The Art of Doing Nothing

A year ago, the internet was overflowing with ads related to crypto-currencies. Had I acted on any of them, I would have been down at least 80 percent on my investment today.

Lately, I've been bombarded by ads related to options trading. Apparently, the way to retire rich these days is to sleep, eat and trade, non-stop.

Needless to say, I'm not much interested in spending my time doing nothing but sleeping, eating and trading. It sounds horrible, and it's a sure fired way to losses.

The secret to successful investing is not to constantly act, but to do close to nothing. How do I know? Well, that's how I managed to retire at age 47. I was lucky enough to inherit a small fortune at age 30. It was sufficiently large to grow into a decent fortune, and it grew to this size by virtue of my inactivity. I did absolutely nothing until two years ago when I sent the inheritance on to my children.

I was also lucky with a hose in Norway that I bought back in 2004. I sold it at the very top of the housing bubble that popped in 2016. The proceeds were enough to cover my retirement.

The trick to successful investing is inactivity coupled with an understanding of when to act, and what to do. It's that simple. The assets we can choose from are either stocks, bonds, real estate or gold. There are other assets of course, but they are on closer inspection only variations on these four assets. Silver and crypto are for instance variations on gold. Options are variations on stocks, etc.

The right time to act is when an asset class becomes expensive relative to another. This happens once in so many years or decades. Trading every day is therefore a meaningless activity. I made a trade every decade or so. That's how I grew my small fortune into a sizable one. However, no-one needs a small fortune to get in on this. Anyone with any savings can do it, and the exact details of what to look for is available in my free book on the subject.

By Jessie Eastland - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link