a.k.a. Capitalist, Financial Libertarian, Patron, Philanthropist

Investor aims to achieve full financial freedom and only focus on doing projects out of interest rather than out of need. Investors don’t search for fame and recognition for what they do. They prefer to build their wealth in silence and live a peaceful life so that they can enjoy a high degree of personal freedom and cherry-pick projects that are most exciting to them. They are also eager to support budding projects with their know-how and financial resources.

The essence of being an investor does not lie in financial matters though! First and foremost, what makes a good investor, is focus on looking for potential in people and projects rather than taking them at face value. For instance, a teacher who spots a talented student and pays extra attention to that student, or a person who chooses to buy more expensive clothes made from better quality materials as they will last for longer, both have features of an investor.

Investors have the empathy necessary to understand people’s current and future needs—that’s why they can create successful projects, and/or find the right projects to invest in. They can also understand complex team dynamics, and notice the potential both in individuals and teams. Yet, they are still individualists who can clearly define their own role and involvement in every project, and make sure that projects that they participate in serve a purpose for their long-term goals.

Investors are sometimes misunderstood by their environment as they can be seen as money- and wealth-focused, or lazy. While in fact, accumulating wealth is not the purpose but only the means to reach the goals for them. Investors value personal freedom more than anything, and money is a source of safety and freedom to them. Once they get to the stage at which they feel financially free, they usually don’t slow down with work either. 

Actually, it works quite the opposite—since they get rid of the mental burden associated with the necessity to make a living, they feel less stressed and more energetic. They can finally free their mind and find more energy to carry out challenging projects. Good investors have the ambition to support projects as mentors and social hubs. They wish to be involved as significant contributors to the startup’s success rather than being nothing more than a passive cash donor. Therefore, paradoxically, many investors become even more occupied with work once they become financially free than at any point before.

STRENGTHS AT WORKPLACE

Independent Decision-makers

Investors are individualists by nature. After all, to build wealth, you need to make your own decisions and take responsibility for them. You need to build your know-how and find a way of making investments or earning passive income that resonates with your personality. 

Some people are talented for building online businesses that bring passive income, such as dropshipping, affiliate marketing, creating online courses, etc. Others can well predict the trends on the stock exchange and spot undervalued companies. Some investors prefer to trade, namely to buy and sell stocks and other assets depending on the trends, while others prefer to HODL instead (Hold for Dear Life)—namely, buy into valuable assets and keep them for many years.

Some investors have an eye for spotting undervalued real estate properties. Others have taste for art or wine and can cherry-pick items that will gain in value in the long run. Some investors are good at forecasting the development of new technologies and can see the potential in teams of fresh startup founders with ideas to revolutionize society with a brand new app or gear. 

There are so many different ways to build wealth! Some types of investments, such as trading, require constant attention while others, such as fundamental analysis of the market and long-term investing, require ground knowledge and patience. Usually, investors mitigate their risks by mixing a few types of investments. On the one hand, they make safe and moderately profitable investments such as buying and selling real estate. On the other hand, they invest in high-risk projects such as speculative assets and high-risk tech startups. This combination not only helps them in staying afloat through the thick and thin but also makes their daily life more diverse and interesting.

Quite Rational But Also, Quite Insane

Investors learn in the process that every decision has real-world consequences. Thus, they rarely make spontaneous decisions before considering all the possible scenarios. The ability to make investment decisions also makes them good decision-makers in life. 

After all, every one of your decisions is a form of investment. Whenever you decide to spend an evening with someone or watch a movie instead, you invest your time hoping that you will get some value from it—even if that value is pure relaxation. Whenever you decide to choose to do a course, you invest time and money hoping that it will pay back in one way or another. Et cetera. Investors learn how to well plan and spend their time and assets. Therefore, they make rational decisions in general, and always ask themselves about the ultimate purpose of every new initiative, even if it is just a hobby.

But at the same time, risking and investing in projects requires a little dose of insanity too—especially if you invest in speculative assets and when the daily fluctuations in the value of your assets exceed the amount that an average Joe would earn in a lifetime. At the end of the day, what you need to do as an investor is often counterintuitive, or even against human nature!

For instance, we are naturally conditioned to think that if the price of an asset appreciates, this means that lots of people are buying in at the moment. Hence, it must be a good buy, right? This is why we often get excited and rush into buying assets while their price is on the rise. Similarly, we tend to run when the price is on a decline. But good investors develop a strong conviction in their choices and are comfortable taking a dive and investing while the price is falling down.

This is why good investors must be cold-blooded and able to put emotions aside. They need to emotionally detach from the numbers, and stop asking themselves questions such as, “What will my family think of me if I lose everything?”, “What else could be done with this money right now?,” or “How many meals for children from the poor neighborhood could I buy for this?” Professional investors treat investing as a form of a game and sleep well in situations in which most people would end up with a twisted stomach. Of course, this balance between rationality and insanity also makes investors colorful personalities and entertaining companions.

Patient

Even if you are not patient initially, you need to develop patience in order to survive as an investor—nothing will cost you more than spontaneous, impulsive decisions in hope of getting rich quick. Even if you decide to day trade, your wealth will only accumulate over time, as large portion of your investment decisions will be wrong.

According to Steven Cohen, an American hedge fund manager and majority owner of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball, top traders win ~60% of the time, while most professional traders only win between 50-55% of the time—which is barely above chance!

Regardless of how intelligent your are, there is no quick and guaranteed way to build wealth. That’s why most investors become zen masters who can patiently wait for decades before their efforts yield expected profits.

Self-sufficient

Investors rarely seek help or acknowledgment from other people. For them, the biggest reward they can get is the sense of freedom and safety that their wealth provides them, and knowing that the projects they support are successful.

Investors rarely feel the need to stand on the scene and become a familiar face to a broader audience, or even to hear that they’ve done a good job. For them, success is measurable, thus, objective—they don’t need additional confirmation that they did well.

Good Understanding of the World and People

Investors are naturally interested in trends in the global economy, technology, politics, and the media. They also learn how human psychology works and how most people engage their emotions while buying into assets, or, getting rid of them. Lastly, they attempt to get a grasp of sociology and learn how crowds make joint decisions. This makes them interesting partners for a conversation about society, the job market, the future of new technologies, and whereabouts.

They work out their own opinions in the process and are always happy to confront their point of view and predictions for the future with others.

Of course, you also need to be good with people to land opportunities as an investor. If you have the right contacts, you will get into projects early, and be able to invest on preferential conditions. You will also learn about new trends earlier than most of the society. Overall, empathy helps in being a good investor more than you might think!

Lots of Opportunities

When you get to a certain level as an investor, you will have plenty of opportunities to join projects. After all, every startup needs money to breathe and to take off the ground. Wherever you go, there will be a long line of entrepreneurs willing to pitch their ideas to you. The more money you have the more doors open up.

In principle, money doesn’t make you any better or worse as a person—it just gives you more opportunities to live life your way. Therefore, if you are a person good at heart and you always had thoughts about philanthropy, success in investing can give you opportunities to pull off new charity projects. It doesn’t come by accident that most wealthy investors give away tons of money for charities or run their own non-profit organizations. Now that they can afford it, they choose the right cause to fight for and do it!

WEAKNESSES AT WORKPLACE AND CAREER PITFALLS

A Long Way to Go

Becoming a professional investor is a long and bulky road—and, it’s a path through blood, sweat, tears, and mistakes. For most investors, it takes years or even decades before they learn what types of investments they are best at.

It’s not an accident that there is no such thing as a university major in investing. Investing is not something you can learn from a textbook—you need to learn your craft by trial and error, and self-improve over the years.

Mind that most of the investment gurus only specialize in one type of asset. Every type of investing requires a bit different type of knowledge, intelligence, and personality. Therefore, it is extremely hard to become a top-class expert in more than one type of investment.

A Path Through Risk

Investing means taking bets. Professional investors learn how to manage and mitigate risks—they work out their individual investment strategy that allows them to live peacefully and keep stress under control. 

Yet still, it takes years before you reach that zen state of mind. As a young investor, you will need to struggle with natural human emotions and reactions when it comes to risking your own funds. In the initial stages of your career, you will experience disappointment whenever your predictions turn out to be wrong and you lose your money. Moreover, you will be locked in thinking about the future. What will happen next? What can potentially go wrong? Am I going to meet unforeseen circumstances on the way? You will never feel that your job is done—unless you decide to cash out and change you profession. Moreover, you will need to stay in the loop and watch your investments—even if you invest in real estate or in other relatively stable markets.

The good news is: as a mature investor, you don’t need to experience stress in daily life anymore. Professionals in this space create a financial cushion for themselves and develop diversified investment portfolios well-suited to their knowledge and personality. 

In this way, they become unflappable regardless of the current economic situation in the market. Just think about it: if you continuously played a hazard game in which you have a 55% chance of winning and a 45% chance of losing, would you be stressed? Probably not—as you would be confident that in this game, you would always be the winner in the long run. You could go to sleep at night with peace on your mind and let this game be played for you. And that’s what investing is in fact: it’s all about looking for games that are safe for you to play. It takes years of risking and learning from mistakes, but eventually, once you succeed, you will feel more peaceful than ever before.

Living in the Future

Investing is almost synonymous with predicting the future. All it means is considering all the possible scenarios and making bets on them. For this reason, many investors constantly think about the future. They lost the ability to be present and enjoy the moment living here and now.

As an investor, you need to hone the skill to disconnect from your ambitious plans, financial markets, numbers, decision making, and the associated dopamine, and smell flowers once in a while.

Freedom Is a Lonely Road

There is a popular saying, “Money likes silence.” The meaning is, “If you let others know about your wealth, it will only cause you trouble.” Well, indeed, your wealth puts you in jeopardy of getting robbed, blackmailed, or kidnapped. But there is more to it. Namely, the paradox is, while most of the society has the wrong image of successful investors and treats them as a source of evil that should be taxed at 100%, at the same time, people are attracted to money. Therefore, you will also need to learn in the process how to recognize false friends and gold-diggers who flock around you mostly because of your wealth and because of you.

For this reason, it is not accidental that most investors make friends with other investors. You will need to find these few souls similar to you, who appreciate you for the way you are, and who genuinely wish you well—even if you are way more wealthy than them. Of course, the rest of the society will never notice your work, sleepless nights, and the long periods when you didn’t prosper. They will think that you are just lazy and full of yourself.

EXAMPLES OF INVESTORS IN VARIOUS WORKING ENVIRONMENTS

First of all, the natural way of development for an investor is to become an independent decision-maker. Remember that it is much easier to become an investor in a lean way, namely by investing next to your studies or your day job, and moving to full-time investing only after you accumulate enough wealth and passive income to feel safe. 

Paradoxically, people who keep day jobs or develop a business where they actively provide value for others, often earn more on the side as private investors than people who spend their whole time on investments, just because the pressure and associated stress is lower. In a way, it is one just thing about the world: people who focus on creating value rather than on just aggregating money, often attract more money than those who desperately try to improve their account balance.

One thing worth mentioning here is that whichever way of making money you choose, a so-called “passive income” doesn’t exist. Whatever way of making money you choose, you will always need to track what’s happening to your money and your businesses; the conditions in the market might suddenly change and you will need to adapt accordingly. Today, in times of globalization, even the types of investments traditionally seen as the safest often turn out to be trapped. 

For instance, in times of worldwide lockdown, the rental market was crushed. Real estate was traditionally seen as the safest bet among all, and a counterbalance to more risky investments such as trading stocks. Now, nothing can be taken for granted anymore. So, let’s call “passive income” a situation when your money-making abilities are not pegged to the number of hours that you put into work.

Entrepreneur / Freelancer Building Passive Income Stream(s)

One popular way of building passive income today is via creating digital products such as courses, dropshipping, or affiliate marketing schemes. Of course, it is easier said than done, because it works effectively mostly when you already have an audience. There are hundreds of online gurus trying to sell you a “bulletproof system” or a “blueprint” for creating a successful online business. 

You should be careful about taking any advice from them—creating a functional online store or a successful online course, and bringing your business to the stage in which you can call it a passive income can take years rather than weeks like the online gurus will try to persuade you.

Trader

Trading stocks and other assets is another way to become an investor. You should know that the ability to trade is not directly related to your intelligence but rather, to your personality. As the old proverb says, “investing is a way of transferring funds from the impatient to the patient”—and trading is a great example of that. 

Remember that—unless the market in which you are trading is growing at a fast pace—trading is worse than a zero-sum game. Namely, when someone wins, someone else has to lose. And additionally, trading platforms and/or brokers take a cut from every transaction. Millions of intelligent people lose their money and develop trauma from trading. Trading is for cold-blooded, principled, and stress-resilient people only. Get rich quick by trading—so easier said than done! 

However, if you believe that day-trading is a game for you, it is easy to test that hypothesis by trading small amounts of assets. Some people have a natural talent for this (which is mostly related to specific personality rather than intelligence or analytic skills) and you may be one of them.

Investor In Startups, Stock Exchange, Real Estate

Many investors have a preference for making middle- to long-term investments in startups, stock exchanges, or real estate. This type of investing requires developing background knowledge about the market and current opportunities. 

For instance, it takes time and effort to get a grasp on which properties in the area are currently undervalued. Or, which stocks are most likely to surge within the next two years. Or, which startups have the most appealing business proposition and the best team, and are the most likely to succeed in the long run. If you just listen to advice without doing your own research, you will likely lose your money.

Employee of a Venture Capital Firm, Hedge Fund, Or an Investment Fund

Of course, you don’t need to be alone as an investor—you can also choose to seek employment in a company specialized in investing. Of course, just as with private investments, there is a variety of different investment models you can choose from. 

While some companies primarily focus on fundamental analysis and long-term investing, others rely on day-trading. By becoming an employee of such a company, you not only have a stable income but also learn all you need to potentially become a successful independent investor later on. Working for somebody else was a starting point for many famous investors.

HOW TO DEVELOP A CAREER WITH THIS PROFILE?

How to Start a Career

Many investors start their careers very early—even in primary school. They just don’t assume at that point that something that they treat as a hobby, will become a full-fledged profession in the long run. They usually start from small projects: they first save some pocket money or work on the weekends to buy and sell their first products or buy equipment that will allow them to offer some type of service. It can be anything—from buying and selling t-shirts online to baking cookies for a summer festival. 

Many kids catch the bug after they realize that you can get some item at $1, and sell it for $2—and then, if you iterate the process for long enough, you will get yourself a new bike. Multiplying little money makes them so excited that they soon start thinking about scaling and automatizing the process. Before high school comes to the end, many young people already have their first online stores up and running, make first bucks from affiliate marketing or invest little amounts in the stock exchange.

It is, indeed, best to start early, and from investing small amounts of money that you can afford to lose. One of the biggest mistakes that young investors make is being bullish on some hyped asset and going all in, especially in a situation when the hype is at full speed. They often get caught in a bubble this way and get trauma from investing for many years to come. Remember that if an asset is already making the headlines, it is probably too late to make money from it—people who earned from it are the ones who noticed the opportunity ahead of the crowd.

Also, the investment that works for your friends won’t necessarily work for you as you have a different personality. Compared to your friends, you might have an affinity to long-term investments, or quite the opposite: a preference for trading. Every investor also has a different stop-loss, depending on their resilience to stress. Therefore, you can create mastermind groups and take advice, but at the end of the day, you need to learn what types of investments feel the most comfortable for your nervous system—otherwise, you will start losing money, even if your friends still win.

Of course, if you have never invested as a child or as a youngster, it doesn’t mean that it is too late. After 20-30 years of a corporate career, many people discover that investing is a great game to play when they finally decide to try something new and risk a small bit of their life savings for the very first time.

How To Look for Jobs / How To Start Working

You first need to accept that every of your investment decisions is burdened with risk. Once you accept that, you can start to invest using little sums of money. Of course, it is important to choose a sector or an interesting topic. For instance, if you know nothing about quantum computing but you wish to invest in companies in this area only because the hype around it reached your ears, you will likely lose your money. In general, whenever some asset or discipline is widely discussed on the media, it is already too late to invest—wise investors are all in, and by chipping, you will only pump the value of their assets with your cash. Also, don’t hesitate to try multiple forms of investments—it will take you a while before you build a portfolio of investments that fit you best.

You need to remember that it takes a lot of time (and lost money!) to figure out what types of investments you are really good at, given your knowledge, personality, understanding of the economy, and the ability to read people. Everything looks easy in theory: you read a morning newspaper, notice a bull run in a certain market, and you think to yourself, “Hey, this is easy money! I can just throw my cash in here and I will make gains no matter which project I choose.” Well, in practice, investing is much more complicated than that—and, there is no easy money. Therefore, you can prepare for years and years of self-training in this domain before you can call yourself an investor.

How To Self-Manage in Daily Life

As a fresh investor, you need to learn how to systematically unload the associated stress in daily life. It is a good practice to make sure that you only invest cash that you can afford to lose, and that you regularly cash out part of your profits. Bad decisions often result from desperation, and you should never put yourself in a situation in which one mistake in investing can put your lifestyle in jeopardy.

Every investor has their own individual path to success—there are no two similar stories. Therefore, you will need to pave your own path at each stage of the way. Becoming an investor is a holistic experience: you not only need to build your knowledge, but also build your physical and emotional resistance against difficulties on your way. In many ways, investing is a sport. 

Therefore, it is similarly physically draining as sports; you will need to take care of your mind and resilience to stress, but also mind your body in general. Most professional investors are fit and in shape—it is the best way to handle this energy-burning lifestyle in the long run.

Furthermore, you need to network. Many investors feel isolated before they manage to find a few people who think alike and form friendships. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, it is good to attend business events in the industry that interests you, and try to find someone who makes investments in this space already. Nothing works better as a support for fresh investors than creating mastermind groups.

If you have a profound feeling of isolation as an investor, you might also think of getting employed at some point. Today, venture capitalists and investment funds are massive companies that employ dozens to hundreds of Business-, Asset-, and Trading Analysts. If you find such a placement, you will have an environment to work at, and colleagues to speak to every day, plus you can still make your private investments on the side (which is what most employees do).

Next, one important but often overlooked aspect of becoming a good and happy investor is taking care of the relations with your family. Most successful investors and entrepreneurs develop deep family bonds based on values. While many budding investors get frustrated and drop out for their path because their family doesn’t understand and support their passion. The path of an investor is not a common choice. Many people who never invested, don’t understand it. 

Therefore, you need to make sure that your close family is all on your side, through the thick and thin. Spend some time explaining to your loved ones what you do, how, and why—don’t leave it as “just a quirk”. Show them that your lifestyle means much more to you than just earning money. You will see that when they understand your motivation and try to put themselves in your shoes, they will all become your biggest fans and supporters.

As mentioned before, choosing the right people to surround yourself with and get an advice from, is hard yet crucial for an investor. Those wise people who know that regardless of how far you will get with you investments, you will remain the same person at heart. It doesn’t come by accident that investors often make friends with other investors. It’s not about creating circles of mutual adoration; it’s about finding people who wish you well, understand and appreciate you—regardless of the bad press that journalists generate around wealth all the time.

Lastly, networking is not only about creating peer support groups with other investors at similar career stages as you. You should also find yourself good mentors: more experienced investors who got to a certain level of proficiency in the areas of the market interesting to you. 

Of course, in the beginning, you might not have access to the right people—not only because successful investors are often famous and hard to get to, but also because most successful investors are not famous. They often avoid the spotlight and are only known in their narrow circle. Many fresh investors leapfrog this problem by reading lots of self-development books written by big names and watching interviews with these people. In this way, you can get input from top professionals without the necessity to meet and approach them in person. 

However, once you find the right people, you will be surprised by how approachable they are! They will answer all your questions with pleasure—and when they notice the potential in you, they will stay in touch and try to help you further. Therefore, never stop looking for good mentors before you find them!

EXAMPLES OF FAMOUS INVESTORS

Benjamin Graham

An American investor, economist, academic professor, and author of British origin. 

At the age of 20, he graduated from Columbia University and launched his career on Wall Street. After a few years in the business, he became independent and founded the Graham-Newman Partnership. He also accepted teaching positions at Columbia, and later also at the University of California, Los Angeles. 

His investment strategy was focused on balanced, long-term investing and mitigating risks. He developed the concept of value investing, which is one of the leading strategies in investing until this day. He was focusing on fundamental analysis: analyzing the value of companies’ brands, intellectual property, and assets. His investment strategy was based on buying stocks within a so-called margin of safety, which is the difference between the company’s value and its current market price. In other words, Graham was focusing on finding and investing in companies currently undervalued on the stock exchange. 

He was the first to discuss the fundamental difference between investment and speculation. He was also a strong proponent of long-term investing (today, often referred to as HODLing). He was also advocating for mitigating risks by diversifying assets and avoiding investing in debt. Lastly, he believed in contrarian investing, which means investing against the current sentiment in the market (selling when others are buying, and buying when others are selling).

He was an employer and mentor to one of the biggest investors of our times, Warren Buffett (check: Examples Of Famous Achievers). He wrote two international best-sellers about investing, “Security Analysis” (1934, with David Dodd) and “The Intelligent Investor” (1949). He was also teaching other notable investors such as Sir John Templeton and Irving Kahn.

Kevin o’Leary

A Canadian entrepreneur, politician, author, and television personality. 

In 1977, he graduated with a Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies and Psychology from the University of Waterloo. In 1980, he received an MBA in entrepreneurship from the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario. He shared his career in business from co-founding the Special Event Television, a television production company that produced programs on sports together with his two peers from MBA studies. At some point, o’Leary’s shares were bought out by one of his two parents, and he proceeded to establish SoftKey Software Products in 1986. SoftKey was an IT company that sold CD-ROM-hosted personal computer software for Windows and macOS computers in the space of education and entertainment, which was then acquired by Mattel US$4.2 billion (1999). 

The exit made o’Leary a wealthy person and opened doors for him to become an investor. In 2003, O’Leary became an investor and director at StorageNow Holdings, a Canada-based developer of climate-friendly storage facilities. 4 years later, he made an exit and sold his shares with almost 1,000% profits. Then, he joined the advisory board of Genstar Capital, a private equity firm focusing on investing in healthcare services, industrial technology, business services, and software. In 2008, O’Leary co-founded O’Leary Funds Inc., a mutual fund company focused on yield investing (i.e., investing in businesses with a focus on maximizing interest, dividends, and royalties). He is the company’s chairperson and lead investor. In 2015, O’Leary Funds was sold to Canoe Financial and o’Leary turned to invest his own capital rather than external funds. 

He is a proponent of diversifying investments and as a personal rule, he keeps no more than 20% of his financial portfolio in one sector of the market. He appeared on numerous TV shows, including “Dragons’ Den” (since 2006) and its American version, “Shark Tank.” In the environment, he is known as “Mr. Wonderful” which is a tongue-in-cheek way of referring to his reputation of being mean to young entrepreneurs on TV shows. In 2017, he was running a campaign for a leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, but he resigned a month before the elections despite leading in the polls.

George Soros

An American investor and philanthropist of Hungarian origin. 

He graduated with Bachelor’s in Philosophy at the London School of Economics (where he was a student of the philosopher Karl Popper), and then Master’s and PhD in Philosophy from the University of London. He started his career by working for a few investment banks in the UK and the US. In 1969, he founded Double Eagle (later renamed Quantum Fund), his first hedge fund. In 1970, he used profits from this fund to start his second hedge fund, Soros Fund Management. 

Unlike Benjamin Graham, the father of the school of value investing, or Kevin o’Leary, the proponent of yield investing, Soros developed the General Theory of Reflexivity for capital markets, which explains asset bubbles, fundamental and market value of securities, and value discrepancies useful for shorting and swapping stocks. He has been successfully trading assets following this philosophy for multiple decades. 

Forbes named him “the most generous giver” as he donated 64% of his fortune to charities to date. His efforts as a philanthropist are the “civil initiatives to reduce poverty and increase transparency, and on scholarships and universities around the world.” He also uses donations for political causes, e.g., he contributed to the abolishment of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.

Jesse Livermore

An American stock trader and author. 

Livermore quit his job and began trading full-time in the local bucket shops at the age of 16. In the first three years, he made 1,000% net returns from trading. He was soon banned by all the Boston area bucket shops because of his constant wins. He then moved to New York, and started his new career by trading for Harris, Hutton & Company stockbrokers, and turning $10,000 into $50,000 in 5 days. 

He then had a long history of trading his way to success. He was using an edgy investment strategy taking positions on margin, which forced him to file a bankruptcy a few times in the process. However, this strategy eventually allowed him to become one of the wealthiest people in the world at a time, with the net worth surpassing 100 million dollars upon the Wall Street Crash in 1929 (t would be worth 1.2-20 billion dollars today). 

He is known as a pioneer of day trading, which is oriented toward making short-term transactions based on price fluctuations and the analysis of the “buy”/“sell” signals coming from the market. He also studied the influence of emotion on trading. Some of his trading decisions — such as taking short positions just before the Wall Street Crash in 1929 — are legendary and studied until this day. However, these decisions also made him unpopular at the time; the public blamed him for the crash and he received multiple death threats. 

In the thirties, a series of tragedies in his family led him to decline in mental health and affected his trading results. Encouraged by his son, in March 1940, he published the book, “How To Trade In Stocks”. In November 1940, just after 5:30 pm, Livermore fatally shot himself (it might have been related to some genetic risk as his son and grandson also finished their lives with suicides). 

Peter Lynch

An American investor, mutual fund manager, author, and philanthropist. 

In 1965, Lynch graduated from Boston College where he had studied history, psychology, and philosophy. In college, he used his savings to buy 100 shares of Flying Tiger Airlines at $8 per share. He made 1,000% profits on this stock and paid back his college fees from it. In 1968, he also graduated with an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. During his time at Wharton, he got hired as an intern at Fidelity Investments, and in 1969, he got permanently hired. After a few years in the company, he got promoted and served as Fidelity’s Director of Research from (1974-1977). In 1977, he took the position of the head of the then-obscure Fidelity Magellan Fund managing $18 million worth of assets. 

Since the fund was small, Lynch received a lot of freedom in terms of investment strategy. He decided to focus on investing in individual companies with undervalued stocks rather than buying into index funds, starting from American companies and soon proceeding to international markets. Between 1977 and 1990, he achieved an average of 29.2% annual return, consequently more than double the market index return at a time. This turned Magellan Fund into the best-performing mutual fund in the world. The assets under Magellan’s management increased from $18 million to $14 billion. Just as Benjamin Graham, Lynch was a proponent of value investing. His motto was, “Invest in what you know.” 

According to Lynch, his undergraduate studies in Philosophy and Logic had more influence on his success than the Mathematics or Finance classes that he studied in the MBA program. He wrote multiple books on investing, including the international bestseller “One Up on Wall Street” (1989).

Deborah Farrington

An American investor and venture capitalist. 

She first caught the bug for investing from her father who worked in financial services at Lehman Brothers. The exposure to Wall Street was fascinating to her. In 1976, she graduated with MBA from Harvard Business School. In 1988, she entered the male-dominated space of venture capitalism and co-founded a venture capital firm StarVest Partners. 

Today, StarVest is one of the largest woman-majority-owned venture capital firms in the US. Farrington pioneered investing in software as a service (SaaS). StarVest was an early and primary investor in NetSuite, a business management software company that was sold for $9.4 billion to Oracle in 2007. In 2011, she received the title of “Queen Midas” as the highest-ranking female venture capitalist on the Forbes Midas List. In 2018, she was awarded the Foreign Policy Association Centennial Medal for Achievement in Financial Services.