My Mt. Rushmore of Investing

A common segment in talk sports shows is the “Mt. Rushmore” segment. Who is on your Mt. Rushmore of Los Angeles players? Kobe, Magic, and Kareem are all a lock, but what about the last spot? That last spot is where the hosts can get upwards of 15 minutes back and forth.

So who is on my Mt. Rushmore of investing? Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Jack Bogel, and Morgan Housel. The common thread that puts them on my Mt. Rushmore is the lessons that I’ve learned from them. They aren’t on my Mt. Rushmore because of their excellent investment returns, even though they do hit that checkbox, but for the lessons around investing and life, they’ve taught me. 

Warren Buffett

How could I leave him off the list? That would be like leaving off Michael Jordan from your basketball Mt. Rushmore. He has been tapped as the pop culture figure that carries the investing torch and it would be harder to find a better person to hold this responsibility. He started to buy stocks at age 11 and hasn’t stopped since.

In my opinion, I learned the first rule of investing from Buffett. The most important factor in investing is time. There is a quote that circles around saying, “Warren Buffett has made 99.7% of his money after the age of 52.” 

The long-term time horizon I have on my investments also translates to my general outlook on life. Does getting a 12/30 on a 7th grade math quiz matter in the long-term aspect of my life? Not at all! I’m hoping that I’ve got another 60-70 years of life left and I do my best not to be bothered by the minor day to day annoyances. Buffett believes the same about the companies he adds to his portfolio. If a company has their earnings come in below estimates, which are decided by wall street analysts, it doesn’t make him flinch. He invests in companies for decades in the future. 

Charlie Munger

Charlie has been partners with Warren Buffett for over 60 years now. It wouldn’t be right to have Buffett on this without having Munger. Despite Buffett being the one getting the press, Munger has been at Berkshire for the ride.

His gruff personality is charming to some in the investing community. He isn’t a man of many words, and when he does speak, he doesn’t hold back. There is an Instagram page that my friend showed me with a collection of his best quotes. One of my favorite quotes from him is on reading.

“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren reads–and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”

Munger has no fat on his statements. He cuts to the chase and he calls it how it is. He has respect for decent humans and promotes behavior I value. 

Jack Bogle

Jack founded Vanguard in 1974 and is the father of index funds. He made passive investing available to the public and is now the default investment choice. Time after time studies proves that it is nearly impossible to beat the market. If the investor makes their investment the market return, they’ll actually do better than people who are actively trying to beat the market. 

Even though index funds are accepted by the investor community as a go-to, there was push back when Bogle initially set it up. Now, I can’t even imagine how much wealth has been created from people having their investments in index funds. Bogle opened the door of investing to hundreds of millions of people. 

At Vanguard, they also continued to push to keep fees as low as possible. For this reason, that is where I opened my first brokerage account and I don’t plan on closing it anytime soon. 

Morgan Housel

His writing was the one that inspired me to start my own blog. He has the superpower of providing a compelling perspective on almost any situation. He has a tremendous range with his writing and his ability to relate it back to investor behavior.

His book, The Psychology of Money, is the book that I’ve recommended the most to others. There are timeless stories about how people behave with their money. A person doesn’t need to have an interest in investing to gain insights and enjoyment from this book and his overall writing. 

He is able to put complex ideas into plain English, which is something that I’m actively trying to work towards. He is also a master at investing analogies. Here is one of my favorites where he compares tree growth to companies.

“Most young tree saplings spend their early decades under the shade of their mother’s canopy. Limited sunlight means they grow slowly. Slow growth leads to dense, hardwood. But something interesting happens if you plant a tree in an open field: free from the shade of bigger trees, the sapling gorges on sunlight and grows fast. Fast growth leads to soft, airy wood that didn’t have time to densify. And soft, airy wood is a breeding ground for fungus, disease, and ultimately a short life. ‘A tree that grows quickly rots quickly and therefore never has a chance to grow old,’ forester Peter Wohlleben writes.

Which is exactly how it works in business and investing, isn’t it?

There’s a graveyard of companies and investors who tried to grow too fast, attempting to reap a decade’s worth of rewards in a year or less, learning the hard way that capitalism doesn’t like it when you try to use a cheat code. Chamath once put it: ‘The faster you build it, that is the half life. It will get destroyed in the same amount of time.’”

This passage was too exceptional not to give you full context. 

All 4 of these people have given me many insights that have helped me guide my life decisions. I hope that I can take my lessons learned from them and pass them along to others. 

Peace and Love.