I only read textbooks, SEC 10K filings/proxy statements, trade publications, classic audiobooks (gym and commute), etc. Then I take my time to really digest the sources and references (especially in the textbooks). Then see if the theory and evidence they present make sense. I look for the strongest argument for the other side with objective evidence and test empirical data. Don’t get too passionate or attached to any theories out there. I don’t have any specific restrictions for asset classes - just keep an open mind - the changes in Prudent Man Rule in the law over time shows that being too stuck and “conservative” sounding is a poor way to invest over 100+ years. I think getting to the cutting edge of prudence is at the top of my priorities
I find a large number of economics textbooks are incorrect and a lot of economics professors are more tribal and delusional than people assume, but some models can be useful. The most useful textbooks were accounting, history, philosophy, and cognitive science for me.
I listen to none of the talking heads in the media and I do not read analyst reports or opinions (I’ve pulled the stats and batting averages before). I avoid listening to mainstream opinions intended for retail investors (doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong but you won’t make much from it from a risk-adjusted return standpoint), but I do keep track of sentiment using sentiment analysis so I have a rough idea of what’s being talked about.
Traditional diversification, for example, does not work IMO. It’s closer to a religion IMO and I’m more of the diworsification camp. I aim to simply put all my eggs in a small number of baskets to avoid idiosyncratic risks and watch every single one carefully. I also hold a significant amount of “safe” assets like Treasuries.
My conclusion is the biggest way to win in markets over 100 years is to be truly contrarian (not for contrarian’s sake) and right. It’s really not that hard for me after reading a lot and I think anyone can do this. Although I’m not really agreeable to all of Warren Buffett’s opinions, he has been quite right about it - if you can commit to it - it is the best way to get to the holy grail with under 10M for anyone. Buffett literally said he guarantees 50%+ returns per year for a $1M portfolio, not just high confidence. Compare that to a possible 0% for 30+ years with Munger on the S&P.
It’s clear to me that aiming for a 50%+ per year up to a certain amount with a guaranteed strategy that anyone can do makes way more sense than possibly 0% for 30 years any way you slice it. I’m sure a lot of people will disagree with this but it works for me.
This might sound like a lot but I try to aim for 1000 pages a day but it’s closer to 5000 a week (this includes medicine and research) because I have to balance other things. Even doing half or less of what I currently do is probably enough. And the most important part is enjoying it, thinking about how it works, and applying it - otherwise you’re just going through the motions.
To each their own. There are many ways to skin the financial cat. It’s best to find a way that you like and will allow you to sleep well at night. If you can’t sleep well while worrying about your investments, that’s a sure sign you are doing something too risky. I had many nights like that in 2018.
Nowadays I have a screening tool I pay for to find the options I sell and I have another tool through my broker that tells me my risk. I usually go for a 90%+ win rate. I then try to diversify my plays over different sectors that have favorable momentum. And my positions last only a month before they expire. Then I repeat the process the next month. It’s time consuming, but profitable. At one point this year, I was up 6.8% YTD. Currently I am only up 1% YTD because I took on too much risk in May, panicked, and got burned. It happens. Last year I made 18% while the market made 28%.
Find an investment class that appeals to you and then research it until you know it inside and out and then you can make money on it. Try the safer ones first so you don’t get wiped out. Or, if you want to try crypto, be aware that you could lose it all and risk accordingly.
Before you commit any real money to an investment, try doing it on paper first. Pick what you would buy and then track it as it changes to see what happens. This will give you a good way to learn about a type of investment.
50%+ each year is pretty amazing. Can you do it consistently? If so, you should be a hedge fund manager! Seriously. I would be interested to learn how to safely increase my portfolio at that rate.
I have been hitting the 18-25% range for the past 3 years. 2018 I had a slight loss, -1% which still beat the market. Prior to that, I would usually get in the low teens annually.
" I have an extraordinary low-risk tolerance"
I probably have more risk tolerance than is healthy. That’s one of the reasons I experiment with different dosages of Rapamycin. It’s just my hard-wired nature.
BTW, my life experience indicates to me that there are many things hard-wired into our brain that are exceeding hard to change
@Paul Good point! I personally would like to do both. I love my job and it has become so much of what makes me…me! It is easier to do my job knowing that someone won’t take away my house.
As mentioned, up to 10M and my methods are not scalable currently and I hate micromanaging investors. I’ve had my experiences and I have had multiple accredited investors, including physicians, who can attest to me making more than 50%+ for them in a year in a LP fund. I’m not going back.
So I just manage my own and no stress. I have enough money and runway for what I need. Me and my SO will eventually hit about 5M or so conservatively - can’t think of really any good reasons to go into finance as a career.
Hedge fund (at least the real ones) AUM is much higher - closer to 1B. It gets much harder to scale after that. Plus I already stress myself with medicine - hedge fund managers are way more stressed. The only reason I spend time researching investments is that geriatricians are paid much less than general practitioners and the after-tax income is best with capital gains, especially with my tax strategies that can indefinitely defer taxes.
“If I was running $1 million today, or $10 million for that matter, I’d be fully invested. Anyone who says that size does not hurt investment performance is selling. The highest rates of return I’ve ever achieved were in the 1950s. I killed the Dow. You ought to see the numbers. But I was investing peanuts then. It’s a huge structural advantage not to have a lot of money. I think I could make you 50% a year on $1 million.* *No, I know I could. I guarantee that.” - Warren Buffett
My experience exactly, I retired twice. The first time at sixty-six. I always loved my job and was lucky enough to work with really great people.
After retirement, since I had already traveled widely and extensively though out my life, I didn’t have any particular desire to travel and spent much of my time reading and puttering around the house. After two years of retirement, I was really getting bored. Fortunately one of my former bosses went to work at a university as head of a new research group funded by the government. He hired me as a consultant. Because a consultant received no university benefits they had to pay me more. After a few months, the university HR dept forced the department to hire me as the amount that they had to pay me as a consultant was unacceptable to them, so I was hired as Principal Engineer for the dept.
As is often the case after a couple of years there was a threat of losing some funding that would probably result in layoffs. There were a couple of young senior engineers with families that were very nervous about being laid off. So, stupidly I offered to retire again. Shortly after I quit both engineers found other jobs, so my quitting was in vain.
Technology is progressing so fast that now as the English would say, your skills are redundant.
I would say to anyone thinking of retirement: This is the main test: If you like your job and coworkers
don’t quit! Of course, if you have something exciting you want to do after your retirement that will last for some time, have at it.
I will share some other financial investment advice that I truly believe is helpful.
Rule 1 - Don’t fight the Fed.
This means when the Fed is tightening (like right now), expect the market to go down. When the Fed is loosening (like early 2020) expect the market to go up.
What this means is right now, wait for the Fed to stop tightening before you buy anything. They will announce it fairly well when they are done. You may miss the exact bottom as others will jump back in before you do, but at least you won’t take the painful ride down.
Double down when the Fed starts to loosen policy and cut rates.
Side note - September is typically the worst month of the year for the market, and market lows for the last half of the year are usually hit at the end of October (around October 29), so this is typically a good time to jump in if all the other stars are aligned (i.e. the Fed is done tightening).
If you live by Rule 1, you will invest much better.
Do you want to have a clinical practice? With your vision and algorithmic approach maybe an EMR version of longevity medical templates and analysis that helps streamline therapeutic options. Hopefully, medicine will graduate into a model similar to what this crew is doing on the site
Probably not (I guess there’s a chance I would consider one to open a CRO-attached clinic and collect patient data on rapa if Dr. Green doesn’t publish aggregate data), but I have a long list of easy-to-read comprehensive preventative handouts (editable by anyone in the org) which include patient assistance programs and clinical trial information (seemed like patients really liked those and I’ve been building a catalog since med school which apparently everyone liked a lot - especially some heart failure patients that keep asking for more information on everything they can possibly do, including clinical trials - ie experimental gene therapies) that I can just upload to Epic and print out to patients.
To add, I summer interned (back in college days) once for a bootstrapped niche nursing home/home health EHR startup that got bought out by a Canadian PE firm. The founder was a super cool guy that I knew put a lot of time into things I wasn’t particularly fond of personally. I would be happy to have access to data mine a future HIE though. My experience with getting an HHS grant to do a web app with Tableau was also a meh experience, but I recognized all this clinical informatics stuff seemed to help my residency interviews a lot at the time, more so than NIAID grant ID research (barely talked about it despite being one of my favorite subjects). Guess they want CMIOs over researchers these days? Hard to say with just one anecdote. Haven’t looked too far on that side unless it was research related.
The only doctor I am familiar with that is in your area of medicine and a researcher is Valter Longo at USC. I really think you have more to give as far as impact, but being on a path that excites you enough to trade off your options in life for medicine is powerful. Looking forward to your next steps.
Holy Smoke! I did not realize the implications of the first post in this thread until more than ten minutes had passed. I contacted my insurance agent about a year ago to ask for a term life quote. I’m a healthy 59 yr old non-smoker with an existing term life policy, but I had just changed insurance companies so I thought I’d check the rates. The answer was that they would not offer me a term life policy. Even though my Rapamycin prescription from Dr. Green is off label, and I pay cash for the Sirolimus, somewhere in a database I am considered a high risk. That sucks for buying term life (I still have the other policy so no worries), but it should mean a really sweet deal on an annuity since the insurance system thinks I’m going to keel over any day now… Question for the original poster: Are there any SPIA quote generation websites that you trust? I’d rather not fill out forms for twenty different insurance outfits if I can help it. I already used a generic quote generator and got a quote for $517 per month for a $100,000 contract. That’s about 6.2% per year. Of course it may not matter which quote I request first. Once the information is out there that a man is interested in SPIA contracts and the computer says he’s gonna croak in just a few years they may all just show up on my doorstep.
I don’t really do product recommendations, perhaps someone else will. But anyone with financial literacy such as yourself can figure it out with a decent third-party professional (insurance lawyers aren’t even expensive) - I’m certain.
I will mention it is best to buy them when you need a longevity bet. Maybe a floor for age 50+ and critically around age 70+ is roughly where the insurance companies think folks are going to croak just for reference.
If you’re in age 90 even better - I’ve seen some insane SPIAs where you get your money back in 5 years or less. (20%+ returns guaranteed by the state) Especially if they see rapamycin lol. But I suspect it gets harder to find companies at around age 80 or so. It is best to get them when ultra competition leads to extremely low costs. And you can get a 10-year spouse add-on for usually only just a handful of dollars less a month, which can be worth it. But chances are you really don’t need much of the other complex stuff the brokers try to push.
Just be sure to stay within the state fund guaranty (the insurance companies are not supposed to advertise it).
Usually $250,000-$500,000 state guaranty, depending where you are located. Basically, this is continuously renewable returns if you live beyond your estimated lifespan by a non-biotech researcher actuary who sees rapamycin correlated with kidney transplant and death - I suspect the rates are even better for some of the older folks here. I’m just surprised by the resistance to SPIAs when there is essentially a no-brainer free lunch out here.
Especially if you have “centenarian genes”, a top medical team, and biomarkers all indicating the insurance company actuaries made a mistake in underwriting. In the right conditions - these are one of those 20%+ “guaranteed” returns type of insurance underwriting mistakes I’m talking about. One can legally but intentionally mess up their underwriting so they literally hand you excellent returns on a silver platter.
As for term life - it probably doesn’t make sense if you can self-insure.
Thanks TongMD! I think my best bet might be to start with Kentucky Life & Health Insurance Guaranty Association. People who live in other states will have similar associations. I’ll limit my choice of insurance companies only to those that are members. Term life is only to make my wife happy and it is a small amount. Similarly the spouse add on seems reasonable. I’ve only started looking, but it seems like the inflation protection features can really cut in to the total return. Of course if the I pick a fixed rate of return and inflation goes to 18% I’m screwed. Of course everything is a gamble. I take Sirolimus, exercise like a maniac, and try to eat right, but I could die on the motorcycle next weekend.
If inflation goes to 18% in the US, you have bigger things to worry about than your SPIA. Might I suggest understanding the commodities and currency markets?
Personally, I haven’t been affected by inflation by doing some maneuvers with uranium over a year plus following portable microreactors. I’m pretty familiar with how energy and agricultural markets generally work, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert - just enough to find out how to value mining operations where they can pay down debt (being inflated away) reasonably. I also had some more obscure commodity plays that are relatively illiquid though (potash and frac sand) but those need a lot of reading.
At the very basic level, if you’re in certain areas - you can at least qualify for ag exemptions and get your entire property taxes out of the way through automated farming systems (ie automated hydroponics are exempt from soil fertility requirement for organics in say farmed fish that can harvested for caviar, broccoli sprouts, mushrooms, and seaweed) or do the least work possible by holding and trading prize cows with one farmhand hire.
Should hedge off the tail risks of hyperinflation to a good amount and save on food/supplements and property taxes at the same time, so even if it’s a “money loser” it’s worth some insurance (and food safety if you have a high intake anyways) - it’s no surprise farmers made a lot in the 1970s but these things tend to run in cycles
Your chance of dying in a somewhat (say 2-3 years) used semi-luxury SUV with a Section 179 deduction (Gross Vehicle Weight >6000 lbs) is very roughly 10x+ lower than a motorcycle and you can easily qualify with say paid carpool with a colleague/neighbors (to ferry their kids safely with yours) to the same exact destination on the way and back by signing up on a carpool app to track everything and get paid to count most of your personal trips as business use - assuming you run everything by your tax lawyer. Note that’s low rollover risk types of SUVs and there are many options from different make and models that fit these criteria without a particularly high total cost of ownership.
Note that’s my assumption of vehicular accidents when running numbers. Personal preference for driving a different vehicle is not accounted for.
More good advice. I wish I’d bought Rubles a few months ago, or perhaps Lukoil at 6 USD per share. I looked into both briefly and discovered that the sanctions made either transaction impractical. I did put some money into an oil etf back when the covid scare make oil dirt cheap. Actually I think dirt was a lot more expensive than oil at one point. Unfortunately the etf closed altogether and I lost a small amount… The state guarantee makes the SPIA contract seem like a good option for risk averse people.
That personal preference thing is what gets us all when it comes to longevity. What do the actuarial tables say about the risk of shiny red Italian motorcycles? The risk of having fun is about 50 times greater than an SUV, but the risk of serious injury or death is no joke. I don’t smoke or drink much, so I try to justify my fun option anyway.
