the anxieties and all that, I can go back to the center and say, I'm okay. I'm going to be okay. and I think that that helped me to be a better person to contribute better to the people around me and then and then I it allowed me it freed me from fear and it allowed me to start to really build a good career in the world of finance and I think that what eventually you know I told my boss on day one in September of 1993 I wanted to be the number one analyst in Thailand but you know i've always taken a crooked road to where i went you know and uh i i say you know in year one

Starting point is 00:52:23 definitely not year two definitely not year five definitely not because i was losing my job six nope seven nope eight nope nine nope ten nope ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen boom fourteenth year i was voted number one analyst in thailand and that was a real pinnacle for me and i really felt great about it that i had stayed you know i lost focus in the sense that you know i did a lot of other things but eventually i got the goal that i set and i think that that that that was really a proud moment but it wasn't my proudest moment in my career my proudest moment in my career was when as my career advanced eventually i was involved with the chartered financial analyst cfa society and cfa institute globally and i was uh involved as a board member and then

Starting point is 00:53:11 i was vice president and then i was elected president by the members here in thailand which was basically thai men and women in the financial industry you know were willing to vote me to represent them in thailand and that was you know i was in tears when i when i got that and i i gave my kind of my first speech about it and just talking about how it's the real that's the real honor and it shows that you know i was able to assimilate here and all that so so that's kind of the the trajectory of the way my career went from an investment perspective what i was doing was talking about i was becoming an analyst i was looking at companies i've looked at thousands of companies in thailand and outside of thailand and i built the skills to become a leading analyst

Starting point is 00:54:01 and those skills have to do with finance accounting but also strategy and management and market movements and momentum and many different factors that all come together to build the skills and so i even now i have a online course that i created called the valuation master class where i bring all of those skills together into one course which is very very tough what i call boot camp for valuation but it is basically it brings out all the skills and i think what set me apart compared to other analysts was that i had the coffee business first of all i'd worked at pepsi and manufacturing so i knew how factories work and i knew all the problem spots and then i had my own business here that we've now had for 25 years but at that year at that time

Starting point is 00:54:44 i knew all the challenges that ceos were facing so when i went to meet with ceos or when i talked to fund managers that wanted to understand about thailand i just i knew things i saw things differently than many other traditional analysts that just went to work as an analyst out of school. Yeah, and I've got your hands dirty walking the talk rather than sort of being an academic about it. You really understand the nitty-gritty of both sides of the fence, essentially.

Starting point is 00:55:16 So you made an interesting point there. It's something that I've been studying for decades now, and that is the road to sustainable success. And you mentioned 14 years. I've sort of come to the conclusion it didn't matter where I look, whether it be business, whether it be in equities, whether it be in property, whether it be any endeavour, the journey to sustainable success, not the one-hit wonders

Starting point is 00:55:40 or the overnight sensation sort of stuff, but the sustainable success, that exponential curve always takes around about 15 years and most of the growth and most of the results come in the last 20% of that hockey stick. So your own experience is obviously a reflection of exactly that journey and I guess my challenge to the listeners is to recognise that true sustainable success is a long-term endeavour.

Starting point is 00:56:10 So focus on the long-term, embrace the time that it's going to take and then relax with it so you're not beating yourself up because you haven't achieved fantastic things yesterday but actually start to enjoy the journey knowing that if you keep at it then you'll you'll uh as long as you're doing the right thing and you'll still make mistakes along the way you enjoy the fruit as a result of that is it definitely there's two good books there's two good books on that the slight edge by jeff olson and then the compound effect by darren darren harding hardy and those two books will help explain the whole concept but

Starting point is 00:56:43 yes you got to build and that's why i was saying if i went back to when i when i was struggling as a young kid, I realized that education and knowledge was my ticket out. Yeah, maybe it's not everybody's ticket out, but if you really want to excel in an area, the truth is it's not that hard. People are not working so hard to improve themselves in any one particular area. Yes, there's a 10% of people that are working very hard, but the majority of other people aren't working that hard. So if you just dedicated yourself to reading, let's say one book in your area of interest a month. You'd be miles ahead of the majority of your competitors. And that's what I did. You'll see behind me, I have 500 books in my library right now. I've had thousands of

Starting point is 00:57:27 them. I've read everything. I did a PhD in the area of finance and I did my CFA. I also continued to teach, even though I stopped teaching full time, I've now taught for 30 years at university in finance and that's what helps me also to you know it helps me obviously it helped me in the beginning to really understand and internalize the theories of finance because i had to explain them but more importantly it really made me a better it made me better able to explain complex concepts yes yes there's no better way of replying your message than having to write a book I know you've written several very good books and I know when I sat down to do the same thing myself, if you look at me before and after the book, the way I communicate the message is so much better than it ever was before having to put the pen to paper and really craft that message. So you've honed that stone on quite a number of occasions, Andrew,

Starting point is 00:58:29 which we'll touch on shortly. Something I'd like to drill into just while we're there, because it revolves around the same subject. And, you know, one of the things that I constantly get frustrated with in Australia is the instant everything response. There is no long term. And, you know, I was fortunate enough many years ago to read The Road Less Travelled that really ran home to me

Starting point is 00:58:55 the benefits of delayed gratification. And it's something that's stayed with me ever since and as, you know, part of the armoury has really served me well as a consequence of that. But I find it very difficult to get people to actually understand the benefits of delayed gratification. But what's been your experience and what's your thoughts on how best to communicate the benefits of embracing delayed gratification as a means to sustainable success in whatever that might be? well first thing is buy the book the road less traveled by scott peck and read the chapter on

Starting point is 00:59:36 delayed gratification and read the argument of why this truly is the true way to have happiness in life once i read that i really i challenged myself and i think this is one way to get there to challenge yourself and i'm gonna i'm gonna talk about it from a perspective of let's say your value or your wealth. Basically, there's two ways to build wealth. And I often say what I do in my business, I help people create, grow, measure, and protect their assets, their wealth, their value. And there's two ways that I see to create wealth. The first way is to start up a business. Let's just say you're one of the lucky ones. You start a business and you make a ton of money, that is the traditional way that we make money and that we build wealth or create wealth

Starting point is 01:00:28 in our life. The second way, and this is something that goes against what a lot of people talk about, and that is a job. If you have a job where you're earning, let's say, $100,000 a year, and let's say that you're spending $90,000, well, you got an extra $10,000 that you've created you have literally created that and once you start to understand it i would highly recommend another book called your money or your life and it's uh uh the forgot the guy's name dominguez i think it is but we can get that but the point is what he really talked about was how you know think of what you're doing every day as you're you're you're giving your energy and so when you look at a tv instead of saying that's going to cost me 50 bucks or whatever

Starting point is 01:01:17 you're going to think that's going to cost me a certain amount of energy that i'm never going to get back and when you start to do that and then you post it on your wall your monthly spending and your monthly income that's what i did i follow what was in that book and it really made me realize that actually if you're making a hundred thousand dollars a year and you can get your cost down to 60,000, you've now created $40,000 of wealth. So you do not have to start a business to create wealth. And then the next aspect is growing wealth. And that's the concept of what are you doing with that money? Are you investing in property? Are you investing in the stock market? What are you doing? And a lot of people ask me about my investments and I say,

Starting point is 01:02:08 well, you know, actually I, I have a little bit of a strange life because my business is very high risk. The coffee business is very high risk. We never expected we would get money from banks and we didn't want to go to outside investors. So we wanted to sell funds. So I always had to have a lot of cash in hand to protect that business. So therefore my other investments are much lower risk type of investments, you know, diversified all, you know, that type of index type of thing. And people would think, you know, I mean, I do sometimes play around with stock, but generally, I have to really balance the risks that I'm taking in entrepreneurship with, you know, the other risks that I take in the market. Yeah, that's a very good commentary. There's a misguided belief, I think, that having your own business is everything, and you and I both know that the number of businesses that are truly successful are few and far between, and those that do immerse themselves often end up in a worse position than they were when they were in a good job, because they're spending a lot more time, a lot more stress, and quite often eating out and existing.

Starting point is 01:03:24 existence that's melting. I think, I mean, I think also I mentioned that your sound is coming about across a little bit patchy. So, but what I will say is that, you know, when I look at business and I look at job, like I've just described it, you know, what your objective is, is to create a cash machine, an ATM, something that just spins off cash. And whether that's a business or whether that's a job where you have, and as I say in one of my books, How to Start Building Your Wealth, Investing in the Stock Market, I say, take pride in living deeply below your means. And if you can do that, you've created a cash machine. And what are so many people doing? They're searching all around to try to find the answer they're buying cryptocurrency and they're doing all these

Starting point is 01:04:19 different things and they got it right in their hand and they're not taking it so you know it goes back to benjamin franklin's you know quote which was a penny saved is a penny earned it's so true and you know most people just completely miss it so if you want to create wealth delay gratification and focus on either your business being a cash machine or your job being a cash machine yeah let's let's jump into the well the current and the future a little bit if you like and i'd love you to describe and you may be living it right now but your ideal lifestyle and what you've invested in and what you would continue to invest in to either achieve it or sustain it so i think that you know from my perspective the first thing is i have three

Starting point is 01:05:11 businesses. So I have my coffee business, I have ASTOT's investment research, and I have ASTOT's academy where I put all of my courses and training and all that. So my first objective is to make sure that all three of these businesses are successful, profitable, and growing. And as I do that, and as I have done that, then that's my wealth creation machine. And that's my job is to drive wealth out of that. And I also would give advice to any person that's in business or in small business. My challenge is you make sure you have monthly financial statements, balance sheet, income statement, cashflow, work with an accountant to get that on a monthly basis. If you do not do that, you're never going to get there, but that monthly feedback is critical.

Starting point is 01:05:59 And so the first thing is my core investments are that. Outside of that, I'll invest in a few different things. First is index funds. So there's a fund like in America, Vanguard has a ETF or a fund called VT Fund. And it's notable because it owns about more than 8,000 stocks, which means it owns technically, you could say, pretty much every stock in the world. It's the simplest, easiest way to invest. You just own that, you own equity exposure. You don't have to worry about, oh, is the US going to crash? Or is Europe going to crash? Or is this sector going to crash? Or is this stock going to crash? So that's one aspect. The second aspect is I do own some property. I have done that. I've done rental and raw land. And then the other thing is individual stocks. And so sometimes I'll build that. And I always say, if you're going to build a portfolio of individual stocks,

Starting point is 01:06:57 you want to have about 10 stocks in that portfolio and less than that. And you really haven't really protected the risk through diversification. More than that, let's say you own 20 or something. First of all, it's hard to manage. And second of all, you're going to be you're going to be behaving a lot like the index so therefore you might as well just own an ETF so there's a little bit of diversification in the in the sort of 10 or so so stock but that's your risk money in a sense because the rest of your portfolio is pretty much covered and and if you do well in those 10 stocks and bonus if you don't then it doesn't matter so much is that is that what you're yeah I think that's good and and you know the truth is that there is some

Starting point is 01:07:43 advantages to being a stock picker you know you can keep your costs low because transaction costs are pretty low and you know you can hold a group of stocks that you really like and think are good but you know it takes some skill it takes time i mean to do that it takes a lot of time which most people just don't have so you don't want to go into that unless you've got the time to commit i do have a recent work that i did on that where i was i was in philippines and thought the problem in philippines i was advising about 2 000 kids high school students i was talking about buying an index fund well they didn't really have an index fund there so you know i was thinking how can i really provide advice well i could go to them and say well buy 10 stocks but how are they

Starting point is 01:08:27 these 2 000 kids do not necessarily you know maybe 10 of them will really be a stock picker and the rest of them like they're just going to get themselves in trouble so i i did a academic study where i basically what i did is uh i randomly selected 10 stocks and then and then uh and then i held those 10 stocks for a year and then i randomly selected another 10 and reallocated to those 10 and i repeated that over years by backtesting this and then i tried to kind of look at you know there's many different outcomes some of those portfolios would have been really good and some would have been really poor bad and then and then i then what i did is i basically said well if i combine a stop loss with that and say, okay, throughout the year, if this stock, any one of

Starting point is 01:09:13 these stocks went down by 10, 15, 20%, I would just sell it, hold cash and wait till the end of the year and then reallocate. And I did that and I found that it really enhanced the returns. And so what I would highlight for most people, the hardest decision to make is what to do when a stock falls. So what I would say is, on a regular basis, whether that's quarterly or whether that's annually imagine that the stocks that you're holding you've just acquired what's today's prices of those stocks set a limit of i would say you know maybe 20 and say if the stock was 100 say if it went to 80 i'm just going to sell because i just can't i can't afford to ride that thing down you know 50 or something and that's then you just get out you wait until you

Starting point is 01:10:01 rebalance next time but the point is stop losses are valuable very valuable because i've always said that you the more important question when you're invested is knowing when you're going to get out not when you're going to get in getting in is really easy but knowing and having some process around the getting out is the is the challenging piece and you know i've done i've spent some time many years ago when i was trying to get back i day traded for a couple of years Andrew, and the stop losses were a saviour. And I had a system that was, I had 60% losing trades, but the 40% winning trades, because I let the profits run,

Starting point is 01:10:37 made that a profitable way to actually do an SD. So, yeah, I think you're 100% right there. That's really good. So I'm picking that you're sort of more a fundamentals investor. Did you have a process or a hierarchy that you apply that gives you a greater sense of when you are stock picking what is more likely to be a good trade than other yeah so basically what I'd done I switched my behavior about 10 years ago I went from being a traditional analyst going deep into a particular company and then coming up

Starting point is 01:11:17 with a conviction and then saying I'm going to invest on this conviction you know there's a place for that but basically what i what i changed to is i i developed a system that is let's say a factor-based system i'm looking at different factors and i summarize them into four factors and i call it fvmr fundamentals valuation momentum and risk and to me those four factors fundamentals valuation momentum and risk encapsulate pretty much everything i need to know about the market and about a stock every three months i myself and my team we lock down and we calculate now we've done a lot of back testing to ask the question you know let's just take uh fundamentals well there's many different measures we could have return on equity we could

Starting point is 01:12:12 have net profit margin we could have many and you could imagine let's say under under fundamentals let's say there's 10 under valuation there's 10 under momentum there's 10 and under risk there's 10. So maybe we have 40 factors. What we do is we go back and back test and try to understand in the past, which factors work the best for that market, particularly because we're looking across Asia. So different markets are very different. Australia is very different from behavior in Philippines, from Thailand, from China. So once we've done that, we've identified a country model basically. And then once every three months, we score all the companies in that market on that ranking. And then from that, we can rank companies from what we think are attractive to

Starting point is 01:12:55 unattractive. Now, it could be that the factors don't work anymore in the future. It's possible. But the fact is, is that it's very hard to predict the future. I would rather have a much more secure, sound understanding of the present. And so by doing that, then we end up with, let's say, 20 companies that are most attractive based upon that factor model that we use. And then we do the fundamental research there. So it's what I call quantamental, a combination of quantitative to narrow it down and fundamentals then to make sure that, okay, we're not getting into something that's silly. But sometimes you are going to get into something that maybe not has great fundamentals, but it's so cheap and momentum's moving. I'm willing to get into that as long as

Starting point is 01:13:41 number one, I've looked at it from many different angles as we do. And the second thing is we have stop losses on those portfolios and we reset those stop losses every quarter. We basically imagine, and I think this is, if I was managing a team of fund managers or I was advising a lot of people that are managing portfolios, basically every three months or so, I'd invite everybody into the room on a Monday morning and I'd lock them in the room and I'd say, good news, i sold all the stocks you own in your portfolio you're 100 cash and then everybody screams and yells what the hell did you do and i say well sorry about that but now you're 100 cash so what do you want to add to your portfolio today and that takes away the sunk cost fallacy and all

Starting point is 01:14:28 the different behavioral issues where we hang on to things and i think the best way to think about that is a little bit like a relationship. If you went into a relationship, you knew nothing about the person. She's beautiful, he's handsome, whatever. And then you had a beautiful romantic time. And after a year, you realize this person isn't what I thought they were. You know a lot more. Now the question that I would ask is, if that person walked up to you today and you weren't together and you know what you know now would you start this relationship and oftentimes you know and that that's i'm not good at um relationships because i've never been married yet so i don't i always say be careful listening to advice from me but i use my my uh my mind and

Starting point is 01:15:17 my logic and reason to basically say if you want advice from me i'm just going to ask you one question and it's only a yes or no answer and that's all that i can give you and so i ask people that often and i say if knowing what you know now about the person that you're with would you start a relationship and if they say yes then i say double down bring that commitment into that relationship and if they say no i'd say i can't tell you what to do but you've just told me something very valuable that's a good way of putting it hey yeah it's something i wouldn't mind just touching on at the moment because there's some pretty interesting activity happening and from, I've been around

Starting point is 01:16:01 a little while now and earned some of the grey hairs that I've got and would certainly indicate to me a number of different financial instruments and also property for that matter in a lot of the developed world where we're sort of coming into a potential bubble phase and we're seeing some, you know, I've seen similar stuff and you know it's just wearing different clothes now where there's been over the furor over the whole exercise with um uh the wall street uh uh you know having a mental blank now but the whole reddit exercise over the game stop and all the rest of it and there seems

Starting point is 01:16:39 to be this sort of emerging gap between you know any sort of fundamental exercise and just third-driven FOMO and almost some of the values centipede-driven moral on the have with the story is rather than anything else. What's your view around all of that? I do. I think the first thing is that it's hard to predict the stock market. And after years of being in the financial industry,

Starting point is 01:17:07 I know that most financial professionals, the ones that are right are almost always right because of luck. And, and it appears it appears in a vision as, you know, brilliance, but most of the cases, it's just luck. But so the point is, is that, you know, it's very hard to predict the future. So it's better to understand the past. And so the first thing that I do is I do a system and I do this in my, I have a Facebook group for my course, which is the build your wealth course. And that's really simple ETF. It's not picking stocks. That's a different thing. But basically, what I do is I created a red light, green light system where I look at, let's say, the US market, and I go back over the last 30 years, and then I apply some different FVMR measures to say, 10% of the time, the market is really high, and I'll call that red light, and 10% of the time, the market's really low, and I'll call that green light. And then I would say that I'll just use that as a guide. And so whenever I see that red light going, which we've had over the last couple of years, basically, I know that we are close to a very expensive market. And so if I look at PEs, price to book, price to earnings ratios, these types of things, the markets are somewhat expensive. Now, I would also argue that it's a small number of large cap stocks that are expensive, and it's a small number of companies in the US in particular that are expensive. And so that's where I think that if I look at allocating, if someone came to me and says, look, I got $100 million right now, and I want to allocate it across the world into the stock market, don't worry, I have my other safe holdings. So this 100 million needs to be allocated to the stock market. I would say, basically, it's probably Asia and emerging markets where I would allocate most of that because these markets are not expensive. There's a lot of inherent growth. They're not facing huge potential devaluations because of overspending like we've got in the US. So that's how I would think about it.

Starting point is 01:19:07 Yeah, great advice. Good lead in there, I think, to talk about a subject that's a favourite of yours, which is around some of the mistakes that we make. And I know that you've done some really good research as a result of your awesome podcast to look at the biggest mistakes that investors make. Can you give us a rundown on your findings and what they are? Are you ready for it? Let's do it. And I'll have a little fun, just like I opened up the show. Hello, fellow risk-takers, and welcome to my worst investment ever. Stories of loss to keep you winning. Now, here, after 350 episodes, I've analyzed all of the episodes to try to break them down into the most common mistakes. and I'm just going to go through them right now. The number one out of six most common mistake

Starting point is 01:20:05 is failed to do their own research. Number two, failed to properly assess and manage risk. The third most common is driven by emotion or flawed thinking. The fourth is misplaced trust. The fifth is failed to monitor their investment. And the sixth is a catch-all account, invested in a startup company. Those are the six most common mistakes of my guests. Right. Beautifully said in those dulcet DJ tones. Can I get you now just to break those down

Starting point is 01:20:41 and put some flesh around those bones because there's a lot of learnings in that. And then once we've gone through that, to flip the other side, to look at, okay, what are the best strategies to overcome those six common mistakes? So I call, I do a little presentation based upon what I learned, six ways to lose your money and six strategies to win. So let's just go through it for a moment and combine both of what you just talked about. It's amazing. The mistake number one is about research. It's amazing how people

Starting point is 01:21:12 just put their money into things without doing any real research. Happens all the time. They hear it from a friend or this or that. Next thing you know, they're handing over serious amounts of money for something they didn't really do any research on. So to solve this problem, I challenge you for the next time that you're looking at an investment, get out a blank piece of paper and do a little research. Write down some notes. What do you think this is going to return? Why do you like this idea? Write down your ideas about it. Now, what I would highlight in this case is write down your positive ideas. What's the potential here? We're talking about huge potential small potential write down your positive ideas now that brings us into number two

Starting point is 01:21:56 which is failed to properly assess and manage risk and basically i talk about assess risk means before you get into it and manage risk means once you're in it and so what i recommend is that you you separate the research that you're done on return from the research you're doing on risk so you want to rank the risks by probability and severity and then try to create a risk reduction plan and i'll just tell you a quick story about it in my own coffee business my business partner dale came up with an opportunity to expand into vietnam and so what we decided he would do the research on that and present it one day and so he did a couple of months of research and then he presented what potential upside there was for us doing this investment and then we went out for

Starting point is 01:22:42 dinner and then you know after he presented that and we talked some more it was a great presentation and what we then agreed is a week later we would have a meeting to talk about the risks and then we talked about all the things that could go wrong and then by the end of that meeting we decided not to make the investment but the point is when you separate your research on risk from return it allows you to you know it doesn't i'm i didn't spend my time trying to shoot down everything he was talking about let's build that vision and then it allowed him to then engage in the next week's meeting about all the risks without really threatening his positive model.

Starting point is 01:23:22 So this would be my advice. That's a great way of separating the two. So each has their equal hearing, but not clowning each other and then turning into a battle rather than a constructive conversation. That's all. Exactly. So then we come to number three, which is driven by emotion or flawed thinking. and what i say to to handle this is find explore and list out opposing views and then discuss this

Starting point is 01:23:50 with a knowledgeable and objective person i don't see any other way to do it you've got to kind of map it out and then you've got to talk to somebody now maybe you don't write it all out you just get someone that you respect who is objective and then talk to them and that's how you can try to overcome that now the next one is misplaced trust and basically what i've learned is if you nowadays we have all these books talk about hack hackathon and hacking you know hacking your fitness and your nutrition and all that but what i can tell you is that from my experience trust is one thing that cannot be hacked it can only develop over time and it's amazing the number of people that i've interviewed who just give their money to someone they never even met

Starting point is 01:24:33 it's just like and many people are very very skilled at getting that money out of the pockets of those people but the point is that trust builds over time and i remember asking a fund manager i believe it was that aberdeen funds uh a very successful fund management company and basically i said to him they were known for their corporate governance i said if a fund man if a ceo of a company did something that was bad for corporate governance that seemed to disadvantage minority shareholders how long would you wait you know you kind of put them on a blacklist but how long would you keep them on that blacklist and he said a lifetime and it made me really realize that you know one you know damaging trust just once can last a lifetime so think about trust it develops

Starting point is 01:25:25 over time and it's also very rare i always ask people and i'd ask the listener to to answer this question you know how many people in your life if you had to tell a a real serious secret that the world would like to know but you need to tell one person and you do not want them to tell anybody else how many people would you trust with that secret you asked me that question andrew realistically there'd probably be only about three people i could trust i'd be my wife there's a couple of others that i had proven to me that they can keep a secret but beyond that I would say the average of what

Starting point is 01:26:04 the answers that I get is probably about two and I use that as proof that trust is rare that's proof I often say that in our business we're actually in the trust business

Starting point is 01:26:21 because for people to we assist people in the property sphere in Australia because because property as an asset in Australia is much more advantaged than it is in most other parts of the world. So it is certainly an important part of anyone's investment portfolio in this country.

Starting point is 01:26:40 But to get someone to feel comfortable to invest large amounts of money with you, it all revolves around trust. And I agree with you, trust isn't something that is immediately given. It has to be earned, and it has to be earned repeatedly over time. And it's because we're in such an impatient, instant, everything now world, I actually think the world's suffering from a bit of a trust vortex, or it certainly is here in Australia anyway, where no one trusts anyone as a result of what the media has done to assassinate politicians and churches and you name it. so trust is a very rare commodity and if you're able to demonstrate trust then that in itself puts your head and shoulders above a lot of others what what's your feelings on all that definitely i mean i think it's a it's a real challenge and the question really is is that

Starting point is 01:27:33 uh are you a trustworthy person if other people were asking if i asked that question to people around you would they choose you as the person that they trust and you know i can't control media and I can't control all the things that are out there. And I agree that it's a mess as far as trust is concerned. But the ultimate thing I can't control is I can become a trustworthy person. So that's the challenge. So number five is failed to monitor their investment.

Starting point is 01:27:59 And what I would say is that I would like to use an example of imagine a friend came to you and said, I've got this idea of this amazing Thai restaurant, you know, whatever it is that they want to start. And then basically they ask for you to invest and you decide yeah i want to put ten thousand dollars in this and see how it goes what i would suggest to you is that you talk to your friend and say look you know what's the the deadest day of the week well maybe monday let's say he takes monday off say the you know the second

Starting point is 01:28:29 monday of every month i want to have a one hour call with you to talk about the business and set a what i call a regular predetermined monitoring process and then you know then nobody's going to refuse that when they're asking for money and then then hold them to it and and then get updates on what you've got so i think that's my that's my way of handling you know the idea of monitoring the investment and the final one is the startup and i just basically say the reality you've got to start from the reality that you're likely to lose everything and it's a it's a binary investment it's either you know big win or big loss and those are my strategies six ways to lose money and six strategies to win well that beautifully summed

Starting point is 01:29:15 up and that folds beautifully into like and i'm not going to be able to do it anywhere near as well as you do but andrew what has been your worst investment ever and since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it and then tell us your story oh beautiful that's beautiful um so i uh i have a friend of mine he's very very you know brilliant guy and literally a genius and uh he had he's a genius in languages and he basically he had some idea of software and developing language software and i was very excited about it and i wanted to support him and uh basically we started a business together and that this was probably about 10 years ago and basically we had great ideas and and and over time

Starting point is 01:30:03 it just took more money and i was the one that was really providing all the capital and and then it started to get sidetracked and then it started to become a bigger business and then all of a sudden we were going to create a learning platform you know and that was going to compete globally and then we hired another guy that that became a third a third person in the in the mix of this who was very you know also a very brilliant guy who worked very hard on that and then eventually what happened was we just we just couldn't we pivoted too many times and we pivoted too far away from the original idea and there just came a point where i said look we have to hit some revenue targets and if we don't it's over and we couldn't hit those revenue targets

Starting point is 01:30:44 and we just had to basically shut the idea down and it was painful it took everything in me to maintain relationships with the people involved because i didn't want to lose those relationships but it it was at a time that it was really a large amount of money and it was a very painful loss i was head of you know cfa society and successful analysts and here i am making these mistakes and and losing serious money money that could really damage my life you know and my other investments and yeah it was a lot of shame uh a lot of embarrassment and i didn't want to talk about it at the time and so part of my worst investment ever when i interviewed people you know part of it i realized is the cathart catharsis you know idea of you know letting go of these

Starting point is 01:31:34 mistakes and learning from them and that that was one that was really hard for me to admit to accept and to reveal yeah and i guess the we talked you touched on relationships earlier uh the relationships can be really good or or conversely they will cloud your judgment to to overlook the things that are probably staring you in the face but because of that relationship connection you're less likely to to take action earlier is that am i reading that right or yeah i think that you know i mean i also just got i get excited he's got a great idea we were pursuing it but i realized you know as i say uh when you think about business and investing you want to think about first thing is trust do you trust the person well i knew him for a while and i knew his

Starting point is 01:32:21 brilliance i trusted him he never did anything that betrayed that trust and he never did throughout the whole time the second idea the second question is the idea is the idea good if you trust him but the idea is bad you know no point but i think his original idea was very good so the next question is execution so you trust him the idea is good the next question is can he execute and then the fourth question is capital you don't ever want to be the person the only person providing capital to a situation you know if you can avoid it and so trust idea execution capital and i think it was at the execution part and i didn't really think about that until after but once i started to see the the reality that we were going to execute on a global scale we're going to raise

Starting point is 01:33:06 three to five million dollars that capital to get there it just all of a sudden i realized okay this is the big leagues and we're not ready for that and i can't you know fund the process of getting ready for that that would have been a tough conversation saying we're going to turn off the tap that would have been very challenging i would imagine yeah and i have a policy which is you know and this is dale and i talked about when we set up coffee works many years ago is it if the business or the money ever got in the way of our relationship we're going to shut it down not the relationship we're going to shut down the business so i really have a philosophy that you know money is just money it's neutral it's a neutral thing and it's something that i can i could be stripped

Starting point is 01:33:48 of completely and still be a perfectly whole happy human being of course there's comforts and other things that i wouldn't have but that's my mentality because of what i've told you about my history yeah this is where the it's the old obstacle of the way exercise the challenges you've had have really set set the tone and given you the comfort and the confidence that regardless of what happens in the world you're still okay it doesn't it doesn't matter and what goes with that is courage but also that fearless fearless approach and an ability to look at situations on their merits rather than than be crowded by other things so were there any other lessons that you learned from that experience that you want to share and i think the first the first lesson is

Starting point is 01:34:31 you know you got to look you got to look down the road it's more than just getting excited about the moment and the idea and i'd say that the lesson i learned was this lesson of trust idea execution and capital that was the big lesson out of that yeah and i'm going to use your questions again because i think they're very based on what you've learned and what you continue to learn around that area, what one action would you recommend our listeners take? So now I do advise startups and I do help companies that are ongoing to clean up their financial aspect of their business in a lot of cases.

Starting point is 01:35:15 But I would give advice to anybody that invests in a business is, and my advice is just very simple, get a monthly financial statements, balance sheet income statement cash flow that is the only advice that i really i think it's the most valuable advice because majority of people could never get it and therefore you don't have a business and if you can get it you're going to have a mirror that's going to give you a reflection of the outcome of your management decisions and ideas and if that reflection is a very negative reflection the management of that company and the owners and shareholders are going to either take a very clear focused look and reverse that or they're

Starting point is 01:36:02 going to have to get out and i think that that's where i always say i when i when i walk into my course of finance course like valuation or that type of thing it's a lot of young people that are excited to work in the industry of finance and i always start off with the same statement which is finance adds no value and it's a little bit annoying and shocking but what i say is that finance is just a mirror our job as financial professionals to provide a mirror to the management team because what truly adds value is is products and services that customers love that's what adds value and that can only be created by a management team by a leader and coordination amongst the management team and executing their ideas and then you know checking

Starting point is 01:36:48 those ideas against what's happening in the financials now also what i would say is that the objective of management is to create value and you know not to create profit so a lot of times we think about it now i'm saying get your financial statement so you can see if you're making profit sometimes it's about survival but the point that i'm making is that uh you know amazon didn't make profit for 10 years so are they you know were they were they destroying value actually they were creating value so you know profit is one thing but value is the whole picture of how you manage a company and if you create a company that's based upon lying cheating stealing you know destroying the environment or wealth all those things all

Starting point is 01:37:32 those things come together to create the value of that company and i think that that's where a lot of people miss about the beauty of the stock market and the beauty of capitalism is that it is not about maximizing profit it is about maximizing value and the market if the markets are allowed to work people are critical of companies that are maximizing profits at times knowing that okay great there's going to be a lawsuit for 50 billion dollars or whatever down the road and that's going to destroy value and so i think if we can get back to the idea of focusing on value, then I think we have a better check and balance. Yeah, very good commentary.

Starting point is 01:38:16 That value exercise is something a lot of people miss, unfortunately, and that's something that you get a lot of, mate. And if I looked at your life today, the thing that I can see emanating from everything you do is that you invest in creating value. and I love the way you continue to do that and I've been fortunate enough now to rub shoulders with you and pretty keen to continue to do that on your journey. Something I just wanted to challenge our listeners with

Starting point is 01:38:50 because something you so brilliantly did during our conversation on my worst investment ever was to coin and capture the TLC challenge and which I just really resounded with me where you said, you know, think of the person that you love and care for the most and then while you're thinking of them, treat yourself better than you treat them. Something I want to extend on that today because I think we're on the... And I think you haven't referred to it correctly.

Starting point is 01:39:28 it is in fact the bushy martin tlc challenge you just call it it's the bushy martin tlc challenge and it is i think about that person you love the most and then love yourself just a little bit more you coined that absolutely beautifully i want to extend that a little bit because Because you know and I know that if individuals, families, communities and governments were serious about really eliminating poverty in the world, if each of us just put away $20 a week every week for years on end, and I'm going to challenge our listeners today, if you've got a son or a daughter,

Starting point is 01:40:19 it doesn't matter what age, and you start putting $20 a week into it, and let's take a Vanguard index fund, Andrew, because they're easy to do, and you kept on doing that, then by the time they're 20, they'll have enough for a house deposit. But if you don't spend it and you keep putting that $20 in, by the time they're 50, they'll have $1.3 million in their back pocket. And if they hang on until they're 60, they'll have $3.3 million in their pocket. Now, if we're looking at solving poverty and also the myriad of financial challenges that communities have across the world,

Starting point is 01:41:03 just that very simple act of putting $20 per week away for every individual would transform the world in 30 or 40 years. So I'm going to challenge the listeners to do that for themselves, do it for your family, and let's start encouraging governments to think the same way. Because if we do, the broader TLC challenge, beyond giving yourself tender, loving care, is to use time, leverage and compounding returns to really change the face of the globe. What's your thoughts on that? Amen. I mean, I think that, you know, if we think about it, I can bring it back to my experience, and that was education is what got me out of the situation of not having money and all that. So if we were to say that we wanted to solve that, we wanted to give young people a guarantee that they would have an opportunity to get their education, have funding for that. it doesn't take a lot when a child is born and you could even say let's focus on families that

Starting point is 01:42:07 have not yet gotten a higher education and then we say how do we fund that from the beginning through government or through voluntary organizations to say if we fund that correctly now at when that child is born that child and that family can can grow up knowing that they will have the funding available to get their education and even if that's all we did forget about retirement or buying a house anything that would be magical would be transformational you sort of ignited a bit of fire in me around that and i've been sort of contemplating it for a while i'm certainly going to putting a lot of energy into the tlc calendar at a number of levels so well i yeah thank you for your inspiration in that regard mate but uh i wanted to sort of

Starting point is 01:42:54 now sort of jump into what i call the ambush series which is just the five quick questions and then a closing question, which I ask all of our esteemed guests here on Get Invested. I'm ready. Yeah, excellent. So the first of those, what's your favorite quote and why? So my favorite quote, I actually got it right here, and it comes from the book As a Man Thinketh by James Allen.

Starting point is 01:43:17 The book came out in the early 1900s, and it says, this is the quote. It's a little bit long, so just bear with me. having conceived of his purpose a man should mentally mark out a straight pathway to its achievement looking neither to the right nor the left doubts and fears should be rigorously excluded they are disintegrating elements which break up a straight line of effort rendering it crooked ineffectual useless thoughts of doubt and fear never accomplish anything and never can they always lead to failure beautiful beautiful very well compassed it's pretty self-evident but why is that your favorite quote i think that it's easy to get distracted

Starting point is 01:44:03 it's easy to get scared it's easy to get doubt and this helped me to feel comfortable to push those things aside and i think that i needed that at times i read that book you know that that book that i have right there my grandfather gave to my father and he gave it in 1954 and he's got it signed in there so it's it's something that touches my family but it also is something that i read a lot when i was younger when i was full of doubts and fears so repeating that quote over and over again i even put it up on my wall when i was younger now i've internalized it and you're a rabid reader reader like myself andrew and what's the top book you'd recommend listeners uh have a read on and why well i i would say you know um you mentioned the uh the road less

Starting point is 01:44:57 traveled and you know i would say that forms the foundation of a lot of my thinking so i it's it's you know it's 30 years old now or maybe even older but i do believe that there's a lot of great wisdom in that so the road less traveled by scott peck and delaying gratification and also his his description of love like what is love and you know i think that i really that really resonated with me that you know it's it's something very different from what you know we we typically think i mean i one understand that that's been a foundational book for me i read that when I had my, what I call my car crash in my early 30s and it really transformed my thinking and the concept

Starting point is 01:45:43 of sacrificial love in giving without expecting anything in return has really been something that's shaped everything I've done since. And the relationship that I now enjoy with my awesome wife is greatly due to the fundamentals that came out of that book. and, as you say, it's influenced other aspects as well. So it might be 30 years old, but wisdom is timeless and I would agree with you. Listeners, grab yourself a copy.

Starting point is 01:46:19 It's regardless of where you're at in life and what you're doing, you'll get a lot of reading out of that book. Awesome. This one's a little bit left field because it's probably got an Australian context because a lot of Aussies believe they pay way too much tax. What's the top legal thing that you've done to minimize the tax that you pay, Andrew? Well, I think ultimately owning business is an important part of managing taxes because it allows you to put expenses related to the business in there and then manage your compensation relative to that.

Starting point is 01:46:55 So I would say that's probably one big aspect of it that I would say is probably the biggest way that I manage that. yeah very well said um back on the investment topics then for a minute what's both the worst and the best piece of investment advice that you've ever received you know i think um maybe i could say it came the best one came from my dad who said if you just keep jumping around from one thing to another you're never going to be able to amount to something significant and so i think that you know that really comes down the idea of hyper focus or focus to focus in on one area and build some strength and competency there that's the only way i know how to increase you know my value and uh you know i i hear a lot of bad investment advice you know there's so much bad

Starting point is 01:47:50 investment advice out there and you know i think that um one of the pieces of investment advice It's going to be a little bit strange, but a lot of people give the advice, like, think about the book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Ultimately, the rich dad was an entrepreneur. The poor dad had a J-O-B. And basically, but what we know in real life is that only a tiny fraction of people really have the skills to be an entrepreneur. Maybe less than 1% of the people. And there's a lot of skills involved. So if that's the case, this book actually gives very, very bad advice.

Starting point is 01:48:35 Because it's telling all the readers to try to be that 1%. And so I would say that, you know, the opposite side of that advice is that, yeah, if you think you're going to be an entrepreneur, go do it. Enjoy. And that book's very, you know, a lot of great stuff in it. But that advice, it's not the only way to create value. Keeping that gap, you can create value through your job. And I think my mom is a good example of that because when my father passed away, it was a one family, you know, earner family. My dad, you know, wasn't making huge money.

Starting point is 01:49:11 He's just a corporate executive all of his life. but when my mother retired and after after 22 years of retirement my father passed away my mother came to Thailand and basically you know she's her her financial sister situation is such that she doesn't have to worry about money for the rest of her life and the point you know first of all there's the power of compounding they made some good smart decisions but ultimately it's evidence that you do not have to become an entrepreneur to create value and so i challenge everybody to keep your monthly costs deeply below your monthly income to create value yeah great advice and 100% right this fallacy that you have to start a business to get anywhere

Starting point is 01:49:58 i i totally totally agree with you if you're in a well-paying job and providing your your lifestyle inflation doesn't escalate to meet the income you're earning but you as you say get proud of living living lean then uh the the gap between what you spend and what you earn if that's invested wisely you can really set yourself up and it's a it's a it is a message that's often missed so uh yeah very good advice there mate um uh coming to the personal level for a minute what's a personal habit that you believe contributes most to your investment success um i guess i'm a methodical person and so i go through a process before i do something and it it works for me it slows me down it allows me to ask questions and it allows me to work look at

Starting point is 01:50:57 things from many different angles so i'd say that that's probably you know my biggest strength yep yep fine final question then and this is a big question but it gives you plenty of scope to sort of wrap everything together in a nice neat package based on the the uh the breadth of topics we've discussed today if i gave you a microphone that spoke to every single one of the 7.7 billion people that's currently alive in the world today mate if i gave you 60 seconds to speak what would decide i think the first thing is your objective in life is to be more of who you are you don't have to be what other people say the second thing i say on that 60 seconds is fear and doubt are really destructive elements you've got to try to block them and the third thing i would say is

Starting point is 01:51:58 protect your mind it is the ultimate source of everything that we can do if you lose control of your mind you can't control your body and your actions and everything else and so protect your mind from all the people and things that are bombarding it and build the strength of mine yeah a great way to bring it to a close like uh really enjoy your company uh i get a lot of energy from your insights and just the your creative ability to add value at all levels is is very motivational and very inspiring andrew so i'm going to encourage all the listeners to jump on board and start listening to my worst investment ever it's a great podcast you talk to some awesome guests and how else can the listeners engage with you and take advantage

Starting point is 01:52:53 of the wealth of wisdom that you share through your various means andrew so there's two main ways the first one is just go to myworstinvestmentever.com and listen in and also there's a contact menu item and if you go to that and you write me a message it will come directly to my personal email the second way is i'm on linkedin and so feel free to reach out on linkedin and i'd be happy to talk yeah fantastic yeah i really enjoy the chat i'm very keen to continue the dialogue andrew and there are a select few people that i like to get back on and get invested whenever i can and if you're open to it and we'd like to bring you back on to perhaps deep dive into some specific subjects as we move forward but in the meantime keep enjoying thailand my

Starting point is 01:53:44 wife and i will be getting over there at some stage again because we just love the place then we're gonna have lunch with mom yes i'd love to and make sure you give your mother a massive fun uh from me mate you can turn my tlc challenge onto your mom please amen amen well she's gonna listen to this and she's gonna appreciate it and i just want to say thank you to you know the time that we had together on my podcast and this time you know i think uh there's a lot of a lot of stuff that we're both sharing that can bring value and i hope that the listeners gain value from it so thank you yeah thanks andrew look forward to catching up yeah stay cool thank you well freedom fighters how good was that you get a summary of all this investment gold in the show

Starting point is 01:54:30 notes just email me on hello at khgroup.com.au it's h-e-l-l-o at khgroup.com.au or check us out at www.bushymartin.com.au forward slash GetInvested. I look forward to joining you next week for another episode of the GetInvested podcast. So thanks for listening. And as always, dream as if you live forever and live as if you die tomorrow.

Property Hub - Investment Insights & Inspiration - Get Invested: Andrew Stotz on learning from your worst investment ever

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.