During his recent interview with Meb Faber, Jim Rogers explained why successful investing is extremely boring. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:
Rogers: Everybody wants the quick answer. Everybody wants to get rich this week, this month. You have enough experience. I have enough experience to know that unless you’re a good short-term trader, and there are some people in the world who are extremely good at that, I am not, I am not. I’ve learned that I’m no good at it.
Unless you’re a short-term trader though the best returns or owning something for a long long time.
You can go back and look. If you had bought IBM in 1914, my God you’d be rich. If you’d bought Microsoft in 1984 my God you’d be rich if you just never sold it.
But their are examples like that. If you had bought Germany in 1980 you know my gosh you’d be rich right now. Germany of course is one of the very successful and prosperous countries in the world. It wasn’t then, hasn’t always been.
If you buy a country after a war you usually make a lot of money because everything is cheap, and if you own it for years, countries like that eventually do very well.
I can show you many examples. You can show people many examples where people say yeah but that’s boring! And my answer to that is if you want to be a successful investor be boring, be extremely boring, and your children and grandchildren will love you.
You can watch the entire discussion here:
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