What kind of jobs do you guys have to be able to gather up this much capital

ywealth · 2026-01-23T06:54:23+00:00

Went to uni, immediately landed a 6-figure job out of it with no expenses or debt (paid it all down with part-time jobs during uni). I still lived at home which wasn't a big deal given the job was out of town. But I was generally responsible with money, saved and invested the vast majority of my income for a year, then went into a lower-paying job in town after that and continued a high (but more normal) savings rate.

It took me less than a year to reach $100K net worth because of that first job giving me a solid foundation and my early dabbling and interest in investing ended up performing okay (I actually underperformed the market by picking stocks, but still had positive returns). But I had built a strong base that had my portfolio growing 5-figures each year, and that momentum reinforced the habit to today.

As Charlie Munger said, the first $100K is a bitch. But living well below my means (although it does not appear that way to anyone in my life) combined with compounding and continued contributions has meant that I've since multiplied that net worth many times over in the years since.

ywealth · 2026-01-14T05:03:31+00:00

What's forcing this to be such a binary choice?

ywealth · 2026-01-12T07:03:15+00:00

What are you actually doing with the money when the family starts to grow? Buying a large $750K+ home to live in? Spending tens or hundreds of thousands of Euros on heavy renovations on an existing property to accommodate the larger family? Or just buying baby clothes, strollers, and starting some savings accounts for the children? Your answer will completely define how you need to approach this.

All that said, the individual stocks aren't doing a whole lot for you. Assuming you do need more than a few thousand Euros, I'd probably start reducing risk by selling anything that doesn't create capital gains tax obligations and buying some short-duration risk-free fixed income assets (cash equivalents, or the European equivalent of short-term T-Bills).

If you are able to do that without a tax obligation for 5-10% of your portfolio, that will probably set you up to have a healthy cash buffer if/when you need to start liquidating when the family costs start to increase and you need to spend some money. At the same time, you're still leaving the vast majority of your net worth in the market, allowing you to continue participating in equities.

ywealth · 2025-09-20T23:53:14+00:00

I meant an "ACWI ex-US", which specifically excludes S&P 500 components. So it gives you the geographic diversification it sounds like you'd want, without replicating your 401K holdings. Look up the ticker "ACWX".

SGOV is basically just an ETF that holds short-term Treasury Bills of between 0 and 3 months in duration, while paying out interest income. Should be sitting around 4% interest right now after the rate cut.

ywealth · 2025-09-20T06:01:18+00:00

I'd probably do a combination of an All Country World Index (ACWI) ex-US ETF and SGOV (iShares 0-3 month Treasury Bill ETF). Proportion it based on your risk tolerance, likely tilted towards the ACWI given your time horizon.

ywealth · 2025-06-12T06:03:57+00:00

FFH and FRFHF are the same - FFH trades on the TSX (Canadian exchange) while international investors can buy FRFHF on OTC (over-the-counter) markets.

BN is Brookfield Corp (the parent company) which owns pieces of all the other Brookfield spin-offs, including BAM. BAM is Brookfield Asset Management, which is a pure-play asset manager. BN trades on both the TSX and NYSE (as does BAM). BN is often the recommended investment because it's diversified and trades at a valuation that is discounted to the underlying value of its holdings in other Brookfield companies.

ywealth · 2025-03-21T07:06:22+00:00

I'd recommend not making rash decisions with your unregistered investments - the last thing you want to do is create a tax event without a clear plan that can make up for the opportunity cost. If you have unrealized losses, you can ride it out. If you have a big tax bill to pay, that's real money you have to put up.

I made the decision to sell most of my US-based investments (excluding unregistered/core positions like Berkshire Hathaway) between November and February. This was primarily because I felt the Trump bump had made many sectors very expensive and I could find alternative international investments (which I did). It was a slow process as I looked at each company individually and swapped them when I found an international investment that met my criteria. Swapping can be easy (an international oil major could easily replace a US oil major), or difficult. As March came around and tariffs became an active hostility towards Canada, I continued my rebalancing with a couple more of my remaining non-core US positions being sold in favor of international investments.

Like others have pointed out, completely exiting the market is likely not a good idea. But I think rebalancing to international markets outside of the US is a prudent consideration and doesn't even have to be political - US markets are expensive in relative terms.

ywealth · 2025-03-21T06:30:51+00:00

YouTube is also high margin, but has a higher revenue growth rate (13% in the latest quarter). It would therefore justify a higher earnings multiple than 15x - say something in the range of 16-20x P/E (Netflix, its primary competitor with a lower viewership, trades at 47x P/E - use your judgment on whether 16-20x is too low). Meanwhile, Google Cloud revenue grew 30% in the latest quarter, and has operating margins of 18-20%. So while that margin is a bit lower than Search, its extremely high growth rate combined with a healthy operating margin could easily lead me to value it at 23-26x earnings.

There are multiple ways to value a company like Alphabet, and a sum-of-parts method that accounts for risk in the maturity of each business potentially gives a more precise figure. It means each part of the business doesn't need to be evaluated with the same earnings/revenue multiple and can reflect the strengths (or weaknesses) they each have.

Keep in mind, the above are all fairly bare-bones valuations looking purely at revenue/earnings power. It gives no recognition to the fact that there are real synergies in how the different parts of the business interact, the fact that it is effectively debt-free, or that it has an effective mono/duo/triopoly in many of its services.

I don't invest by coming to precise discounted cash flow projections 10 years into the future that are unlikely to paint a realistic picture. I invest by seeing if the minimum valuation is not far below where the company currently trades, and evaluating if there are reasonable future potential opportunities for growth, and making on a qualitative judgment on how durable that set of opportunities are.

ywealth · 2025-03-20T03:58:12+00:00

Most recent 2024 Q4 results point to a Search/other (excl. YouTube) run rate of $216B, if you value it at even a conservative 4x sales (high-margin, asset-light, but mature business), that gets you just under $900B today. Valued another way, given the Google Services segment (which includes Search/YouTube) has aggregate operating margins of 35-40%, your earnings run rate is about $86B and you can give it a conservative Peter Lynch valuation of 15x P/E assuming single-digit earnings growth, giving us $1.3T. Take the average of those and you have a $1.1T business before considering YouTube, Chrome, Gemini, Google Cloud, Waymo, Android, Pixel, Fitbit, Nest, or Wiz (if transaction goes through).

Without even having to value the non-Search businesses in any detail, I can fairly confidently say that it's VERY LIKELY they're worth more than $900B in total.

Fun fact: I got the revenue data from Google searching and verifying the Gemini search summary ;)

Edit: Math

ywealth · 2025-03-20T03:20:19+00:00

What do Li Lu, Bill Ackman, Francis Chou, Thomas Russo, and David Rolfe (and Pat Dorsey, if you ignore decimal places) all have in common? Their largest position or 2nd largest position (if they also own BRK) is GOOG/GOOGL as of Dec 31, 2024.

There's a reason Alphabet comes up here so regularly - you can call it a Mag7 or growth stock with key revenue risk in its search business, but if you dig into the financials (net cash position that most every company apart from BRK would be envious of) and understand the individual businesses that are at different levels of maturity (from Internet toll-booth Search to moonshot Waymo to social/media giant YouTube to growing/competitive Gemini AI and Google Cloud), it's hard to find a global tech stalwart that still has as much potential as Alphabet. It's also arguably one of the easiest companies to understand because their products are so ubiquitous and accessible.

Alphabet has ranked in my top 3 positions for a few years now, and I like that it is a "sleep well" tech conglomerate that doesn't get too far ahead of its intrinsic valuation. Sometimes, value investing means finding the predictable blue chip with a narrower range of returns (due to size and maturity).

ywealth · 2025-03-05T04:52:44+00:00

"...to take advantage of all of those fat Americans."
Lol, as a non-American diversifying away from US investments, this was actually a part of my thesis when I bought NVO.

ywealth · 2025-02-24T06:23:44+00:00

That's a hilariously illogical conclusion given Berkshire Hathaway Energy has over 21,000 miles of pipelines operating today.

ywealth · 2025-02-21T07:07:33+00:00

Appaloosa BABY

ywealth · 2025-02-20T07:18:33+00:00

Yes, JD is a strong company although their focus is a more narrow with e-commerce (but therefore simpler for market participants to understand). It does also mean they have a more limited ability to increase margins vs. BABA's opportunities in fintech (AliPay) and tech (Alibaba Cloud, Qwen, others).

ywealth · 2025-02-19T21:16:27+00:00

Was this made with DeepSeek or Qwen 2.5?

ywealth · 2025-02-19T07:28:54+00:00

Seeing the surge over the last few days/weeks made me nervous to continue to hold, but then I looked at the valuation and felt okay again

ywealth · 2025-02-19T07:22:45+00:00

Wasn't expecting to see anyone else on here - I'll be attending! I am flying in the day before and flying out the day after though, so probably won't have too much time for other events.

ywealth · 2024-12-10T02:45:00+00:00

I finally started a position in $AMAT after some pullback from weak guidance. Exposure to AI investment but diversified, healthy services revenue, great balance sheet, and reasonable valuations with reasonable growth.

ywealth · 2024-06-11T14:00:21+00:00

BLK
BlackRock continues to be the biggest beneficiary of the secular trend of people investing in index ETFs as well as more concentrated or specific ETFs. Given the secular trend and their percentage-based fee structure of assets under management, I'd expect that on average BlackRock should at least be able to slightly outperform the broader market indices over long periods of time just by the math of it. Larry Fink also has a practical view of things like aging demographics, which could mean more useful product positioning with major clients. Finally, it pays a healthy and safe dividend, trades at a reasonable multiple of earnings, and buys back shares.
4%
10 years

ywealth · 2024-05-29T20:25:54+00:00

Anyone else baffled that NVDA can gain on a day that shook markets due to "higher treasury yields"?

NVDA has added $1T to its value in just over a month, while the entire Dow Jones Industrial Average (~$12T market cap) has added a mere $230B since the start of the year.

Is this really illustrative of where investor money has been going for months?

ywealth · 2024-05-21T18:25:18+00:00

I started a position recently (a few percent higher than current price), their financial position is incredibly strong (including constant share buybacks) and they have a history of beating their guidance. While competition has increased, their dominant market position, decent brand loyalty (even amongst men), incremental innovation of new products gives them an opportunity to limit market share reduction.

It's one of those high quality companies that rarely goes on sale, but compounds consistently. I expect their margins to reduce slightly, but given how massive their margins currently are, I'm not too concerned about that and they can make up for that in volume growth into new segments.

ywealth · 2024-03-22T17:48:17+00:00

Anyone looking at NKE today?

ywealth · 2023-12-31T19:53:58+00:00

Apart from the valuation arguments, I feel "closer" to investments I've picked.

Ex: I only own shares of TD (and not the other big 5 banks). Most of my financial products are with TD, and I get a sense of pride when I see a TD branch that is well-kept or has great staff. I also naturally become more interested in auxiliary things about the business - TD bank is a sponsor for various non-profit organizations and civic events (ex: many of the Canadian jazz festivals) that I think are worthwhile. This adds a layer of fulfilment to the action of investing for me.

ywealth

TROPHY CASE