I finally understand what Buffett meant when he said you don’t have to swing at every pitch. As individual investors (or non-institutional investors), we don’t have the pressure to perform year-after-year. No one is holding us accountable to return 10% a year - this gives us flexibility to buy or not buy - or i.e. to stay in cash for prolonged periods of time (and perhaps stay in money market). This provides individual investors the option to only swing at the truly great pitches (wait till a stock is convincingly undervalued). Of course, you can go short - but you then fall into the trap of trying to time the market. And as Buffett has also said, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. If the market keeps running up because of irrationality - or some other reason - you lose if you are short. So why even take the chance? Why not just stay in cash and be safe, and if the market does tank, that's when you strike/swing the hardest.
Not often is one able to truly start over, to really sit and reflect on one's life and the future -- especially how one wants their life to play out. Some are absolutely lost when asked the question: what is it that you want? We may have become the culmination of ideologies and expectations of our past influencers: the media, our friends, family, idols, teachers, mentors -- the ones we care about the most. Our thoughts may not even be ours any more. We may have spent such a long time carrying out someone else's expectations of us, who we ought to be and what we should be doing , that we fail to seek our own wants and needs and carry them out for our self-actualization. We get lost in this flurry of expectations, and perhaps our self-imposed responsibility to others, and never get a chance or even have thought about asking what is it that I want for my life? what is it that I want for my future? How do I want my life to play out? Yet, the question is almost vital to find...
"Entrepreneurs take calculated risks" is a phrase or quote I hear ever so often in sales, entrepreneurship, or business seminars... but the phrase always confused me. At first, I just took it for what it was worth, never really thinking too much about it. But after some pondering, I feel like this word of advice never really gave me any thing concrete to work off of. I mean, what are am I really supposed to get from it? Can any entrepreneurs even explain this to me? Are entrepreneurs out there calculating the risks on Excel Spreadsheets and Monte Carlo models or are they really just using their intuition? (which could be even better than the mathematical models). I feel like it's the latter... so why even use the phrase? First of all, it holds little meaning, and secondly it's confusing. i would say that a majority (now, I said majority , not all) of entrepreneurs out there aren't even doing any real mathematical simulations out there. Let me tell you why this ...
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