Alright, guys, again, it’s Jim. Thanks for joining in on the live. So just a few caveats before I start off every live with a few caveats. No. 1, I’m not a financial advisor. I don’t give financial advice. You need to consult your financial advisor at all times, no matter what you hear on social media, past performance is no guarantee of future results. There’s no offer. I don’t offer anything on any of my videos, any of my content across any of my platforms. Not a solicitation to buy any asset or asset class or investment. And all investing involves risk, including the risk of losing your own money. So you should keep in mind, no matter what opportunity you hear, whether from myself, actually, I don’t offer opportunity. So if you hear any opportunity, unless they’re talking about US Treasuries, all investing comes with risk. And I’m also not a lawyer and accountant, so you should consult your lawyer or tax professional. And I’m here with Brian.
I bumped into Brian actually on X. I guess it’s X now, used to be called Twitter. And I was reading some of your content and I really liked it a lot. And I was hoping you were on these other platforms, too, and I was excited to find out that you were. So thanks for joining us. Right. For the audience, can you give it, give your name, where you’re from, what you do and how you got into this? Just a quick intro to the audience.
Sure. My name is Brian Ferraldi. I am an author and Youtuber, and I just generally call myself a financial educator. I’ve been investing in individual stocks for twenty years. I was just super passionate about learning about financial independence and personal finance and all things money and wealth when I graduated from college, despite graduating with a business degree, I was effectively financially illiterate. I knew nothing about stocks and stuff. And I say that as a, a business major, which, well, should tell you something about the state of college education. I know nothing about the stock market or what a stock was or had to build wealth in the market. None of that all completely foreign to me. So self taught. I just started devouring books, podcasts, audiobooks, TV videos, anything I’ve get my hands on related to money investing. I discovered that the stock market, number one asset class for me, it was the best match for my personality. Studied it for.
I’ve been sitting here for 20 years and about 10, eight years ago, I became a writer for The Motley Fool. So I’ve written 3,000 articles on money, investing stocks for The Motley Full. And then about four, three, four years ago, started doing stuff on social media, built up a following there, and here we are.
Fantastic. So there’s a lot to unpack there. That’s a fantastic story, like in terms of how you evolved as an investor. So you said you went through business school and then you came out realizing you weren’t as financial leader as you hoped. Were you going into business school in order to sort of have a goal to be financially leader? Like what was.
The goal was get a degree because I was told that you have to get a degree. So I figured that generally speaking, I had no idea what I wanted to do. So business seemed like a generic enough of a category. That’s what I went to go into. I didn’t. I wasn’t interested in engineering or becoming a doctor or a lawyer. So I figured out business was generic enough. So like so many people, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I graduated college. In fact, I’m still trying to figure out what I wanted to do. So that just seemed to be the option that provided the most options in the future. There was no well thought out plan.
Got it. Yeah, yeah, I feel that. Totally get it. I’m still trying to figure out what to do, but that’s besides the point. So apple.
Again, Paul, Pound Stone has this wonderful joke. She said, you know what, you know, my parents always asking kids what they want to do when they grow up. They’re looking for ideas.
That’s true. They’re looking for options. So you mentioned that when you graduate, you realize like you weren’t financially letter and you wanted to become more. So what kind of pushed you in that direction? Like from what I understand, you went to college because a business kind of gives you like the broad spectrum of being employable. But what made you say like, listen, I wanna kind of understand how companies work, how to evaluate businesses. How did that happen?
So a slow progression. It started out with a book called Rich Dad, Port ad by Robert Kiasaki, almost popular personal finance book really of all time. And while I don’t agree with everything that’s said in that book today, that book was the first time that I ever heard of concepts like the rich think about money different.
The rich by assets. Your house is not an asset. And it was the first time that it blew up what personal finance was. And it opened my eyes to the idea that I could actually build wealth and become wealthy. So again, I disagree with some things that are in that book, but I owe that book for starting a love affair with learning about investing that continues to this day.
That book is really big on real estate and buying with like leverage and using rental income to pay for your expenses. I thought about that for a bit, but real estate was just not a good match for my personality. But once I discovered the stock investing, that was just a much better fit for what I was looking for.
Okay, fantastic. So when you got into stock investing, I hear you too like that book, I think was everywhere. Like I think I saw that book, everyone read it. I’m gonna, I’ve been investing since like the 80s, so, or the 90s. So my first influence was Peter Lynch, you know, the one up on Wall Street. And I don’t know if that’s kind of before your time. And so I kind of bypassed that rich dad, poor dad sort of phase because I already got into Warm Buffet and Charlie Munger before that. And what really attracted me to your content was that you do a lot of work around analyzing businesses and deconstructing financial statements. How did you get involved that? Because again, your backgrounds not accounting or bookkeeping, right?
Yeah, so that is up that I learn through just and interest in investing. So once I discovered that the stock market was the asset class for me, I started to learn how to invest in and analyze individual stocks. Like so many people, I had no idea what I was doing. And at the start, I couldn’t tell you what a balance sheet was when I first bought, when I first made my first, quote unquote, investment. And you could imagine how well I did on that investment.
But I gotta hear about slow.
Yeah, a slow learning progress where you kind of learn about, oh, what are financial statements? Oh, how do you analyze that? What is an annual report? What is a proxy statement? How do you actually read through there? What is the information you’re looking? So it’s just been a slow process of self discovery that I’ve Learned by studying other investors and seeing what works to figure out what makes for a good investment versus a bad one.
And what was your first stock investment? You kind of alluded to that a little bit.
It was some garbage penny stock that I found on the Yahoo Finance discussion boards, which was basically the Reddit, the Wall Street bets of its day, right? Okay, so how people find fine garbage promoted stocks back then was just the Yahoo Finance discussion boards and people be promoting garbage and just saying this is actually close 30 cents higher by the end of the day and all that kind of nonsense. And I had no idea what I was doing. So I was like, oh, okay, this sounds good. But you know, I do that as the best tuition I’ve ever paid, right? Yes. There’s nothing like losing money on an investment to make you realize that you don’t know.
And, you know, that’s so, I, I, so coincidental that you mentioned that cuz I just tweeted that one of the benefits of starting early is that you get all the mistakes out early when you have relatively less money to lose. The worst thing is, if you’re in your 60s and you really need to think about retirement and you start making mistakes then like I think it’s just.
Absolutely.
You know what I mean? It’s like.
You are 100% correct. Losing money when you’re in your teens, in 20s is such a gift. Losing money in your 60s and 70s is a massive threat.
Yeah, huge, huge. And I think a lot of people forget that huge point when they say start. Everyone’s thinking like, I’ll start early. I just want to enjoy life. It’s like, no, you want to get all the mistakes out of the way because I have not met anyone who has been successful by having a perfect record. It just doesn’t happen.
Yep. So I know someone that had a perfect record. His name was Bernie Madoff.
So it’s like a smooth trend. Look at that. It’s like.
Yeah, people with perfect records are convent.
That should be a red flag. That’s a, you should have a series of red flags. Red flags would be perfect. Smooth upward trends to the bottom left, top right.