The Shark Investor is a personal finance book written to help individual investors discover the next NVIDIA, Apple, and Facebook by leveraging the same principles utilized by “Shark Tank” investors. While the “Shark Tank” TV show focuses on venture capital-like investments in privately-held startups, The Shark Investor teaches that much of the investment wisdom distilled on “Shark Tank” can be utilized in public-market stock picking.
Thinking like a Venture Capitalist is where The Shark Investor gets started. The book explores the difficulty of beating the market averages, how to engage in proper asset allocation, and more. The Shark Investor serves as a one-stop shop for how to analyze and buy winning individual stocks, as well as discover market-beating equity ETFs.
Warren Buffett once said (and I’m paraphrasing a bit), “It’s a very powerful instinct to try and get rich quickly, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out how to do it.” The “Oracle of Omaha” said it well: everyone wants to get rich, and people sure would love to get rich overnight. How many of the books you see in a bookstore investment section are focused on strategies that claim to create instant wealth?
In a landmark behavioral finance study, University of California professors Brad Barber and Terrance Odean found that investor behavior often stands in the way of successful investing. Their research uncovered a strong “Disposition Effect;” that is the tendency for investors to sell winners quickly and hold onto losers. While it is possible that a laggard eventually turns into a winner (which we’ll discuss soon), I have found countless investors that will interminably hold onto securities that have lost 60% to 90% of their value.
According to a Forbes magazine article, two Santa Clara University professors who engaged in a study of traders using Technical Analysis found the investors employing the method had lower performance, on average: approximately 50 basis points (0.5%) per month in raw returns from portfolio selection decisions and 20 basis points (0.2%) from additional transaction costs.
Be prepared for frustration! Along with many worthwhile endeavors in life, trying to make money in the stock market can be challenging. We all know Murphy’s Law– often abbreviated as “If anything can go wrong, it will.” The pursuit of stock market riches isn’t exempt from the peculiar ubiquity and gravity of this law.
Part of the seduction process was Neumann’s insistence that WeWork was a technology company. In a 2019 article titled “No, WeWork Isn’t a Tech Company. Here’s Why That Matters,” Harvard Business Review noted WeWork used the word “technology” 110 times in its IPO prospectus. Thankfully, the potential IPO buy side customers– mutual funds and hedge funds– sniffed out that they were getting duped, and put the breaks on assisting WeWork in selling itself to the public.
Blackberry’s stock, which listed on the Nasdaq in 1999, finished its first trading day at $1.92. By 2008, shares had climbed to a glorious perch of $139.00. This was a lovely nine-year run for investors, but unfortunately Steve Jobs decided to see if Apple could make inroads in the mobile phone space with its touch screen powered iPhone. Do we know the story from here? Disruptors eventually get disrupted. This is why we must repeat Peter Lynch’s advice that: “Keeping up with a company in which you own stock is like playing an endless stud-poker hand.”
"The Shark Investor" is an online course where students receive live instruction from the book author, Michael Stern. We'll learn how to hunt for the next NVIDIA, Amazon, and Chipotle as a "Shark" investor; cover the top Dos and Don'ts for individual stock picking; reveal how to find market-beating ETFs; define proper Asset Allocation; and elucidate the wisdom of investment gurus Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett, and much, much more!