My day job is all about taking risks. As a venture capitalist at my firm, Social Leverage, my partners and I invest in seed-stage software companies, with my personal focus being on financial technology. You might recognize some of our early investments, like Robinhood, eToro, and Ycharts. This background, along with co-founding StockTwits, probably makes it clear why I favor individual stocks over index funds when it comes to .
It’s one thing to give financial advice, but it’s another to live by it. The way we handle our own money is often a reflection of our earliest experiences, biggest lessons, and personal values. Here’s a look at how two financial professionals, Nina O’Neal and Debbie Freeman, manage their own investments, shaped by their unique life stories.
I was listening to the financial news the other morning, and the commentators were all focused on Google. Since the start of the year, the stock had been all over the place, with frequent gaps and high volatility. The steady, organized climb it had enjoyed for years was starting to look more like the chaotic distribution phase you see after a bubble bursts.
People often ask where I find my investment ideas, assuming they’re some rare commodity. The truth is actually the opposite. After more than twenty-five years of hunting for good investments, my challenge isn’t finding ideas—it’s sorting through them. But I remember starting out and asking the same question you might be asking now: Where do I even begin?
To be successful with , you have to know what a business is worth. But what if the old rulebook for valuing companies is broken?
If you're interested in , you eventually realize that a company's long-term performance is driven by its quality. To succeed, you have to get good at spotting what makes one business truly superior to another. This skill really comes down to one thing: identifying a company's competitive advantage.
When it comes to , price is the variable that can single-handedly veto any deal. You can love a business and admire its management, but if the price isn’t right, you have to walk away. This principle of triangulating between price and value—asking, “What am I getting for what I’m paying?”—is the backbone of any sound investment strategy. At a certain point, even the most incredible business becomes a bad investment if it’s overpriced.
In 1950, a young Warren Buffett from Omaha walked into Benjamin Graham’s class at Columbia Business School and found a system that felt like a revelation. For anyone wondering , Graham’s method was like a perfect cookbook: a formulaic, easy-to-follow guide with strict rules. It was a framework that would help turn Buffett into a billionaire. But over time, the student realized the world had changed, and the teacher’s old recipes were no longer enough.
My early picture of Wall Street was a complete caricature. When I started my finance career twenty-five years ago, I imagined a world of testosterone-fueled cowboys and sharks, shouting into phones and waving their arms on the stock exchange floor. I couldn't have been more wrong.