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But first:
- Shaan Puri raised $4mil on Twitter from strangers
- Rob Abasolo made millions from homes less than 500 sq ft
- Kate bought land outside Zion for $10k and cashflows $1500+/month off it
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🔊 Listen to the audio version of this week's blog!
He Traveled the World on a Motorcycle and Made 300 Million.mp3
I had a chat with Jim Rogers, also called the Indiana Jones of Finance. Besides winning in the nickname department he had a few other things going on. He was co-founder of the Quantum Fund w/ George Soros (NBD), is worth $300 Million, & the man who returned 4,700% in the ’70s during arguably one of the worst bear markets of our lifetimes.
In other words, he’s a big deal OG in investing and worth lending an ear to. Especially given the markets today. Let’s just say he’s worried about ‘em. How worried? Very. Now he has been a bit of a permabear on the US but dang if he also hasn’t been long-term right. So he gave us 3 ideas to protect your assets & 7 lessons to invest by... we’re going to share all of them today.
BUT FIRST, A RANT:
HYPERTS VS EXPERTS
This is how you lose BIG in the stock market... and apparently, people will still listen to you.
This gal has 20,000 followers on TikTok and her name is ThatStockGirl. Not surprisingly, she tweets all day about her stock trades.
AND YET, look what happened.
I don’t know what is more horrifying for me, that essentially she tweeted how she bought 10 call options, and somehow it bought her 1,000 shares at the call price... Spoiler: each contract = 100 shares so not knowing that is kinda like trying to play baseball with a basketball.
OR that she exercised a call option and is then surprised at being down 50%. Did she not know she was exercising it? Did she not have alerts set up? Is she not watching her trades?
The moral of the story is this is 101 sh*t that anyone who trades as an expert should know. You don’t hit home runs and call them field goals. Ok, that’s the end of my sports knowledge.
The larger problem is not this particular human. It is a trend. She appears to be what I call a hype-rt not an expe-rt.
Great at slinging hype not so great at knowing the details.
Now I don’t profess to be a genius on stocks or options; in fact, I wouldn’t even be able to remember from my trading days the underlying mechanics to feel comfortable placing trades myself intelligently. NO ONE knows it all. There are people WAY smarter than me on even stuff I talk about a lot, like M&A.. but, there is an absolute universe of fake gurus selling hopes and not enough selling the truth.
That’s why my motto is D.Y.O.D.
DYOD - DO your own DUE DILIGENCE.
That means digging in for yourself in every financial and mental decision you make. Don’t just listen to online gurus and take their word for it. Question everything including me. Hell, especially me, I’ve been wrong before and I will be again. Just ask my husband.
That made me begin to question, perhaps this is why more people aren’t financially free.
Why aren’t more people financially free?
It may be that most humans are not ready for freedom. Living with freedom is not easy, actually. It is much easier to listen to directions, take them, and let another be responsible for the outcome. The free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery and YET those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.
The tradeoff is simply this... choose to do your own homework, or let others give you the potentially wrong answers to the test.
Your choice.
Today in <10 Mins We're Diving Into:
- How Jim Rogers Went from 0 to $300Million
- Lessons for Investing from A Contrarian Investor Who Returned 4,700%
- BEAR MARKET: 3 Asset Classes He’s Allocating to Today
Jim Rogers is a legend on Wall St.
He is worth 300 million dollars, a best-selling author, he traveled the world investing on a motorcycle, and then in a lifted yellow convertible Mercedes through Africa and China.
What a G. He also co-founded the Quantum Fund w/ George Soros in 1973 — in the middle of a terrible bear market. Despite the market meltdown his portfolio in that market and continuing until 1980 when he quit, returned 4000%+ while the S&P 500 rose 47%. That’s Bitcoin level baby.
I first found out about Jim when he wrote two of my favorite books of all time, 'Investment Biker' and 'Adventure Capitalist'. Adventure Capitalist was all about him traveling the world for a year in said convertible and investing in as many markets as he could. He’d get his feet on the ground, look at the commodities, infrastructure, RE, markets, etc and make bets all around the world. I was in awe. He inspired me to build my investment business in Latin America, I even had a stint on a motorcycle down there. He gave me the courage to invest in emerging markets aka Chile, Brazil, Mexico, etc. Scary for me at the time. 🙂
BUT funny story, when I first spoke to Jim it was a bit of a nightmare (audio included at the bottom if you want to hear my very first interview and how bad I was at it back then). Imagine me, little young Codie, all of 23 years old probably, ready to speak to my idol on the phone. I’m in Chile, he’s in China, he even agreed to let me record it for my first podcast. I’m on cloud nine. One small issue, I’m tech incompetent and couldn’t get the connection to work on my side. However, I could hear him on the phone SCREAMING at me to “GET IT THE F*CK TOGETHER. WHY ARE YOU WASTING MY TIME. DON’T YOU THINK I HAVE BETTER THINGS TO DO?!”
Pits sufficiently sweating we finally iron it out and I get to interview him. At the end of which he replied, “that was actually really lovely you’re a phenomenal interviewer. Just next time get your sh*t together first.” Yup, the old-school finance traders are not to be messed with.
But the truth is he’s weathered more down markets and up markets then most of us new investors can even imagine. He’s made money in them all.
So let’s start with lessons learned from the Indiana Jones of Finance:
#1 Contrarian Investing is Just Good Investing
“Contrarian is a word that people apply to me, but I never thought of myself that way,” he said. “I try to find things that are cheap, but have upside. Some people call that Contrarian I just call that investing.
In summary, if you follow the crowd, you’ll rarely make it. Follow on investing is just short for no-conviction coat tail riding. Say "no".
#2 Facts > Feelings in investing always.
“You have to ask yourself, are you sure what your buying is worth the price today? I better not invest in what I want, I’d better instead invest in what is happening in the world. Otherwise, I’ll be broke. Dead broke.”
With so many investing in things they hope will exist in the world and not those that do or will this is a lesson to take to heart in an age of exuberance.
#3 DYOD
“Most of the time when I listen to other people, I lose money. I have to do the work myself.”
Why has he done so well when the market plummeted? He touts apparently not listening to others very well :).
“You must think for yourself... very hard to do. That is really the only way to be successful at anything. If you follow the crowd as a musician, without your own sound you probably won't’ do very well.”
He’s put this into practice, he invested in Russia when the market hated it. Investors fled, people thought he was crazy. Newspaper headlines made fun of him. Investors yelled at him. Competitors laughed. They thought he’d lose all his money.
What happened? A triple-digit win for him and his investors. DYOD.
#4 Early is Better Than Late
“One of my problems is I’m always early. I’m the world’s worst trader or market timer. I realized that not everyone knows what I know.”
He started touting China in 2008 very publicly. He got a lot of negative feedback for that and yet that trade would be up 129-300% depending on how you invested. He was early on Russia, he was early on Latin America, and maybe he was early on the US decline. Time will tell. Being early means missed upside often but perhaps that’s “less bad” than too late.
#5 Avoid Labels
“I avoid labels, Libertarian, Capitalist etc... because as soon as you label yourself people stop listening and start arguing. If it’s a black cat or white cat, I don’t care as long as it catches mice.”
Aka if it works, he does it.
He’s lived in Hong Kong and worked in communist China for decades. One Chinese politician when I worked there for a spell actually told me, “If it’s capitalism and it works, we just call it Communism and keep on doing it.”
Labels are for division, not for asset allocation.
#6 People Hate Change
“Those who cannot adjust to change will be swept aside by it. Those who recognize change and react accordingly will benefit,” he said.
He’s right. We humans by and large hate change. We underestimate how much the world can move in the blink of an eye. There’s an old economic saying, “In economics it takes longer than you imagine, and then happen faster than you think.”
Be ready to react to change, have a plan, and often you’ll be able to beat the crowd.
#7 “The next bear market will be the worst in my lifetime.”
The line stopped me, he’s very concerned about inflation and a pullback..
I tend to agree with him, whether it’s due to the fact that US treasuries are growing at a record pace and increasingly owned domestically.
Or whether it’s due to the Fed refusing to raise rates fast enough...
We’ve never been in quite as large of a predicament as we may come into with massive deficits, increasing inflation, lack of foreign interest in our bonds, and inability to raise without increasing our rates.
All that rosy nature out of the way...
So what is he doing about it?
Well it could probably be summed up in one of his quotes, “If the world economy gets better, commodities are a very good place to be in... even if the world economy does not improve, commodities are still a fabulous place to be.” — Jim Rogers, "The Adventure Capitalist"
Three Recession Resistant Moves According to Jim:
Silver.
The all-time high for silver was $50oz; silver sits now at $23. Jim thinks it’ll climb back up as a hedge against interest rates. Interesting.
He likes it as a hedge against rates but ALSO because it is being widely used as an industrial metal (unlike gold). Silver is needed in solar, which he believes is an argument for why prices may continue to go up as solar mainstreams.
Copper.
Then we move to copper. Unlike silver, copper hit new heights in 2021 but Jim thinks it’ll keep rising for another surprising reason. Electric vehicles.
EV’s use 2-4x more copper than gas cars. Per the Copper Development Association Inc., traditional cars have 18-49 pounds of copper, hybrid EVs contain approximately 85 pounds and plug-in hybrid EVs use 132 pounds.
If their implementation and usage are just getting started, demand will grow is his thesis.
Agriculture.
Yup, we’ve talked about it before (like Bill Gates and farmland) and we’re here again. Jim likes commodities like corn and sugar, but even more so the actual hard real estate asset.
The thesis is that supply constraints, lack of correlation to the historical stock market and maybe even higher risk-adjusted returns could weather a downturn.
I think personally we need more data over a longer period but there is something to see here.
IN SUMMARY
Learn from those who have seen cycles, kingdoms, and markets rise and fall. Their glasses are no longer rosy, their opinions less tempered by trying to prove themselves.
My challenge: if your desire is to travel the world lucratively, invest yourself, or simply understand the inside of one of the most brilliant minds in finance, listen to what Jim has to say.
MAYBE HE'LL CHANGE YOUR LIFE, JUST AS HE DID MINE.
Or maybe he’s totally f-ing wrong. Who really knows?
Question everything,
Codie
Codie's Conversation With the Legendary Indiana Jones of Finance.
Not Boring News
At Contrarian Thinking we're all about making millions in the boring. But that doesn't mean there isn't some seriously cool stuff going on that's far from! Here are some headlines we're loving this week:
🎥 At the height of the platform wars, Youtube starts testing adding NFTs as a revenue source for creators.
🍕 Automation Station: Pizza Hut tests fully robotic restaurant in Israel.
🗽 This NYC co-working space dubbed 'the Airbnb for startups' makes $3.6mil per year.
🍪 Vending can be sexy: Alibi cookies vend warm snacks with its 'cookie bot'.
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Disclaimer – This is the “Be an adult” section. Everything mentioned above isn’t advice, just a recount of what I did. That said: This article is presented for informational purposes only. The opinions stated here are not intended to recommend any investment or provide tax advice. Neither are they an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase an interest in any current or future investment vehicle managed or sponsored by Codie Ventures, LLC or its affiliates. All material presented in this newsletter is not to be regarded as investment advice, but for general informational purposes only. Day trading and investing do involve risk, so caution must always be utilized. We cannot guarantee profits or freedom from loss. You assume the entire cost and risk. You are solely responsible for making your own investment decisions. We recommend consulting with a registered investment advisor, broker-dealer, and/or financial advisor. If you choose to invest with or without seeking advice from such an advisor or entity, then any consequences resulting from your investments are your sole responsibility. By reading/sharing this newsletter or consuming our content on our other channels, you are indicating your consent and agreement to our disclaimer.
