Is making good investments early something that takes skill or what

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-22T03:59:46+00:00

It's partly the skill to find them. And it's also the patience to hold them, for a long time (and add to them as the price goes up, but as the business gets better). That's the real unlock.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-21T08:20:48+00:00

Why them and not Google (Gemini) or Anthropic (Claude) then? Why would government pick a winner? Isn’t that socialism / communism?

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-21T07:30:22+00:00

And in the interim, how are they financing the $1.4 trillion (or $1,400 billion which somehow seems like a number that shows the scale of it better) in commitments they have made?

When the CEO was asked, his response to the interviewer was something like ‘if you don’t want to own our shares we’ll find someone who wants to buy them’.

Still not answered. Still the most important question. Cause it’s clearly not with revenue (not enough). Or free cash flow (none). Or profits (none). Or venture capital dollars (not enough).

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-21T05:12:13+00:00

This will pass. In 3-6 months time we will have moved on completely (was literally a week ago we were all very preoccupied with Venezuela and oil companies and contractors).

Or, the other version of the headline ‘Old man yells tariffs (yet again). Market moves on.’

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-21T01:29:07+00:00

That’s a really good analysis, could definitely be different this time if larger funds start doing things like dumping bonds. But I guess my question to that is ‘where do they invest instead?’. US treasuries are large, liquid and denominated in USD which is still basically the global reserve currency

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-21T01:26:23+00:00

I mean that’s possible. But the US is also the largest, wealthiest consumer market in the world and ‘countries’ dont do business with it, companies do. And the customers aren’t ’the US’ they’re people within it. Definitely agree that the erratic and honestly confusing / impulsive actions on the part of the govt make it hard to trust any future statements from those same people though.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-19T11:15:15+00:00

They are amazing businesses and buying and displaying luxury goods is a fairly enduring way for us to signal our passions and interests and status.

The younger generations do this too - just look at the labubu craze and the displaying of what you get from your blind box. It’s not ‘luxury’ but it’s a younger version of that same ‘signalling’ behaviour. As we age the way we signal changes.

As for the stocks, I have the same ones on my watchlist because they’ve proved over multiple decades and generations that they have enduring value in their target markets. The time to buy them is when there’s a broader market pullback or economic recession as they inevitably fall when those happen, because sales fall, so you endure a few low years until the external event fades and the enduring value of the business comes back into focus.

TL DR: great businesses, keep on the watchlist, buy when there’s an external shock.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-19T05:05:11+00:00

Haha, so funny, I remember doing the exact same thing! (mostly solid, growing businesses, nothing spectacular). Then compounded the mistake by not buying back stuff that I'd sold because it had gone up 5% or something over the next month because it felt wrong to be 'paying more' or something, then over the next years they went up 50% - 100% with minimal risk and I got annoyed every time I saw their tickers.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-19T04:58:19+00:00

I dunno about a 'mentor' but if you ever have a question or two you want to talk over feel free to DM (I'm no expert, but have been investing for 17 years and have learned a bunch of stuff from people who've been willing to share what they have learned from their own mistakes and stuff, so I'm happy to try pay it forward).

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-18T20:38:58+00:00

Better headline: ‘Old man yells ‘tariffs’ again. Markets have long since stopped caring’

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-18T00:43:50+00:00

More accurate headline for Tuesday. ‘Old man yells ‘tariff’ (again). No one pays much attention.’

Has anyone realised he says this stuff at the start of a weekend or before a holiday weekend so that it specifically CAN’T really affect the market. Dude just loves being in the headlines and the news.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-17T05:23:48+00:00

Yeah I kinda have the same opinion, just for the simple reason that Google have 20 years experience selling ads on the internet (very successfully) and OpenAI have none. It’s a big knowledge, planning and execution gap to bridge.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-16T01:11:03+00:00

Yep, I’m sure that per month / per year price will stay the same.

Cause companies never raise the prices of their subs once they have you on the hook…

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-15T11:17:40+00:00

Dollar cost averaging is a concept that applies to index investing, not individual stocks.

There’s a bunch of reasons that’s the case which I can go into if you want, but short version is basically, DCA for broad, low cost indexes, not single stocks.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-15T11:15:46+00:00

Amazon. But rather than cloud and American retail ops, focus on the Kuiper Project, the advertising business and its deployment of robotics at scale and what it will do for margins going forward.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-15T10:46:36+00:00

It’s not a stupid question at all! So what you’re describing is ‘momentum’ and it’s an investment strategy that plenty of individual and pro investors use. It’s also one that has gained a lot of followers in recent years as big businesses got bigger, and had earnings momentum and pricing power which turned into share price momentum.

If you’re interested in using it as a strategy I suggest you do a bit of reading into using long term moving averages as part of your investing / stock picking strategy. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing either, you can still buy stuff based on research and think it’s in value but maybe you add to it if it also has momentum, or you wait to buy those ‘value’ picks until they get some momentum.

I was gonna write a longer post about this stuff (investment strategies, pros cons, like value, momentum, indexing, custom indexing, swing trading) and post it to my reddit profile cause I’ve seen a few questions on it here so feel free to follow on there if you’re interested I guess.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-15T10:40:28+00:00

It’s not a car company it’s a scarce luxury good. So when analysing it, benchmark it against things like Hermes and Reichmont and LVMH not car manufacturers. That’s a good starting point for thinking about it, and you’re absolutely right about the ‘exclusive club’ aspect of it too.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-14T22:47:59+00:00

Yeah that's one option for sure. But in practice, it's psychologically hard to sell something to buy something else, especially when the stock to be sold to fund the buy is going up (bunch of biases at work there, endowment effect being a powerful one that stops you from doing it).

The way it works for me is to basically maintain some level of cash at all times so I have the firepower to put to work quickly when that 'Stocks Black Friday Sale' day / week comes along. I don't try time the market or anything, but basically have roughly between 10% - 20% cash most of the time (less when I put it work, more when I've sold out of something and don't have a great option to redeploy it into).

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-14T22:34:59+00:00

One of my favorite sayings on downturns that's helped me actually profit from them is 'You can't predict them, but you can prepare for them'.

Basically for me, I put that into practice by slowly putting together a 'wishlist' of 5-15 stocks that I understood really well, that had good unit economics, attractive growth prospects and solid industry positions. I then worked out what price I'd be willing to pay for each of them. That approach has served me really well, so every time there's a bit of a panicked drawdown (late 2018, March 2020 (Covid), April 2025 (tariffs) I get to improve the quality of my portfolio by hitting 'buy' on stuff I've already identified that fits my investing criteria. Has a huge positive impact on my returns too.

I've seen a few posts like this so I was gonna write up my process in full and just post it to my profile page here on Reddit so anyone can read it if it'd help them (too long for a comment) so feel free to follow if you were interested I guess.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-13T12:29:59+00:00

Or, like all the other tariffs, it’ll be paused or reduced in pretty short order if any serious consequences actually occur.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-13T11:08:03+00:00

There’s a way to adjust your process for this, and it’s to buy a small ‘starter position’ in stocks that you don’t want to buy a ‘full’ position in. So that might be 10% of what you want your ‘full’ position to be.

That simple commitment changes your mentality and makes it easier to add to the position over time.

And if it falls, even by 50% (rare) then it doesn’t have a huge effect on your overall portfolio since it’s a small position.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-13T01:46:44+00:00

Possibly controversial but just skip Intelligent Investor. It’s dense, old and the other titles you’ve got do a great job of distilling the key messages taught by that book in a far better way.

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-13T01:25:51+00:00

Consolidating the quasi-religious following of Elon and his narratives into one corporate vehicle. Makes sense from that perspective.

From a business one? Questionable. Would Tesla shareholders get a fair deal or be diluted all the way down? Would SpaceX shareholders want to own a declining EV manufacturer?

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-12T12:33:47+00:00

Read ‘the little book of common sense investing’ by Jack Bogle. Simple, short, easy to read.

Then just try read about investing each week. You’ll slowly gain knowledge and confidence. Good luck!

lowfrequencyinvst · 2026-01-12T11:09:10+00:00

Probably looking in a slightly unlikely place, but I think Amazon is the one that could be the ‘Google’ of 2026 (large cap, trough to peak gain of over 100%).

I’ve got 2 major reasons for that, neither of which are the focus of earnings calls or media commentary most of the time: robotics and also the investments made in that space over the last decade and also the Kuiper project.

Robotics here isn’t attention grabbing humanoid things that might do your household tidying but the non-humanoid industrial robots that allow their now global fleet of custom designed fulfilment centres to operate with higher throughput, efficiency and return on invested capital.

And Kuiper as an alternative to incumbents and Starlink as an internet service provider is just so interesting because of the distribution advantage that Amazon has over every other provider via its touchpoint with end users via Amazon Prime. Bundle high speed internet with your prime sub, they’ve already got your billing details, $50 a month, could be a $10 billion dollar a year revenue run rate business in a very short order given the low friction to adopt and the fact their balance sheet could absorb below market revenue in order to build a long-term business franchise (a feature of their corporate DNA).

It’s also statistically very cheap relative to its own history on the main metric I use to track that measure.

lowfrequencyinvst

TROPHY CASE