In this special episode, Monkey comes back from a Zen retreat and advises Badger on all the ways he needs to get his life in order. Along the way, we discuss the pitfalls of short-term trading, and why doing less is often more when it comes to investing returns.
Most importantly, Monkey challenges Badger to see if he can put away all his tech toys for his week-long retreat: listen to all the creative excuses!
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WSW E28 – Zen
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[00:00:02] Luke: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Wall Street Wildlife. Krzysztof, you have been away having some fun for a week. Where’d you go? What’d you do? Have you been buried in your investments while you’ve been traveling?
[00:00:16] Krzysztof: I don’t know if you follow me on Strava.
[00:00:18] Luke: I do. I haven’t looked. Okay. I
[00:00:20] Krzysztof: Ah, you haven’t been. So I was, I was the furthest away one can be from civilization, which is the Hawaiian islands.
[00:00:29] Luke: Oh, wow.
[00:00:30] Krzysztof: But the specific Hawaiian island that I was on is Molokai Island, which is more or less completely undeveloped. In fact, the locals. kicked out a development company that was trying to turn it into what you see in Honolulu to keep the land more or less pristine and, uh, there for the natives.
But the consequence of that is there’s Almost literally nothing on the island of that has to do with commerce. A couple, like one stoplight, I think a couple little, uh, burger joints. Uh, anyhow, was not there on what I would call it vacation. I was there to cleanse, scrub deeply, uh, get all the fur out of the way and, and get deep into a realignment with. who I really am. And the, the, the thing is, you know, in modern day life, Badger, you know, this, it’s one thing after another and habits of mind form. And before you know it, I’ll speak for myself. I’m doing things constantly in a way that is habitual. and does not necessarily feel good or does not feel like I’m living a life of, uh, not necessarily purpose, but of a kind of, equanimity amidst all of the chaos and amidst all of the beeps and apps.
And so this was a Zen retreat with my longtime Zen teacher. In a truly beautiful setting, on that undeveloped island, there’s a very beautiful, uh, curated retreat space. I
[00:02:22] Luke: know in here, Mark Zuckerberg’s Hawaiian bunker that he’s built.
[00:02:26] Krzysztof: had a house, from Pearl Jam, had a house somewhere in Molokai. And you could see why, you know, some famous people want to live on a place that has no commerce. So I, I, I’m an experienced, uh, Zen practitioner, have been doing it for a long time, so there’s no, uh, it wasn’t like a, you know, oh, let me try, uh, Zen for the first time kind of thing.
I knew what it, what I was getting into, and as part of the experience, I allowed myself the privilege of not checking. Any email, any investment apps, any beeps or bops were completely ignored by me.
[00:03:13] Luke: So how’s this right for our episode today? Let’s go down the rabbit hole of, uh, your emotional journey as an investor, but let’s not talk about what happened in the market because. I don’t want to be the one to tell you about all the wild things that have happened in the week you’ve been gone.
[00:03:29] Krzysztof: Uh, okay. So, so,
[00:03:33] Luke: and also in a few days time, I’m off to a yoga retreat for a week, purely coincidentally. Uh, and I wasn’t planning to switch off. So let’s see if you can persuade me in today’s episode that as an investor, you should turn off the, uh, the Bloomberg feed, shut down the Twitters for a week, and that will do me some mental good.
[00:03:54] Krzysztof: So, we talk about this quite a lot. That much of successful investing or mistakes come from the psychological or lack of proper psychological etiquette. And, you know, real big picture, you’ve been living like this in many ways. Money is there to serve us rather than us to serve money. And in my last year of investing, I’d say I was more lost as an investor than I ever have been. One in part, because of, you know, my investments in small caps that didn’t work out.
And then I studied the trading. Technical analysis stuff for a good while wanting to fill in close up gap that I knew was out there, but you know, that was completely naive to, but in that process of learning what short term investors do, stuck to the screen, looking at charts and movements in, you know, intervals of minutes, days, weeks, that kind of stuff. I could report to you that it did not, it did not feel good in the sense of, uh, the holistic aspect of my life. Like, what are we, you know, each minute is precious. Each minute is precious. You don’t know when you’re going to die. I don’t mean to get really, heavy here, but one thing I’ll mention is on my spiritual, on my Zen retreat, one of our Zen practitioners died, um, stage four cancer.
So we were, uh, she died back in Austin. So we were there to support her. But, you know, it someone’s death, there are fewer things that wake you up more, right? Potentially. And so the connection I’m making here is that I know for myself that checking screens some of the time, or most of the time, or some amount of the time that I was checking them was not my highest priority. way of living. I knew that. But you also know that daily life, once you get into that habitual way of being, it’s hard to snap yourself out of it because, right, it’s just the normal processes take over and it’s not hard to just look at your phone this time, that time, right? And so that’s why I think, uh, uh, deliberate retreat from the ways we normally retreat in our daily lives, which is, you know, to keep the emptier spaces busy with something. And so, uh, I think This kind of retreat does work its magic if you give into it fully surrender, which means I I’m not going to give you advice, but I would say I would argue from the other side that it’s hard to know what turning everything off.
can do for you unless you actually do it.
[00:07:02] Luke: as investors, this is our job to monitor the markets, monitor your investments. And you’re right. If, uh, I’m a long term investor, so really I shouldn’t have to be tweaking and fiddling with stuff every week. Right. Otherwise I’m not truly a long term investor. And even I read an interesting comment. Uh, like a week ago while you’re out that said, cause I’m, I’m, I’m down the rabbit hole with certain elements of macro at the moment and thinking about consumer spending and the economy and what’s happening in the world.
But actually if you’re really a long term investor, macro is irrelevant. And, uh, micro becomes more important. Again, I think I’ve forgotten the exact quote, but it was along those lines. Like the actual company performance is the most important thing. And if you, if you’re holding a generational company or a company, at least for 10 years, plus like macro will come and go, these things come and go and in and out, uh, but your great quality company will prevail nonetheless.
So anyway, narrowing back down, I shouldn’t worry about what’s happening to my stocks over the course of a week or two weeks, though I’m probably going to.
[00:08:10] Krzysztof: Right? Right. That is another reason in the column for why long term investing mindset is, I would, I’m going to reduce things to simplify better or more holistically rewarding. Because if you are in fact curating a portfolio, Of mostly world class companies, then yes, the price is going to bounce up and down, but you don’t have to be scared to have that anxious mind wondering, will the latest bit of news destroy my company, you know, Google, whatever might happen to say Google over the next 10 years in the face of AI and whatever, there’s no amount of news that could come out in a week’s time.
that would make your investment, you know, plummet 80 percent just not going to happen.
[00:09:07] Luke: Ciao.
[00:09:07] Krzysztof: Right.
[00:09:08] Luke: Yeah, okay,
[00:09:09] Krzysztof: And so, uh, and so I guess coming back from this, one of the main lessons that I’m going to try to take away as I want to apply this way of being to my daily life is yes, when I rebuild my portfolio backup, I will take extra caution to make sure that the kinds of companies I’m putting back in there will not need to be monitored at all times.
So I could continue getting rid of the constant checking of things.
[00:09:40] Luke: So have you, is this to say you’ve now, you’re coming to the end of your experiment with short term trading technicals and looking at charts and things like that?
[00:09:49] Krzysztof: That’s a little bit more of a mixed answer, despite everything I said. And I’m not sure, let me say, I’m not, I haven’t made conclusive decisions of, uh, fully yet I have, I know there is value in that stuff, but there are. I think you pointed me to some Wall Street Bets post that, you know, talks about how many people lose all their savings because there’s, that world has a lot of scammy things going on because fortunes can be made very quickly and lost just as quickly because it’s closer to To save the casino analogy, right?
You could win big at the poker table, have a real nice run of luck and think you’re a genius. So in that world, there’s a lot of, uh, ditches you could fall into. I still maintain from what I’ve seen that there’s a way to do that stuff as fairly simple, doesn’t require a course, doesn’t require a bunch of crazy patterns and stuff.
that allows you to see what the, what I would call the purest, fundamental variable of, of a stock is, which is its price, meaning everything condenses down to price. If a company is failing, the price has gone down. If it’s succeeding, the price has gone up. The, the key there is. You need enough of a long term timeframe.
Basically, you can’t be dabbling with, with the minutia. So I saw you frown about something. Um, you know, when I said prices that, you know, indicator, I could think of, I’ll let you, you know, tell me why you’re rinsing in a second, but you know, one, one contrary point to that, for example, is biotech stocks went or pre revenue companies when they were pre revenue, the price is going to, I guess, do what it will, because it’s all of a story. And so the company might be doing well, I guess, developing drugs, but the price still might be going down because from hope to okay, it’s taking longer, whatever.
But in general, successful companies go, the price goes up and unsuccessful ones go down.
[00:11:59] Luke: Yeah, and just to clarify my wince, um, And we are on the YouTubes. If you’re listening audio only, you can see, you can see us frowning each other. Uh, the, like given a sufficiently long timeframe, absolutely correct. Like eventually the stock performance will come in line with the company performance. Like investors can be driven insane by the fact that these things can be divergent for, Years at a time, sometimes like I’ve held what I feel are great quality companies and I’ve had to hold them through multiple years of just pain upon pain upon pain.
And then eventually you either realize you were wrong and it wasn’t a great quality company or the market realizes it was getting it wrong and things come back into line.
[00:12:45] Krzysztof: right. So this is where it gets really tricky. And I wish there was an easier answer, but let’s say you’re holding a company. where the price is indicating a downward movement, you still believe in the story, but that interim call it one year, three years, four years, you’re actually paying an opportunity cost, right?
And so that those instances, you need to really, you know, know your stuff fundamentally to override the cost of just holding. And sometimes the correct answer is if the, you know, if the stock is going down in terms of price to exit and wait until the first earnings report that says, okay, we finally overcome the hurdle and then you come back in.
But then of course that gets us into market timing ish, ish territory, right?
So let me go back to maybe the, the basic takeaway from this. I want to live a life that I am proud of, that feels good day to day. Before going on my Zen retreat, I knew, based on my habits, that I was overdoing it with the amount of time I was spending on looking at the screens. And, you know what?
In hindsight, I made a bunch of decisions over the last couple years. that were way more reactive and way more born out of the incessant checking than knowing too much than I would have if I had the much more spacious, holistic view of things. And that’s why I think now coming back to civilization, I’m going to, I just got back yesterday, right?
So I’m fresh off the boat, fresh off the, fresh off the scrubbing. I’m, I’m going to turn off a whole bunch of notifications. And I’m going to hopefully become a better investor by making my investment sessions, deliberate, planned, focused, deep, you know, what am I doing at this time on Thursday at 3 PM?
Oh, this is my two hour block to investigate company so and so or to talk to you or to do work for seven investing or whatever,
[00:15:04] Luke: yeah,
[00:15:04] Krzysztof: what side of that, right? If I’m looking at my things, it’s more likely than not to be a hindrance than, than the help,
[00:15:12] Luke: yeah, that’s good. if you’re, I’m going to say a professional investor, but if you essentially stock pick, you’re an active investor, you don’t ever turn your ears off, right? Sometimes I, I’m not being deliberate with my time, but sometimes I’ll be going to do something. There’s nothing to do with investing. And then I’ll just see something or overhear something and go, and that will trigger the investing part of my mind.
And I’ll start asking interesting questions about what’s happening in that part of the world or in that particular company or in with that trend that seems to be emerging or collapsing. So I guess I never turn my brain off to that stuff, even if, um, even if I’m playing tennis and I’m not thinking about investing whatsoever.
[00:15:54] Krzysztof: you know, that’s interesting. You say that because this morning I was listening to an absolutely wonderful podcast on my run. Between the world class therapist, Esther Perel, truly astonishing if you haven’t heard her work, uh, she, she helps people become more, overcome all kinds of barriers toward intimacy, but she’s so bright and insightful.
It’s really worth checking out as a side. But she was having a. She was interviewing Trevor Noah, the comedian, and they were asking, they were trying to help one another live on stage. I think this was recorded South by Southwest in mutual ways. She wanted to learn from Trevor Noah. How to have less stage fright because she’s about to go on world tour in front of large audiences.
And he wanted to understand from her how to be a better listener. And the interesting comment that made me think of that is, when you get really good at something, in his case, comedy, in her case, therapy, you could continue learning about your dominant discipline from everybody else because every other discipline has something to teach you about your own. And so what you just said, Luke, is I think really great. Once you have this longterm investing mindset and you’ve done a lot of work, you know what to look for. You’re right. Your ears are never really turned off, right? You’re looking at fashions and brands and so forth. What we’re talking, what I’m talking about. I think I would, I would be so bold as to say it’s a little bit of neurosis. maybe a little or a lot. And I, again, I’m telling you because I’m fresh off the boat, a week was long enough for me to my nervous system to get over that, anxiety producing feeling of, Oh, there’s space. Let me open up my investing app to fill it. Now that that is sort of on the other side, I’m going to protect or be might be aware of that Habitual instinct. Protect myself from it. And my, my guess is that my long-term returns from here on in, if I can stick to this, will improve rather than deteriorate.
[00:18:14] Luke: Great. I like the enthusiasm. And if you’re by necessity becoming more of a longer term guy, that takes you back to the successful 20 years you had as an investor before you got into some of this crazy stuff.
[00:18:26] Krzysztof: Yeah. And you know, if I’m going to be compassionate with myself and honest, I don’t think the mistakes I’ve made in the last year were, I mean, they cost me, the education was very, very expensive. But I learned a whole bunch of stuff that I did not know about. And I feel like I’m a more well rounded investor now with having, you know, having hands on experience in multiple different realms of investing.
And I’m not making binary decisions. I think saying only this way, or only this way. I think I’m going to try to be as discerning as I can and take the elements from. Because obviously, right, it’s the world is too complex to think it’s one purely one or the other and as long as I’m not caught up in the in the bullshit or in the in the problematic stuff, I can use a more round well rounded approach to the overall game, but, you know, I have the experience to, I think, be able to pull that off
[00:19:31] Luke: Good.
[00:19:31] Krzysztof: like, and I’m still whooping your ass in the king of the jungle portfolio.
[00:19:38] Luke: Okay, the game’s not relevant, but yes, that’s good to hear. I’m not tempted to go on the same journey as you. I’ve always figured I know my style and I play into my strengths rather than trying to develop my gaps. So I just carry on doing things the way I’ve always done them that serves me well. But so let me think about what you’ve just said there and reflect because, yeah, I’m off to a Kind of a yoga retreat with a buddy, um, on Thursday for a week.
Um, and it hadn’t occurred to me that I should use that as an opportunity to try and tune out the real world. but maybe I should try and do that to some extent. I do, I do genuinely enjoy the activity of tracking my investments and looking for other opportunities, and as we both agreed, UA has never turned off that stuff.
Um, I don’t know, I’m always filling the little micro gaps in the day with active stuff around that. I’ve got a bunch of research websites I look at. Looking at the Twitters, which is mostly investment research for me. I enjoy that stuff.
[00:20:40] Krzysztof: Well, allow me to challenge you
[00:20:42] Luke: Hmm.
[00:20:42] Krzysztof: because you know, we’re, we’ve, we’ve been co hosts now for a while and, and we’re friends and you’re a remarkable individual because you live life. You’re one of the few people who really lives life. I would say passionately and for the right reasons. And, you know, I, I, I’m a therapist on the side and I teach and study Zen.
I would say to you that one, the word yoga means to yoke and it means to yoke body and mind. because they sort of can get unruly. So the ancient practice was, you know, developed to, to help people integrate. But as you know, in the ancient days, they didn’t have the constant source of addictions that we do to, to interrupt them.
So yoking for them was in a sense, a lot easier than it is for us. The second point is, I think addictions, you know, when we talk about addictions, I say this to my students all the time and I don’t exclude myself. We’re a generational society of addicted humans because these phones that are new to our lives were designed to be that way. And I could see when you show up in my class that nobody is talking to one another, everybody is, you know, doing the thumb thing. So, addiction, I’m using that term not in the scary, you know, you’re addicted to a dangerous substance and your life is spiraling out of control way, but I’m using it more in the literal sense.
That there are things we do that create new neural pathways that if we try to interrupt those pathways, we have a hard time. And so my challenge to you would be that it would be this simple. If you are just as a mind frame, if you have no problem, say with investing and investing is not an addiction in the heart, you know, in the negative sense, then going without it for a week should not be a problem. Then you could easily say, right, I’ve gone a week, uh, I like it, I enjoy it, it’s, it’s wholesome, uh, and it’s not a big deal, letting it go in that way. And then when you come back from the retreat, you just pick up the habits exactly as you were, because they’re not a big deal. But, if in that week, you find that there was increased, whatever, anxiety or whatever, then that’s important to know.
Right.
[00:23:16] Luke: Is that allowed? I’m going to take a book. I’m going to take a book with me. Uh, which is one that you recommended I buy. I’ve stuck it out here to remind myself to pack it. Uh, Expectations Investing by, uh, Mabousin and Rapoport. Because I read it on your recommendation about a year and a half ago. I sort of half understood it. And I think I’ve now got enough of a foundation I can go and have another go at reading it.
So maybe if I take maybe one more book, that, that might be enough to get me through a week without looking at the phone too habitually, maybe because of like an hour a day. Yeah.
[00:23:55] Krzysztof: that generally feel wholesome ahead of time. Reading a book like that, I would say, you know, requires deep thinking and deep studying. That feels different to me than the more impulsive stuff that I’m talking about that gets away from us, right? You’re defining it ahead of time, and that doesn’t seem too problematic to me.
But you know, the joke, I could quit smoking anytime I want. I’ve done it a hundred times before. Right. So, uh, you’ve, you’ve confessed as much to me before, right? That you are a tech guy and you, you usually reply very quickly to my pings on WhatsApp. So you’re, you know, you’re, you’re a man of the. of the 21st century, second decade of the 21st century. Challenge yourself in this way. Get rid of the, the, the other stuff.
Take that book. When you finish with that book, go eat some tapas and just stare out into space.
[00:25:01] Luke: Okay. All right. I’ll, uh, I’ll tell my buddy Jason who I’m going with to, uh, monitor my phone usage. I’ll, uh, I’ll do my best to minimize it. I’ll tell you, I’ll come back when I come back, uh, next episode, I’ll give you a playback on my, uh, comparative screen time, my usual screen time, which is probably getting on for about eight or nine hours a day in a normal week.
Let’s see what it looks like for at least that week.
[00:25:26] Krzysztof: And, uh, if I, if I may remind our, esteemed listeners, and viewers that the last time I posed a challenge to Luke the Badger Hallard, he got through, uh, one attempt of taking a cold shower and then bailed, right? You did it once.
[00:25:47] Luke: I did five days. I fulfilled, I fulfilled the parameters, but it wasn’t pleasant. Yeah.
[00:25:52] Krzysztof: I thought you only did it one time and then, and then, I took the, I took the phone, recorded myself one time for your delectation. No video.
Okay.
[00:26:02] Luke: I did. I did the job. I did five days. Yeah.
[00:26:05] Krzysztof: okay. All right. Fair enough. So exactly. So I know you, you’re made of the stuff that, that could do this. So I hope I, I generally from the bottom of, of my mind, monkey heart, wish this for you so then you could come out the other side being more free to make a decision about which way you want to re engage.
[00:26:27] Luke: All right. Very good. Uh, so let’s land the plane for our listeners. What’s the key takeaway from this? Um, very. A different conversation to our usual podcast.
[00:26:36] Krzysztof: I would say that successful investing depends on A tremendous amount on the state of your mind. And there’s a lot in the modern world that corrupts our, our minds quality so much so that we forgotten the way it’s been corrupted, taking a, a break, a deliberate break. To reassess retune oneself, I think is the way to long-term invest in gains because you’ll be making better decisions most of the time.
[00:27:15] Luke: And whether you are or not, I suppose you hopefully feel a bit better and calm of mind about whatever the state of the markets might be. And I hope you resist the wild exuberance and the YOLO bets and the fear and the emotions that generally are unhelpful as a long term investor.
[00:27:33] Krzysztof: Yeah. So there you have it,
badger and monkey, the two monk, Wiseman.
[00:27:40] Luke: One, two, two, there are always a master and a, uh, a student. I’m definitely the student in this domain.
[00:27:48] Krzysztof: All right.
[00:27:49] Luke: All right. I hope you enjoyed that random sidebar episode of wall street wildlife podcast. You can find us at wallstreetwildlife.com. We’ve got our 10 laws of the investing jungle download. We’re also on podcast platforms and we’re, we are on X. So if you are having your one hour a day of looking at Twitter, can find me at seven Luke Hallard,
[00:28:12] Krzysztof: Yep. And I’m at seven flying platypus. And please, if you found today’s conversation useful, do us a big favor and leave us a review because they will really help us in the long term.
[00:28:28] Luke: especially if you’re a Spotify or Apple podcast listener, go, uh, go hit the apps and give us a five star review. That will really, really help. Are you ready to become a beast of an investor? Your journey starts here.
Woo! Woo woo! Woo woo hoo ha ha! Woo hoo! Woo hoo hoo! A reminder that the people on this program may fold positions in the companies that are mentioned. Buying and selling carg carried financial risks, which could include loss of capital. The views in this program should not be taken as personalized advice.
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