🎁 Stop Buying Landfill, Start Building Empires. This holiday season, ditch the plastic toys that end up in the trash by January. We show you how a simple $200 investment today can compound into college tuition, a house deposit, or a debt-free future.
💰 Stocks vs Socks: The 30-Minute Setup. We break down the exact steps to open custodial accounts (UGMA and Junior ISAs) and start investing for the kids in your life. It’s easier than you think — you can literally set this up while listening to this episode.
⏰ Time is the Ultimate Superpower. Starting at age 3 versus age 30 changes the math entirely. We analyze how Gold has performed vs. the S&P 500 over the last 15 years, and prove why the stock market crushes almost every other asset class over time.
🎮 From Super Mario to Super Returns – The perfect gift combo: Give them the game they want AND make them owners of the company. Turn gift-giving into financial education that creates lifelong investors.
📚 The “One & Done” Portfolio: VOO vs VWRP For the complete investing rookie: We reveal exactly which index funds to buy. We keep it dead simple — one account, one investment, life-changing results.
🎯 Advanced Mode: Ownership Thinking For kids 8+, learn how to use brands they already love (like Lululemon, Apple, and Roblox) to teach them how to think like owners, not just consumers. $AAPL $RBLX $LULU
👨👩👧 The Family Wealth Team. How to coordinate with grandparents, aunts, and uncles to contribute to one investment account instead of drowning your house in more plastic junk.
🚀 The 18-22 Year Old Playbook. A special shoutout to the young adults: How to open your first brokerage account and start your wealth-building journey immediately.
⚡ Action Items You Can Execute Today. Step-by-step instructions for US investors (Fidelity/Schwab + VOO) and UK investors (AJ Bell + VWRP). Check the show notes for our custom ChatGPT prompt to make the setup foolproof!
AI Prompt:
Paste the following into your preferred AI model. Don’t forget to update the three user context variables to specify your country, investment amount, and child’s age!
“You are an expert, meticulous financial assistant providing high-quality, actionable, step-by-step guidance on setting up an investment account for a minor.
**GOAL:** Generate a structured, compliance-aware, step-by-step guide for setting up a tax-advantaged investment account for my child.
**USER CONTEXT:**
1. **Country:** UK
2. **Target Initial Investment:** £500
3. **Child’s Age:** 5 years old
**CONSTRAINTS & OUTPUT FORMAT:**
1. **Audience:** Treat the user as financially literate, but an investing beginner.
2. **Output Structure:** The response MUST be a detailed, numbered step-by-step process.
3. **Broker Recommendation:** Provide three recommended brokers that operate in the specified market, provide the recommended account type, and offer the recommended product. Prioritise low fees.
4. **Execution Detail:** For the ‘Investment Step’, provide the exact order type (e.g., market order, limit order), the specific investment amount (using the amount provided above), and a concise one-sentence justification for the chosen investment product (VWRP/VOO/etc.) based on global diversification and low-cost passive tracking.
5. **Next Action:** The final step must be titled “Post-Setup & Long-Term Action” and must mention setting up a recurring contribution (e.g., monthly direct debit) AND the critical action of checking the account’s dividend/distribution setting (e.g., for UK: ensure it is an ‘Accumulating’ share class).
**Generate the full, detailed, step-by-step setup guide now.**”
Segments:
00:00 Introduction: Stocks Are Better Than Socks
02:00 Why Material Gifts Fail
06:58 Gold vs S&P 500: Why Stocks Win Long-Term
13:45 Getting Started: US Custodial Accounts (Fidelity/Schwab)
16:13 UK Version: Junior ISA Setup (AJ Bell)
21:54 What to Buy: VOO and VWRP Explained
26:35 Advanced: Stock Picking with Kids
34:45 Investment Accounts for 18-22 Year Olds (plus adults!)
37:57 The Nintendo Gift Combo Strategy
41:00 Final Call to Action
WSW – E109 –
literally with enough time, a tiny amount of money can grow into like a million dollars.
That’s absolutely doable. Time is the most important thing
I think if we accomplish one goal, I think we set for ourselves, one goal with this episode is to get people to legitimately pause before going out to spend money on material gifts and to get them to think I can do so much better.
If they haven’t figured out what their Christmas gift is gonna be this year, you could help them make their Christmas gift to their kid, be the gift of investing.
what is it that’s stopping you? From taking 30 minutes out of your life to make, you know, a really massive difference to this young person’s future wellbeing.
Welcome to the Deep Investing Jungle with your hosts, Luke, the Badger Hallard. And Christophe the Monkey Pikey. This week we are revisiting episode 60 from last December, and we’re gonna talk about the incredibly important topic of investing for your kids.
Badge People mess this up so bad and we’re gonna help them out so hard in this episode. You know how they mess things up
How do they mess it up?
because it’s the holiday season and they start thinking immediately we’re kind of garbage. New thing that they, that, that their kid or their, their friend or their young person needs. That they don’t really need. And then they go buy that thing. And then that thing is in the, you know, waste basket or in the drawer, uh, like three weeks later.
And no one’s the better for it. We have a better plan.
Yeah, you got it. If your kid’s like you’re generally receiving landfill, if you’re an adult, you’re probably getting socks. I like a, a nice pair of socks. Now I’m an old guy, but stocks are better than socks.
There you go. That’s the new tagline. This is a serious issue. This is a serious issue. I’m not faultless in, in, in this either. I don’t mind. I I’m a gift giver, by the way. Badge. I love giving gifts. I love how it feels. I like a nice, well thoughtful gift, you know, like really chosen from the heart. But most people, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m going hard on this and saying most people don’t do that.
Most people just say like, let me buy some materialistic thing to show somebody that I thought of them, and they’re throwing money out. And what we’re gonna tell you is that not only are you throwing your money out, but it doesn’t have that much of an impact on the person receiving it because it’s just like material goods swapping.
It’s like, here’s some like thing. Whereas if you thought. A little bit longer about what kind of gift could have a longer, deeper impact for the rest of a person’s life. You would immediately realize that helping them invest and or open up an investing account will be life changing, literally life changing for months and years and decades of this person’s life.
Like that literal gift that keeps on giving and giving and giving and giving. So. Listen to what we have to tell you. Rah, listen.
And if you don’t have kids. Right. We’re still gonna tell you some stuff that will be useful to you as an adult new investor. I wanna give a specific shout out to Raffi, my piano teacher, who is like inundating me with questions every time I go sit over his place to play piano about becoming an investor.
I’m like, dude, check out episode 1 0 9, which we’re gonna publish at the start of December, and that will tell you everything you need to know to get started as an investor.
Yeah, and I’m glad you said that. Badge, uh, uh, I have a stepdaughter, so that came to me a little later in life. So I never had a little, little crawling kind of kid. Uh, and, and, but, uh, I’m a godfather. And I have all my friends having kids, so I’m, you know, uncle Monkey, uh, in a lot of different ways. And I’m faced with the same exact temptation or question, like, what should I get all these whipper snappers for the holidays?
Right? And I’m now in part, by the way, badge in part because of last, uh, the last time we record this kind of episode, I am now 100% in the camp. That monkey’s not gonna give any of these whipper snappers anything, but either direct investing, um, you know, like, like I buy something for them in an account or if they’re a little older, a lesson about investing or some combination of here, you know, come here kiddo.
Your gift from Uncle Monkey is like an hour of my time. With you sitting down and helping you open an account or whatever the step may be, that is the only gift anybody’s getting from Uncle Monkey going going forward. And I know it’s the way.
And if you get this really right, if you get your own kids or kids in your extended family or friend group started as an investor, magical things can happen. I, I bought investment gifts for a bunch of kids of my closest friends last year, and I just heard last weekend that one of the girls is now investing like a few pounds of her own pocket money every week into that investment account, and she’s buying more stocks.
So she’s now a 13-year-old investor and that is gonna change her life.
I know. I mean, seriously, can you imagine the difference of, I mean, if you take our own time machine back of say, being 14 years old or whatever, 12, 14 years old, right? And because your parents having listened to our show, opened up an account for them when they were three or whatever, right? Added a little bit, whatever, monthly buyer, yearly doesn’t matter.
And now all of a sudden you’re 12 or 13 and you open up your account and you have like $8,000 sitting in there. Right? Whereas, you know, your summer job, you get, you know, tiny little paychecks, you know, as a lifeguard or whatever. And you know, as this 12-year-old, you have 20 times more money than all your friends because of what your parents did.
You just think about the world in a whole different way and, and I mean, it’s just a, I don’t know. The impact of this can be so huge and it’s not that complicated.
It’s easy. It’s easy. We’re gonna give you an easy roadmap over the next 30 minutes, and then we’re gonna give you a slightly more advanced version over the following 30 minutes. You could literally have this set up. In the time it takes you to listen to this episode, it is that easy.
Right. So should we get started on the, on the actual steps, uh,
do it. But I wanna, I wanna just, I wanna attack one thing because not all investments are the same. And the stock market, like owning shares in the world’s most incredible companies is how you create long-term life-changing returns. And also if you start like a kid’s investment journey started when they’re, you know.
4, 5, 6, 10 years old. They are the definition of a long-term investor. They have decades ahead of them before they theoretically need to touch that model. Um, I just wanna bring this to life because I know gold has been incredibly popular over the last couple of years. I’ve got a couple of pictures to show you.
let’s take a look. First of all, at Gold versus the s and p 500 over the last three years. And if you can’t see like the little squiggly numbers on the YouTube, basically over the last three years, the s and p 500 is like a collection of the 500 biggest companies in America. There are other indexes for other countries.
If you owned the s and p 500 over the last three years, you’re up 75%. That’s a nice return. But if you owned gold, you’re up 133%. So the last three years, gold has done incredibly well. And that’s what you’re seeing, all these gold articles right now. About gold being an incredible assets plus, but if you zoom out a little bit to 10 years, they kind of break.
Even Over the last 10 years, the s and p 500 has delivered 284% return, and gold has delivered 269%. So essentially the same, but like s and p just edging it out. But now if you really zoom out and the s and P’s only been around since 2010, so that’s about coming up for 16 years. 15. 16 years. That’s where you see the difference.
So owning stocks over the long term, like in this case 15 years, if you owned gold, you are up 209%. If you own the stock market, the s and p, you are up 710%. So that’s like a massive difference. And I know some things will come in and out of fashion in terms of investing and people might be like really pro property or gold or cash or.
Treasury bond bills or you know, whatever kind of stuff you hear about. But really you wanna keep it simple. You buy a passive index tracker, which is essentially a big grouping of stocks and you just own that for a long time and you are going to, over a long enough period, you’re gonna outperform almost every other asset class that exists.
Yes, sir. And it could be as simple as that. Uh, uh, I don’t have much more to add badge. You know, where I wanna start with though, before we get to the nitty gritty, is to, um, ’cause this is a holiday episode, right? So we’re, we’re, we really are thinking in the spirit of gift giving, the first thing that I think about is, is the, uh, gift for the young person.
Are they really, really young or are they, uh, more mature and by more mature? I’m starting to think like 10, maybe 10 and older. Maybe it could be even a little younger than that. Eight, nine, something like that. 10 between eight, whatever. Um, where they could actually begin learning about investing. So it’s like two, two forks. Parents just doing things for their kid on their, the, the, the child’s behalf. Versus involving the, the, the child or young person in the process. And to me, that makes a, that makes a difference in the kind of, uh, approach. The first one is basically to talking to the parents. The second one, meaning like, here’s a gift, right?
The, in the first case, I’m not gonna give, uh, investing gift to the three-year-old. I’m gonna give it to the parents. The second case, my, call it 19-year-old niece, I’m actually gonna put a thing in the box that says, lessons with Uncle Monkey about investing plus a hundred dollars to go into the account.
Two kinds of gifts like that. You see what I’m saying?
let’s, let’s, so there’s, there’s sort of two, two ways to look at that, right? Like you can have an account and there’s ways to do it in the UK for sure, and I’m sure there is in the US where the kid owns the assets. It doesn’t have to go into the parent’s name. And I think actually that’s quite a healthy thing to do.
’cause situations can change over the long period. And you, if you’re giving a gift to the kid, you wanna make sure the kid gets it. Um, but I think the, the, the nuance that you’re drawing out there is you can’t really have a conversation with a 3-year-old easily about what it means to be an investor and to own, you know, maybe you could to a really limited extent about, you know, maybe to be like a Disney shareholder, something like that, or a Roblox shareholder, like brands they might have heard of.
But three is pretty young. But what certainly, you know, a 7, 8, 9, 10-year-old could start to understand that stuff. You could, even if you wanted to give them like a specific stock, which you don’t have to do, if you want to do that, could even give them like a couple of options and let them choose. And then they have a bit of agency and like picking the stocks in their p.
Right. That’s what makes it an interesting gift. Uh, that’s what makes it a good gift and it’s quality time and it’s time spent and it’s educational and so forth. I just know, I suppose that the first decision you need to make if you’re thinking of giving investing as a gift is, is it for the parents or is it for the kid directly, even though it’s both, obviously for the person receiving it.
Um, and if it’s essentially the first kind, we’ll walk you through the, the, the exact specifics in a bit. But it’s more like you open up. An account that’s a kind of custodial account and you say to yourself, in the name of my child, I am going to keep putting money into this custodial account at whatever rate, and I’m basically helping them save money rather than throwing it out on stupid gifts. That’s kind of path one. The second path, the one that I’m actually involved in since all my. Younger, younger baby monkeys, monkey, cousins, and, uh, they, uh, are, are of age. And so I, together with them, help them manage their own account and I educate them saying, your, your uncle just put $200 into your account. What should we do with this? Or that kind of, you know, conversation.
So I’m, I’m gonna make a suggestion. Let’s, let’s put that stuff to the back of the episode today. ’cause I think we should start off. Like for somebody who knows nothing, doesn’t even know what the stock market is. Hopefully we’ve told you why this is important. Um, and literally with enough time, a tiny amount of money can grow into like a million dollars.
That’s absolutely doable. Time is the most important thing, which is why starting early is the most important thing. But I think let’s, why don’t we now let’s just break it down and try and give some. Really clear, simple advice to someone who just does not know where to start, how to get this account set up and what to buy basically.
If you’re in the US and you wanna start investing for your kids, what do you do?
Okay. Badge as simple as I can make it. You’re going to go to either Fidelity or Charles Schwab. You Google, or type in fidelity.com, charles schwab.com. Great. Once you’re there, you’re going to open up a custodial brokerage with the acronyms UGMA. If you have a hard time, for whatever reason, you can’t find that thing on their website, you press the contact button and you say, Hey, I’m trying to open up a custodial brokerage account for my young, uh.
My young buddy, I want A-U-G-M-A account. Great. They help you set it up, you open it up. thing you’re gonna do is deposit some money into that account. And then the last thing is the kind of thing you buy with it, which is, uh, in this case VOO, the Vanguard five s and P 500 index, and you’re done.
That’s it. That was really simple, and it’s literally as simple as that, and you could have this account created. In like a couple of hours, you might have to, you know, show like a bit of ID and stuff to get it set up. what is VO
no, no, no. Bad. It won’t take a couple hours. I mean, unless you get caught in some diabolical thing, I mean, it’s opening up a website, you know, like, I mean, they try to make it as easy. I, I’d be shocked if this takes longer than. 45 minutes tops for most people.
Alright, and we’ll come back to what you’re gonna buy in a bit, but let me just catch up with you and give some advice to. Our UK listeners, and if you’re in like Europe and somewhere else, like it’s easy to figure this stuff out, just go Google. Like, how do I invest in my kids? But we’re gonna give you, Christophe gave you really straightforward, simple instructions for a US investor, US family.
If you are a UK family, we have a really simple account called the junior ir, um, and is offered by a bunch of brokers. The easiest one to use that I would recommend is a company called AJ Bell. And you can find them by typing you invest.co uk YOU invest.co uk. Um, and log it, like create an account on there.
Say you wanna open a junior ir and you’d have to give her a few details if your kid like their date of birth and stuff like that. And then you’ve got the account set up and then you just fund it with some money and you’re ready to buy VWRP. But we’ll come onto that in a sec. What you’re gonna buy. Like what we’ve just told you are the super simple instructions.
And actually I know you can do that junior icer thing in like under 10 minutes because my cousins between them just had their fifth kid. And, uh, we just opened like, no, maybe even the sixth kid, I’m losing track. And uh, we just opened like another account for one of them and they had, they got it done with me, like helping them by email, but they got it done in minutes.
Yeah, I mean, uh, I don’t think we have to over anybody right now that feels confused or unsure about. I would, I would pause and say like, what is it that’s stopping you? From taking 30 minutes out of your life to make, you know, a really massive difference to this young person’s future wellbeing. There is.
I mean, this could not be easier, and the only thing I, I, I would add is we’re in 2025. If you’re, whatever, if you’re scared by the acronym, U-G-M-A-U, then just open up your, your, your favorite GPT model. A perplexity or whatever you use, or even in Google and say, I wanna open up a custodial account for my kid.
What do I do? And then you just follow those di directions. This is not right now, confusing about execution. There’s nothing confusing about this. It’s all about, I think your inner psychological, uh, stayed and, and getting out from I need to buy a physical gift versus, oh no, I need to do this other thing.
Once you’ve made that decision. I mean, there’s, there’s, it’s, it’s not complicated.
And I’ve, I’ve been doing this for over a decade for my niece, and then more recently for like my cousin’s kids, and even more recently for my friend’s kids. These gifts are making a serious difference. Like some of these accounts are now turning into something that will pay for the, a whole education, like university education, maybe even be like a down deposit, like a down payment on a house.
Um, just helps a kid get started in life. And it helps, it helps you as the parent because the kid won’t be so dependent on like the bank of mom and dad because they have their own assets to fund, and it means they won’t come outta college with this like six figure debt hanging over them. Because they could use this money, small amount of money you invested decades ago, and it’s grown into something quite material over time.
Badge I could, monkey is primed to go on a major rant right now, so hold me back. This is a whole nother episode. I just read this, this thing about a, a modern economist talking about what the actual poverty line is today. It used to be, uh, $40,000. Now it’s close to $140,000, and it’s really actually terrifying and, and true.
And I think when I hear you say this, I, I can’t say this with more sincerity, having an Uncle Badger like you. That legitimately took off this massive debt burden or eased this massive debt burden of childcare or edu funding a young person to education. Because you made one simple decision, right? To start this kind of fund for, for the young person. I mean, my God, like the difference between the Uncle Badger who paid for their college education, right, and freed them from a life of debt and in servitude. Versus Oh yeah. And Uncle Monkey got them a Lego set. You know, like, I mean, the difference could not be more, more wide and life altering. So, I don’t know.
I know I’m preaching again, but I guess the, that’s the point of this episode, right? Like, are, are you, are you hearing, we’re yelling at you?
and I, and. Like a personal anecdote, right. I’m fi I’m turning 54. I think so. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Um, like I didn’t start investing until I was 30, no, not 13, like my cousin’s kid. My friend’s kid, 33 0. But I retired when I was 49. Right. And that was, you know, I had a good job and I was able to pay like a decent amount of money into my investment account.
But just, you know, give or take 20 years of focusing on investing. Over, like spending money on frivolous shit basically I didn’t need, has changed my life. And like the last five years have just been incredible. Um, and you can do that for your kid. You don’t wanna give them so much that, uh, they’d never have to work.
We’ll come to that at the back of the episode. I think there is some nuance there, but, you know, certainly mitigating the cost of an education or getting onto the ladder of owning property, like that’s a really serious. Just like nice start in life that allows you the freedom to do kind of what you want to do,
Yeah, exactly. So, so we’re a nation of debt holders and this is one direct way out, and it just couldn’t be simpler. So let’s move. Uh, I already briefly went, went by this, uh, a little fast, but I’ll reiterate. So you open the account, right? You set yourself up as the legal garden and, and you have the designee all lined up.
So what do you buy for this particular purpose? For the, the, the person that just wants to do the absolute minimum, doesn’t even care about investing, doesn’t whatever, blah, blah, blah. You buy VOO, it’s a vanguard. Index that tracks the s and p 500. It’s gonna go up and down as the market goes up and down and over the long run, it’s gonna make you a lot of money and it’s as risky or it’s as low risk as investing in the stock market as it can be.
And that’s all you do. You buy that thing. And the only other decision is do you want it to be a re recurring gift? So you know to, to. Let’s say stop worrying about, oh, did I invest more or did I, did I add more to it? How long ago did I add? You put it on some timeframe appropriate to you, the gift giver.
Maybe it is a once a year gift. So once a year you set it to add 200 bananas, right? And then every year that child gets 200 bananas from you for, you know, the next 18 years. That’s still gonna add up to be quite a chunk. Or if you’re more generous, you do it. You know, you add, let’s say $25, uh, every month or whatever the, the case may be, and that’s the gift I would give to the actual parent, like a card or something.
You know, like I’m, I’ve opened this count. It’s getting $25 every month. Here you go. You know, happy holidays. I love you all, and you’re welcome.
Yeah, and if you’re the parent, you know, maybe you, you as the parent, you probably had to open the custodial account, but maybe you then send like the details out to the grandparents and the friends and say like, rather than buying landfill for my kid, like, why don’t you contribute to their investment future?
And like, this is the weird place to send the money to this kid’s account.
Yeah. Oh, that’s brilliant. Right. Make it a team a c Yeah. There you go. That’s, that’s brilliant, right? You, you bring in the rest of the clan. Uh, to nurture this young person together and everybody now has a place. To, to deposit that money. And today with the way it’s so easy to send money back and forth, right, PayPal, Venmo, I mean, it’s even plausible for me to say like, you know, badge, you want to, you know, or let’s say I want to, I wanna help your niece out, so I’m going to, you know, send you, uh, 50 bananas via wise.
Put that in, you know, young, young, um, Bobby’s account for me. You know, make sure, make sure it comes with a banana. Uh, under the, you know, holiday tree and then done. You take care of the rest, right? Team effort.
So you, you gave us the roadmap for the US and it was, you know, you get that account open, put money in open VOO, which is the s and p 500, which is essentially the 500 biggest companies in America. Um, if you’re a UK investor, I’m gonna reckon, recommend something slightly different. You’ve got your account opened with AJ Bell.
You invest instead of VOO, I’m gonna recommend you buy VWRP. So VWRP is the Vanguard, FS e, all world ETF. And instead of being like the 500 biggest companies in America, this is nearly the sort of three and a half, 4,000 biggest companies in the whole world. So over 40 countries. And it’s the biggest companies essentially from like every market that matters.
And you are owning the whole world there. Um, and you couldn’t be more diversified. And if you, you don’t have to overcomplicate it more than that, like just, if you run, if you wanna buy both, you could buy VWRP and VOO to have a little bit of extra American concentration if you wanted it. But if you wanna keep it simple, just buy VWRP as Christophe said, every year, every quarter, whatever it is, add more money, don’t sweat it, just keep adding it to VWRP, and you’re gonna get like a, a nice return, which is gonna be.
Cash in the bank, it’s gonna be gold, it’s gonna be property in the long run.
Amen. So that that covers this first, uh, kind of audience, right? The, we want, we wanna keep it simple. We don’t know anything. Just tell us what to do. And, you know, good riddance about stock picking. You wanna switch and start talking about What I find the more interesting and worthwhile, uh, sort of not worthwhile, um, more interesting for me, the gift giver, which is, which is I, I think of, uh, as the older age set, you know, I wanna give a gift to my, in this case, let’s say goddaughter, , so we’ve set up the account. If you’re in the US you’ve got your Fidelity account in the uk, you’ve got your AJ Bell account.
We’ve put some money in, and instead of following the simple path of buying VU or VWRP, we wanna do something a bit more hands-on and interesting. So what is, what is that interesting thing?
Okay, so now my card or Christmas card, uh, that comes with a banana. What, what the young person, let’s call, let’s say they’re 13 years old. What they see when they opened up that card is. Uncle Monkey has deposited 250 bananas in your uh, custodial account, which becomes legally yours when you turn 18 or 25 or whatever.
What should we buy with those 250 bananas and then. Uh, it’s some, you know, then you get to be creative and say, in order to figure this problem out, we need to have a call. We need to go out for coffee. We need to go get an ice cream. And we’re gonna sit down and actually think, you know, we’re going to think through, is there some kind of company that you really love and you think you would like to be an owner of?
And that’s where the education and the, the how to invest and what investing is and how it works starts. But it’s going to be a more active process. It’s the gift of time and presence and kind of being hands on. And then after that conversation happens, they might conclude that I want to buy 1.2 shares of Lululemon, uh, because I really love Lululemon.
And then, uh, and then Uncle Monkey goes and purchases 1.2 shares and there you go.
And I think Lululemon is an interesting choice there. ’cause it’s like a brand that we’re all familiar with and like. Pick stock picking doesn’t act initially. Doesn’t have to be much more complex than that. Like, you know, you exist in the world and you buy certain products and you use the services of certain companies, and some things you think this is really great, you know, I want more of this thing in the future.
And some things you think, man, that was such a horrible customer experience, like my car just broke down. Whatever happened, and you think that sucks. Like. Just applying that simple lens of like, what is the story behind this thing? That’s like a big part of being a stock picker. You’re using your own insight to find companies that have a compelling service.
Now, it is more complex than that, and listen again, you know, go back, going back and listening to like the last hundred episodes of our podcast. Every week we talk about how to identify good investments versus as bad investments. But if you’re just starting out and it’s a couple of hundred bucks for the kid and it creates like a really interesting conversation, like in this case, the conversation in itself is gonna be really valuable.
’cause it teaches the kid to think like an owner because that’s what you are when you’re a shareholder, you’re an owner of these companies.
There’s a, I think. Uh, similar but more important point here that I think both of us are trying to express. This will be the best gift ever if the person receives it begins to care about the company that they’ve invested in. So forget about finding the best investment because of whatever fancy financial metrics you could come up with.
It’s not about that. It’s if you give 13-year-old Susie. Uh, a share of a company that she and her friends are constantly talking about Lululemon in this example, or maybe it’s Apple computer or, I don’t know, maybe they like some restaurant, you know, but it’s, it’s a legit thing, but you know, like a legitimate business.
And all of a sudden, Susie, when she goes out with her friends, not only says, I really love Lululemons. And look, we all love these Lululemons, but she gets to say. And by the way, I own Lululemon. I share in the profits that this company makes. That is the thing that’s gonna make the big difference. So in that case, that lynching thing, buy what you own, buy what you love, as long as it’s not, you know, something on the verge of extinction, which you could almost tell might be happening.
I mean, rarely that, you know, that’s rarely the case. Uh. Then you’re gonna be fine. Then. It’s the gift of enthusiasm. It’s the gift of participation. It’s the gift of understanding yourself as an owner.
And just to be clear, you don’t have to do any of this stuff if you want to keep it really simple. It’s like the stuff we said in the first half an hour. Just buy the index. Don’t sweat it. Don’t worry about whether it goes up or down in the short term. Be assured that over like the 15, 20 year term, it’s gonna be the, the best risk adjusted asset class.
Like you’re most likely to make the most money with that thing, irrespective of what happens in the world. But if you wanna get more hands-on, then you can pick stocks. And Christophe just gave you an example of Lululemon. There’s hundreds and hundreds of thousands of companies out there. Um, and you can use your own insight to pick and if you wanna.
Get a bit more into like, how do you identify whether Lululemon is a good investment compared to say Nike, right? There’s ways you can do that. There’s tools you can use, but probably not for this episode. Probably for, you know, go check out the podcast and we talk about this stuff all the time.
Yeah. And you know, one of the comments we get, I think from, from our Patreons and is that they love our show because, uh. Well, most, most of them, not the people who canceled, the people who canceled, didn’t, maybe, didn’t love our shows much, but the majority of our, you know, our of our people, I think they tell us that we make entering this world accessible and easy on the ears.
And, you know, we’re honest and transparent and we’re not financial tech bros. You know, like in the deep weeds. Even though we understand this stuff, that’s not what we’re kind of offering people. And so to me it’s the, it’s this, again, to reiterate the process. You open the account. Right. You either identify yourself as entirely passive.
You pick an index fund, you’re done. Or if you want more quality time, you want more presence, you want it to be educational, then you say, Hey, let’s talk about companies you love. Then let’s buy a couple of shares of each of these and to get better at this stuff. Start listening to Monkey and Badger on a weekly basis, and they’re going to, you know, school you over many years and it’s gonna make all the difference.
And that’s a gift that kind of keeps on giving. I hope that doesn’t sound too self-serving, but I think we’re not trying to, I don’t know. I’m not trying to sell our show. I’m just saying that’s how you make a gift that legitimately makes someone wealthy and makes it fun and engaging and personal.
And I think, I think we are doing something a bit different on Wall Street Wildlife ’cause there’s a ton of other finance podcasts out there, but mostly they’re just telling you like what to buy or what they think about stocks. They’re not telling you like how to think as an investor so that you can make your own decisions.
And that’s really what we try to do. We tell you very transparently the things we own. You can see our live portfolios, if you go to Wall Street wildlife.com, it’s all there in black and white and um, uh, but we’re trying to teach you to make your decisions and you know, we’ve just launched our community portfolio, which is we have a whole bunch of Patreons now on the show who really like the measures we’re trying to tell, and now they’re picking their own portfolio and we hope that they beat us.
Like we have a rolling every one year contest. Who can. Beat like badger or monkey portfolio. Now the, uh, the jungle, like the community portfolio is in the mix as well, and I really hope our Patreons beat us using the skills that we’re helping them hone.
Okay. Badge. Uh, I, I think we’ve made that point pretty clear. I, I wanna say one additional point, and this may be, might be third, third case. Uh, and this is because it’s personal to me. These are the, the young people in my life that are now over 18. So they don’t necessarily need any of the custodial stuff.
They don’t, you know, you’ve, you’ve walked, you’ve done well until that part. But my 19-year-old right. Or my 22-year-old. Right. Uh, what I would actually say there is the gift would be slightly different. I would help them open up their own, uh, account in their own name. So it’s a gift of, just call it counsel.
Uh, and I like Robinhood. So here in the US that’s what I would do. And then, uh, once it’s in their own name and everything is theirs, I would send them some money and say, here you go, uncle Monkey just gave you 200 bucks. And then we from there, have the conversation. I wanna teach you how to invest. So let’s set up a meeting once a month, once every two months, right where we say, where we talk about companies.
And you, you got any ideas? Right? And then we make it, uh, that kind of, that kind of process, which turns into a habit in a lifelong, uh, you get, you get, it’s the gift of getting them started early, earlier than most people who think they have to wait to have a big paycheck to start investing. That’s the real gift.
That’s great and, and you know, by definition there. That advice you just gave applies to you. If you are like an adult and you haven’t started investing for yourself, do what Christophe just said. If you’re in the North America and the US, go open a Robinhood account and start investing. The way we set out, and you could keep it simple, you could open your own Robinhood account and you could buy VOO or you could do the stuff we said in the last 10 minutes where you start to pick companies.
Lemme give you the UK version of this. And I did say I like I shouted out my piano teacher at the top of the episode. Like Raffi, this is what you should do as an adult who hasn’t started investing yet. The UK equivalent of Robinhood is a company called Trading 2 1 2. I use trading 2 1 2 myself for my King of the Jungle portfolio, which is the one I I used to as the Badger portfolio to try and beat Christophe in the monthly contest.
Super easy to create a trading 2 1 2. And if you can open an Isa ISA, it’s like the adult version of the Junior isa. Same thing. And if you wanna keep it real simple, just put all your money that you can afford to invest for the long term into VWRP. And if you wanna start stock picking, well, trading 2 1 2 ISA allows you to own like any of the thousands of greatest companies in the world.
And you start doing exactly what we just talked about.
Badge. Uh, perfect. Let me uh, add one additional point I missed back. Uh, in some previous episode, we had a conversation with the founder of public.com. I wanna add public.com As an alternative to Robin Hood, both our excellent platforms, both will get the job done, so public or Robinhood for these, uh, call it individual investors.
well, I think, uh, it’s, we, we should wrap things up, uh, about this topic. But as we were talking, I had what feels to me an obvious idea, uh, intending to bring us to the spirit of wrapping this conversation up, which is, so far we haven’t made any direct stock pitches. Because that’s about the process and individual.
But one came to mind and I don’t think you’ll be surprised by, and I, here’s why. I think it’s a brilliant idea, uh, and why it encapsulate Yeah. Everything we’ve been saying, often for young people in the holidays, you get the gift of games and games are fun and there’s nothing wrong with getting a game.
But if I’m really being my best, uh, uncle Monkey Santa Self. Then, you know what? I would give my, my younger people, I would get them, uh, a Nintendo game because the Switch two, or you know, like, I mean there’s Donkey Kong and the, the Switch two is just a great gift. It’s what monkey wants. Uh, ’cause monkey’s been a really, really good, uh, uh, uh, Simeon this year.
But then I would also get them a share of Nintendo. Uh, not least because it pays a dividend. So once you get one share, that share actually keeps paying for itself. You know, and I would explain, you know, you are now an owner of Nintendo. You’re not only getting this game, but you also get a share of the profits when anybody else buys these games.
And to me, it’s the perfect encapsulation. Of that mindset switch from buying, just buying stuff to participating in wealth creation. Ticker, by the way, ticker N-T-D-O-Y on the US uh, stock market.
yeah, it’s one of your favorite companies. I don’t own it, but it’s a really. It is a brand that would resonate with kids and make sense. Um, so that’s, you’re right, that’s a great place to start with the stock picking journey. We, I don’t wanna over complicate this, complicate this conversation, but you know, maybe if you are gonna be stock picking, you might wanna find 10 ideas and then spread your $200 gift 20 bucks into 10 different companies.
One of which could well be Nintendo. ’cause then you get diversification. But probably beyond the scope of this like intro, where do you start? Episode. If you want to really get into that though, like we answer that in other podcast episodes and fire us the question on on the exes or hit us up on Patreon and hit us with your questions and like we’re happy to fill those in future conversations.
Awesome. That feels, that feels pretty complete to me. Badge. I think if we accomplish one goal, I think we set for ourselves, one goal with this episode is to get people to legitimately pause before going out to spend money on material gifts and to get them to think I can do so much better. By opening up one of these custodial or individual accounts and starting the process, if that’s where we got you to, and you actually take that step.
We’ve, we’ve, we’ve won. And then it’s just about, you know, the gift that keeps on giving.
And now, now if you’re, the reality is if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably like a subscriber or a Patreon. Um, and you know this stuff already, but we’ve tried to do this episode in such a way that you could send us as like a link to this one as a one-off. To like friends and family, this is going out early December.
If they haven’t figured out what their Christmas gift is gonna be this year, you could help them make their Christmas gift to their kid, be the gift of investing. And maybe as the expert you can hold their hand and help your friend or your family member along that journey. But yeah, it’s like fire him the fire him.
Link this episode and we try to make this real simple. And if you wanna make it like even more simple and in like five minutes, well. We were really crisp and clear when we did this last year in episode 60, so you could even go and listen to that. The advice is the same today. We’ve been a bit more kind of conversational about it, and we’ve gone a bit deeper on the why, but the mechanics are the same.
They haven’t changed and they won’t change for years. Like opening one of these kind of accounts and buying one of these kind of indexes is just gonna be the right decision for the next 20 years.
Yep. Uh, here’s A-A-T-L-D-R, right. You’ve just finished listening to this on your drive or wherever. You finished listening to this episode. You’re gonna go home, you’re gonna open up your chat, GPT. You’re gonna say, I would like to give the gift of investing for my young person, right? Walk me through the steps, the exact steps I need to take to open up an account for my young person, and then follow what GPT tells you based on everything you’ve heard us talk about, and then you’re done.
You know what? Even when in the show notes, we’ll put a prompt, you can chuck into your, uh, Gemini or your chat GPT, that will give you like the right kind of answer. So literally just go and when you get home from your drive. Copy and paste what we put as a potential prompt and then go use that to get the answer.
And I think 90% of the time it’s gonna give you a pretty similar answer to the one we’ve just set out for you.
Sweet badge are you and all your young, your young. Little baby badgers ready to become beasts of investors.
We are Christmas beasts for right now. Rah.
