I love this investing thought from Bob Brinker:

The problem with buy and hold is not the math, which proves it works.

The problem is with the evidence, which proves investors can’t do it.

Bob is correct.

I am trying to live the rest of my investing life in a way that helps me buy better and hold longer.

For the cycnical, buy and hold does not mean buy forever. Selling will always remain a most critical part of any investing strategy.

For me, early stage investing was the only way I could get myself to lose all the bad habits I had learned investing in the 90’s as my career began. When I make eary stage investments, I have no price to check and no market to sell into. I am forced to hold.

I believe in my eyes and ears. They are my AI. They are my quants. They solve my big data problems for me in real time. They store a ton of information and I have owned them for 51 years. I trust them though they have at times failed me.

When it comes to investing in the markets, I look to price first. It’s my big data and small data all in one.

Millions of eyes and ears and real machines churn to create the prices I look at everyday on my watchlists.

After price, I look to people. I don’t look to institutions though many smart people live inside institutions. I used to look to institutions as my investing career began. Institutions slowed me down. They lied to me. The financial institutions of the 90’s did not want you to learn the language of the markets. They will slow down your own investing learning curve.

Financial Institutions are still lying. Here is Jamie Dimon telling everyone over and over again telling people that Bitcoin is basically a scam.

Yesterday, Goldman Sachs issued a report on the blockchain called ‘The New Technology of Trust’. Yes feel free to vomit and snicker at the irony. I won’t link to the overproduced website that mostly cut and paste content from the hundreds of websites that have been writing about the blockchain the last 4 years. Here is Coindesk on Blockchain 101.

The faster you find the right people to follow and hopefully mentor you the better.

After I use price to surface ideas and overlay the people I trust to curate the ideas even further, I look to patterns.

Machines may alter the patterns, but until they are not programmed by and run by people, I will continue to watch for them and the ones that have made me money in the past.