How To Really Ruin Your Financial Life and Portfolio

Introduction

Your basic human is not a great investor. Successful investing requires extreme patience; we humans are impatient. Rewarding investing requires nerves of steel—or else perfect forgetfulness; we humans are frightened, nervous animals. Making money by investing requires singleness of purpose; we humans are scattered and distracted, pulled in all directions at once. The great investors carefully think through their moves, guided by eons of experience; we real-life human being investors are rash, impulsive gamblers.

Great investors are not swayed by fads and fancies. The ones with two feet and receding hair are wills-o’-the-wisp, blown all about by what is happening at the moment.

The ones who make money over their lifetimes are steadfast of purpose, well informed, listen to wise guidance, reject counsels of impatience and despair. The real-life investor gobbles up misinformation, listens to fools and knaves, and gyrates wildly in his actions, almost always against his own best interest.

I know all of this. I have seen it in my own life on many an occasion. I have seen it in the lives of men and women I know, even supersmart men and women. They make extraordinary mistakes that cost them real money.

Educations are imperiled. Retirements are jeopardized or lost. All of that comes from making poor investment decisions.

Investors do not do the wrong thing because they want to lose money. They do the wrong thing because they are, well, human. And humans are simply constructed ...