The Investing for Beginners Podcast - Your Path to Financial Freedom

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:36                     All right folks. We’ll welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 102 tonight. Andrew and I are going to answer a couple of listener questions we got recently. They were really, really good questions. They were really good questions and it had some great potential for us to talk about some things that we maybe don’t always get to talk about. So Andrew and I thought that there would be a lot of fun for us to talk about. You guys could take away some great stuff from those as well. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and read the first question to us. Andrew:                              01:05                     Yeah, sounds good. So this is from Sam, Sam s he says, Hey Andrew and Dave, I listened to your guys’ podcasts in September, 2018 have been caught up for a while. Love the content that you put out every week. Also, I’ve been subscribed to the Eletter since December, 2018 and love the and say I get from that as well. Thank you. I can’t thank you enough for helping me take that leap into the wild, the unknowns or the stock market and help me see what a valuable tool it can be to reach financial security. Andrew:                              01:33                     I love that. Just as a side note, okay, he’s got two questions. First one, let’s, let’s tackle that one first. He says this first one deals with thoroughly reading the 10 K I have a business background so I am lucky enough to be able to understand income statements, balance sheets and most of the 10 k but when it comes to the risks portion of the 10 k how do you decipher which ris...

Announcer:                        00:00                     Your tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern too decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:35                     All right folks, welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 101 tonight. Andrew and I are going to talk about a listener letter that we got, and it is a fantastic letter, and she has a great questions, and so Andrew and I wanted to just kind of read through her letter and then just answer those questions for her on the air. So I thought this would be a lot of fun. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and start talking about the letter and then we’ll just do our little back and forth thing. Andrew:                              01:02                     Yeah, I love it. That’s a great letter. This is from Susan G so she starts off. Dear Andrew, I’m on episode 16 of the podcast and I’ve learned more about finance from your program than I did in my years. At B school in the late seventies, Wharton for two years, then decided to switch to a psych degree on the liberal arts side. Wow. That’s quite a compliment. Thank you. I got serious about investing when I returned full time to work in 2009, um, basically built up a four one k summarizing here, uh, until from 2009 to 2017. Okay. And then stopped building out the 401k. Andrew:                              01:45                     She says I am 61 single and only about a third of the way to where I need to be to even have a modest retirement. I am currently on disability and I’m not sure what his next workwise. So 370 k 401k 62 K and Roth Ira, a hundred k and cash can value investing be part of my solution for current or future and come it appeals to me is consistent with the process part of my brain. Um, maybe, uh,

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners lead by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers. Your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:35                     All right folks, we’ll welcome to the Investing for Beginners podcast. This will be our podcast episode 100 Ooh; we made it. That’s awesome. All right, so today we’re going to talk about the basics of spinoffs and acquisitions, and we’re going to, we’ve talked a lot about these from the aspect of the company buying, but today we’re going to kind of go over some generalities of the other side. So the company that’s being acquired or spun off. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and take us off. I know we have a listener question regarding this as well as some are our general thoughts on this. Andrew:                              01:12                     Yeah, so that fits right in and yeah, episode 100 let’s do something not special at all and just treat it like any other episode. I’m down for that. Had a question from a  listener to the podcast, and this is about acquisitions. So Hi Andrew. Just started listening to your podcast and the impulsively dove into the stock market through the Robin Hood and Mobile App. Andrew:                              01:35                     We should slap this person on the wrist. I’m cautiously putting it in a mere $600 into a variety of stocks. I was wondering if you could cover how a company’s stock gets affected if they get acquired by a larger company. Is it a good time to buy when that happens? Is it the worst time to buy? So something that you know we can cover and then we’ll try to keep it short because these things can be very, very complicated. But it’s important to know just as a gen...

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:36                     All right folks, welcome to the Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 99 tonight we are going to talk about a stock that Andrew recently had some bad walk with and has sold. And we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the lessons that he learned from his investment with this company, including things like activist investors, divestitures and board resignations, and how those can affect what happens with a stock. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and tell us about the company and a little bit about your experience. Andrew:                              01:08                     Yeah, sure. So I think when you talk about stock picks from the past, it’s much more useful to talk about your mistakes rather than your successes. Um, we can, we can all buy stock. I can go out for a multitude of reasons, but you know, if you can look at how you kinda messed up and maybe you can avoid that in the future and maybe some people can kind of recognize a situation like this and maybe stay clear or in the case of, of my, like my personal kind of experience with this and the way that maybe I wish I would have played it is I would have waited longer to, to get into this stock because it was clear that the fallout from the stock hadn’t completely finished. And so I’m keeping this stock on my radar and I’m watching to see how it progresses. Andrew:                              02:04                     I’ll talk a little bit more about the details as we go along here, but it’s one of those where I would have wished for the dust to settle kind of a thing before, before I bought and one that’s a hold it. So it was by no means like a portfolio killer. I lost maybe 25 to 30% think a lot. So I’ve definitely had gains that have more than made up for that. But, uh, it’s still something that you still want to examine your mistakes and try them group fro...

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern, to decode industry jargon. Silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers. Your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:36                     All right folks, we’ll welcome to the Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode ninety-eight. Tonight we’re going to talk about why you shouldn’t be a lone wolf investor. And I’m going to have Andrew kind of take us from there. All Right, Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and chat. Andrew:                              00:50                     Yeah, I love it. So maybe I’m recording this because this is something I need to tell myself more than anything else. Having people around and having them influence your life can do a lot of things for you. Very, very well. They say the five people closest to you are the most important because they impact how you live your life and the big, big way. So I, I kind of present this topic and this idea based on some personal context. I guess I didn’t mean to get like super personal, but there’s a saying that as you get close to the turn of a decade you start to make big moves, right? So we’re here close to the end of 2020 and that full decade before. Andrew:                              01:41                     So it’s time to make some big moves, and we’re going to talk about some big ideas and the show. So when I think about what got me here and I kind of reflect on my past and the journey I’ve taken, and even this podcast where we’re at 98 episodes approaching a hundred here, and we have way more people than I thought, whatever, listening and tune in. It’s been incredible. We get tons of feedback, tons of emails, and that’s been such a wild ride. But you know, it’s funny to think about how it all started then and maybe how, if it weren’t for the people that were placed in at least my life, how it when I’ve gotten this far. So when I think about investing personal finance,

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginning led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern. To decode industry jargon. Silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers. Your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:36                     All right folks, we’ll welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 97. Tonight Andrew and I are going to talk about wisdom, really unwise financial decisions. We’ve put together a list of some things that you should not do if you want to be wise with your money. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and talk about our first item, then we’ll kind of go down the list. Andrew:                              00:59                     Yeah, sounds good. Making this list was fun, wasn’t it? It was fun because I’m guilty of these just as much as anybody else. I don’t like to think that. I don’t like to imply that I’m just like the super wealthy dude that doesn’t make any mistakes. But you know, I think we can kind of learn from other people sometimes. Maybe learn from ourselves sometimes and we can do some things with our money that, uh, you know, when it becomes a money pay, we don’t have to fall into those traps. So I think a huge one, and by the way, I think a lot of these are pretty controversial. I think this one’s controversial too, but credit cards. So my thing with credit cards is obviously my stance is I’m the super no debt guy, only by, you know, I only want stocks that don’t have a lot of debt. Andrew:                              01:52                     I think that is the devil, the borrower, slave, borrower’s slave to the lender, you know, all these sorts of things when it comes to debt. However, I also like to think that I’m brilliant one. A lot of the times I’m not. So even with my

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginning led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern too decode industry jargon, silence, crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers. Your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:36                     All right folks, we’ll welcome to be Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 96. I am back this week after missing last week. I’m sorry guys, but I had pneumonia and Andrew was kind enough to help me out so I didn’t have that coughing, hacking everybody’s ears, uh, during the, during the episode, so I appreciate it. Andrew, take it over for me last week tonight we’re going to talk about some questions from our listeners. We got another great batch of questions and a couple of testimonials there. We thought we’d read those to you guys on air and inner and I can go back and forth and answer some questions. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and read the first one to it and we’ll start talking. Andrew:                              01:16                     Yeah, sounds good. So this one’s a testimonial. I thought it was cool and inspiring because it shows you just how far you can go. Um, when you really put your mind to it. I parse it down a bit, but basically, um, the email goes, Andrew, I just sign up for email lists. I started listening to your investing for beginners podcast about two weeks ago. I appreciate the work that you and Dave are putting into it. After listening to a couple episodes, I finally dove into actually investing on my own of wanting to do it for years, but was overwhelmed thanks to your podcast. I took the leap a leap on Monday last week and set up an account through Robin Hood due to the advantage of learning that a low cost since beginning of this week, I’ll be gone a reading through 10 k’s and learning so much about companies. Andrew:                             

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginning led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern, to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now. Andrew:                              00:36                     Welcome to the Investing for Beginners. episode 95. Today Dave is under the weather so it’s just going to be me, but we have a guest today. His name is Kenny Robinson and I’m really excited to have him on. Kenny’s a fulltime diversified investor. You might have heard about him from his youtube channel called the Kenny Robinson channel and he’s got a lot of cool things I’ve, I’ve checked out several of his videos is I’m really excited to get perspective, particularly around dividends and dividend ETFs. A, if you’ve been listening to the show at any length of time, you know how excited I get about dividends and I think we can have a really fun conversation. So Kenny, thanks for coming on and joining us today. Kenny:                                  01:21                     Yeah, I’m, I’m very excited to be here on the podcast and, uh, hopefully we can definitely talk about some excellent ETFs and dividends in general. So yeah, let’s, let’s do it. Andrew:                              01:32                     All right. Let’s start, you know, you are fulltime diversify the investors. So what does that mean to you? I know we talked a little bit off the air and you said you do some investing outside of dividend ETFs. So, uh, what does that mean as far as the whole circle of kind of what you do with your investments? Kenny:                                  01:53             &nbs...

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew Sather and Dave Ahern to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:36                     All right folks, we’ll welcome to the Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 93 tonight we’re going to discuss it. Buy and sell rules. Well actually we’re going to discuss buy rules. We recently got a great listener email that wanted to chime in on his ideas of some by rules. Andrew and I have discussed those several times in a podcast. Episode 32 we discussed buy and sell rules and that was really popular. And then we also touched on those as well with Braden in episode 88 and so we’ve got this great listener email that I mentioned and we wanted to talk about his bye bye rules. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and read the first by rule and then we can talk about it a little bit. Andrew:                              01:21                     Yeah, sure. So obviously super inspiring. I think it’s really cool when people who are listening to our stuff take it and run with it. I’ve said that before. So the first viral that, um, this is Daniel f first viral that Daniel, um, shared with us is it must score under 250 on the Vti and must file a readable tank k that demonstrates good finances that indicate I am getting a bargain. Do you agree or disagree? I definitely agree. Yeah, me too. That one’s easy. Next, Dave:                                    01:57                     next a must pay a dividend and allowed directly reinvestment a drip grows as investment. Well that’s kind of a no brainer. Yeah, it’s got to pay a dividend and it’s got allowed direct reinvestment cause that’s how we grow our wealth.

Dave:                                    00:00:36               All right folks, well welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. Tonight we have a very, very special guest with us. One of my favorite writer, thinkers and investors. His name is Vitaly Katsenelson and he is the CEO of the IMA firm based out of Colorado and he has a fantastic blog. It is one of my favorites that really, really has helped me learn and grow so incredibly much. It’s called the Contrarian Edge. If you do not already subscribed to it, you need to, it’s fantastic. So without any further ado, I’m going to go ahead and get us started that you don’t want to hear me talk. We want to hear Vitaly talk. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and ask the first question and we can go ahead and chat a little bit. Andrew:                              00:01:15               Yeah, thanks Vitaliy, for joining us. And, I’m also a big fan. I’m currently, it was actually good timing because I’m in the middle of reading your Sideways Markets book. Just so happened to be reading that when I reached out to see if you want to do an interview. We’re obviously a show that’s very focused on beginners and we like to talk about value investing and trying to buy stocks– buying low, selling high. So when you think, how do you think about value investing because that’s one of the things that you like to talk about. You’re a value investor, you’d like to think about investing. So do you approach the actual topic of value of investing differently? Do you see it as like a numbers game? Do you see it as maybe a mixture of both? How would you go about approaching the idea on the topic of value investing? Vitaliy:                                  00:02:09               Well, first of all, Dave and Andrew, thank you very much for having me. I’m looking forward to this. All right. I think value investing is usually misunderstood. And let me explain why. Ben Graham wrote the Bible of value investing The Intelligent Investor and when most people read this book, they get would they get out of this? They get this recipe and the recipe is basically this: buy cheap stocks. And I think they get the wrong message out of this though. The recipe is part of the book. The bigger message of the book is really, it’s a value investment philosophy. It’s something I go through in my six commandments. But basically value investing is a philosophy where you say, and let me just go through a few of those six commandments. Stocks are not piece of paper their businesses.

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew and Dave, too decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers. Your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:35                     All right folks, well welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 92, tonight Andrew and I are going to read some listener questions and take a few minutes to answer those. This is going to be kind of a refresher episode on some basics, so things that we haven’t talked about a while. I wanted to give everybody kind of a refresher on some of those and also to help some people that are just joining the podcast now that might feel like they might be a little bit overwhelmed. Dave:                                    01:01                     So I thought we thought this would be a great time to talk a little bit about some, some of the old basics because that’s always the foundation for everything you ever want to do. So with the first one, Andrew, you’re going to go ahead and read the first question and then we’ll talk a little bit about that. Andrew:                              01:17                     Yeah. Uh, and I’ll also add the disclaimer if you’re brand new and this is something where you’re an absolute beginner and you’re looking to get some really basic stuff. Obviously listen continuously in this episode, but we also have a couple of series that we’ve done that are basically targeted towards people who, you know, might not know anything about investing, personal finance or any of those sorts of things. So starting on the episode for the three, we have what we called back to the basics and that’s a five part series, getting you an introduction on stocks, Wall Street, other sorts of investments, why investing works, how it works. Well,

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew and Dave to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion, and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:35                     Welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast, this is episode 91. Andrew and I are going to take a moment and answer listener questions. We’ve got some that are some great questions that we’ve had in our bank, and we wanted to take a few moments and answer those for you guys. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and read it. The first question? Andrew:                              00:55                     Yes sir. So this is a great question from Michael B. we’re going to split it up because there are two different questions here. So let’s tackle this first one. Hi Andrew. I used your VTI every week. I love it. I’m here in Canada. The banks are the most common stock to rise steadily and had decent dividends, but because of their equity, they would never score well in the VTI. I know you aren’t a big fan of financial institutions, but Dave is, and I could care less either way, but based on trends in Canada, most banks are still selling that less than $100 a share which based on their EPS increasing consistently in the dividends increasing regularly. Andrew:                              01:36                     I want to jump on the bandwagon now. Braden mentioned the banks and both of his last interviews with you too. I don’t know which valuations I need to focus on with a company that makes the most money. The higher their debt is. Thirteen of Canada’s dividend aristocrats are financial institutions, nine of which are banks. I’m not sure if I’m chasing my tail here, trying to convince myself they’re a good buy or not, but I do rely heavily on your VTI spreadsheet because it does take a lo...

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew and Dave to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion, and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers, your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:35                     All right folks, we’ll welcome to Investing for Beginners podcast. This is episode 90. Tonight we have a special guest back from a very popular episode 38. We have a full time a micro cap investor who is the CO-founder of Geoinvesting.com, and he’s going to talk to us about his special brand of investing, and he’s a really smart dude, and he’s got some great insights for us. So why don’t we go ahead and start chatting a little bit about what you wanted to talk about tonight Maj. Maj:                                       01:04                     Yeah. I appreciate the opportunity, and I want to congratulate you on the success you’re having with your podcast. It’s, I think we’ve been over a year since we chatted and it’s really good to see your kind long educating investors, and young investors and how to navigate the market and I appreciate that. Andrew:                              01:22                     Yeah, thank you. We talked off the air before we started to record this, how we just said a million dollars today, so I’m going to be popping a bottle of champagne after this. Maj:                                      

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew and Dave to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion, and help you overcome the emotions by looking at the number, your path to financial freedom starts now. Dave:                                    00:36                     Welcome to the podcast, this is episode 89. Tonight Andrew and I are going to do a little more of a deep dive into the 10 K, and that’s one of our favorite things to talk about. I know I like to geek out about 10 ks and so does Andrew, so we’re going to talk a little bit more about them. So Andrew, why don’t you go ahead and start us off there. Big Guy. Andrew:                              00:56                     Yeah, sounds good. So 10 k, another way of saying a company’s annual report, this is the document that every company, every public company is required to file. And this is where you will find all of the information about accompany. We’ve talked about some of the important ratios and some of the important metrics that you’ll find on there, some of the important numbers. So I think today maybe we talk a little bit more about some of the qualitative side. I’ve been reading a lot of 10 k’s lately and have seen some similarities, some, some things that have stuck out and you know, based on some of the previous discussions we’ve had the last couple episodes, you know, on the last episode with Braden. Andrew:                              01:42                     Now we’re talking about, trying to find a qualitative factor and how that, how that helps you make a decision on whether you want to buy a stock a talked about kind of this whole idea of buying stocks with products that are either commodity products or a versus maybe one where a product is priced at a premium. Maybe it’s a value add and the differences there.

Announcer:                        00:00                     You’re tuned in to the Investing for Beginners podcast. Finally, step by step premium investment guidance for beginners led by Andrew and Dave to decode industry jargon, silence crippling confusion, and help you overcome emotions by looking at the numbers. Your path to financial freedom starts now. Andrew:                              00:36                     All right, so we have Braden Dennis on from Stratosphere Investing.com, remember Braden have had. He’s basically Canada stocks expert, so I’ve had him on the show before. We had a good discussion about FANG stocks and some of the evaluations that he was seen with Canadian stocks at the time. We also had some listener questions about Canadian stocks that he was gracious enough to answer and we shared some of those on the podcast as well. Andrew:                              01:04                     And now, you know, we’re trying to a, make this episode as something where it can be a complete star, the guy for some of someone who’s in Canada looking to invest in Canadian stocks, looking to invest in the Canadian market and B, for those listeners who aren’t Canadian, we’re going to dig in maybe at the end if we have time. Uh, I definitely want to dig into at least a couple of Braden’s buy and sell rules when it comes to buying stocks. I think there’s some good discussion in there and a lot of it aligns with a lot of the things that I like to teach and the things that I think people should look for when they’re buying stocks. So that can definitely give insight for people kind of seeing different ways that maybe people approach stocks and how it can be similar and how it can be different. So Braden. Thanks for coming on today. Braden:                                01:58                     Hey Andrew. Yeah, no, it’s a pleasure to be here. It’s been quite, quite a ride since I started investing and reach out to you several years back now and uh, yeah, no, I do feel like things have come so far and I’m going to continue to