Read an Excerpt
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My Pursuit of
Enduring Prosperity
I was born in Tehran at the height of the war with Iraq, in 1987. One year later, my mother left the country for the Netherlands, where she already had family members who had made the same move several months earlier. My father wasn't allowed to leave the country during a war, so my mother had to make the trip alone. When she arrived at the Dutch immigration services, she had no money and just one suitcase; that was all. My father arrived in 1990 without any possessions. He had needed to travel by land, which took him nearly two months. It sounds dramatic, but it's the story of millions of people around the world. If you're living in the United States, the land of immigrants, your parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents probably came to the country under similar circumstances.
Everyone who leaves their birth country out of necessity needs to start from nothing. My parents had to get educated again, learn a new language, adapt to a different culture, build a social life, and build a better future for themselves, my brother, and me. For as long as I can remember, our family lived paycheck to paycheck; we were up to our necks in debt. In our house, everything revolved around money, or rather the lack of it.
My parents did their best to raise us comfortably, but they always argued about the price of everything, from groceries to clothes. Despite our limited means, my brother and I never went to bed hungry and even had a Nintendo gaming console. But somehow, I felt guilty. Like I was the cause of their financial problems. Even though I didn't know the exact details of the financial struggles of my parents, I could sense the constant tension in the house. I was afraid of losing everything we had. A recurring thought of mine was If they didn't have me, they wouldn't have to spend all this money and they would not argue. I realize now these were the thoughts of an overly responsible child. But my childhood did instill a sense of urgency in me. I was determined to become rich so we wouldn't have to live that way anymore.
That's what led me to pursue business and finance in college. I remember how my classmates struggled mightily choosing the right major. To me, it wasn't even a question. My only goal was to make a lot of money. And I believed that having a business degree was the highest-probability path to my goal.
In 2007, when I was still in college, I got a job at ING, a Dutch multinational bank. ING was on an international tear at the time, with offices across the globe. This was before the global financial crisis, and the industry was a lot less regulated than it is now. In the evenings I worked at ING, initially in the personal banking division, where I helped clients with mundane tasks like requesting credit cards or applying for personal loans. After three months of selling a lot of credit cards to clients, I was offered a position as mutual funds adviser in the investing division. It was a dream come true. In my teens, I had loved the world of finance that was glorified in movies like Wall Street and Boiler Room. When I received that opportunity, I imagined myself selling stocks on the phone just like Charlie Sheen's character, Bud Fox, in Wall Street. I didn't sell stocks of individual companies like Bud did, but I sold mutual funds, baskets of stocks, which was close enough for me. I felt like a stockbroker.
It was astonishingly easy to become an adviser in the Dutch financial services industry at the time. I participated in a three-week training program, and I was good to go. My assignment was simple: call existing clients who already invested in other financial products and persuade them to invest money in the latest mutual funds that the bank had introduced. The pitch was glorious, and calling clients was a great experience. This was a time when people actually loved talking to someone at their bank, when people still trusted bankers.
Looking back, however, I can't help but think, How on earth could a twenty-year-old kid with a three-week training program advise clients about what they should invest in? It was all about profit. The bank would consistently release new mutual funds with specific themes like sustainable energy, emerging markets, technology, you name it. A mutual fund is a basket of stocks that are picked by a fund manager. When you invest in these funds, you piggyback on the potential success of the fund manager. The goal was to sign up as many investors as we could, because the bank earned a fee on the money clients would invest. And signing up clients was easy, because who can resist the promise of earning money without working for it? Just invest money in a fund and wait till you get rich.
After my first few deals, I thought I was an investing genius. I talked about my work with everyone: my family, friends, fellow students, professors. I even bought shares of ING with the money I made at the bank. Immediately after I bought the stock, I was rubbing my hands together, waiting to get rich myself. I bought the stock for around $27. But one year later, ING Direct was trading around $3. I had started investing at the height of the housing market bubble that caused the financial crisis of 2008-9. I felt sick to my stomach when I lost that much money. It was a feeling that haunted me for years.
While I didn't sell at the bottom, I held on to the stock until 2011, when I finally couldn't take the emotional roller coaster anymore and sold it at around $11 a share. I had lost 60 percent of my money in four years. Meanwhile, the broader market had already recovered its losses and was even higher than before the financial crisis. While I invested only around $2,000, losing more than half of what you have hurts no matter what the dollar amount is. As if the pain of growing up with financial struggles weren't enough, I got burned in the stock market too. Investing was too hard. Like everyone who loses money in the stock market, I thought it was for rich people or Wall Street bankers with three-piece suits. Even though I had a master's degree in business administration and specialized in finance by that time, I had no confidence in building wealth through the stock market. I had given up the day I sold my stock.
The truth is we can't afford to not invest. Everyday life is getting more expensive. The prices of groceries, gas, insurance, energy, and almost everything else are going up. Many people can't afford to buy a house. What's worse, not all wages are keeping up with inflation. In reality, your wealth is either stagnating or decreasing every year . . . unless you own assets. The graph on the next page shows what inflation does to your cash over time. Between 1980 and 2022, inflation averaged 3.06 percent a year in the U.S. (that includes the high inflation of 2021 and 2022).
In comparison, the market (when I talk about "the market," I am always referring to the S&P 500 index, which contains the five hundred largest publicly traded U.S. companies) achieved an 11.44 percent average annual return since 1980. Returns since the 1928 inception of the S&P 500 have been roughly 10 percent per year. If we correct that for inflation, the market returned 8.38 percent a year. It doesn't sound like a lot. But look at the alternative, which is to stay in cash.
For cash holders, this is an ugly picture. Imagine you had put $1,000 under your mattress in 1980. Forty-two years later, in 2022, that money would have a real value of $240. But if you had invested that money into the S&P 500 index, you would have a real (inflation-adjusted) return of $29,632.50. In that time period, we've experienced wars, recessions, natural disasters, political tension, stock market bubbles, interest rate increases, and a severe financial crisis. We also went through a global pandemic, which caused nearly seven million fatalities along with a range of secondary problems like double-digit inflation, supply-chain issues, and a labor shortage. And all the while, asset prices went up. The problem is that not everyone owns assets. That causes the wealth gap.
Pretty much every country across the globe, no matter how developed, has a problem with rising inequality. For example, the wealthiest and most prosperous nation in the world, America, has seen the wealth gap between its richest and poorest families double from 1989 to 2016.
It's no wonder economic inequality has captured the attention of politicians and economists for the past few decades. But despite this, not much has changed, because the majority of people are focusing on increasing their salaries. While earning more might give you immediate financial relief, it's not the path to long-term wealth. Data show that for the 99 percent of taxpayers making less than $500,000, salaries and wages account for 75 percent of their income. For millionaires, their salaries only account for 15 percent to 50 percent of their income.
So here's what we know about getting rich: invest your money in reliable assets, and let it grow over time. It sounds so easy, and yet it's one of the hardest things to accomplish in life. Because we don't just want to get rich at all costs. We want more money, but we also want peace of mind at the same time. Those two things don't always go together. You can have so much money you never have to worry about paying the bills and still be terrorized by anxiety about losing that money.
We should prosper financially and mentally. When your finances are solid while your mind is peaceful, that's true wealth. When you no longer solely rely on working to earn money, when your money compounds on its own in the stock market, that's when you can finally liberate yourself from the trap of exchanging your time for money.
While the economy keeps growing despite cataclysmic events and, as a result, the market keeps going up, there are a few challenges when it comes to successful long-term investing.
Challenge #1: Volatility
Many of us recognize that having exposure to the stock market is a good way to build wealth. The problem is that investing in stocks is difficult because the market is so volatile. Prices constantly go up and down, which plays into two powerful human emotions: fear and greed. We feel fear when the market is going down. We get greedy when the markets start going up and feel the urge to pour our life savings into the market at once.
This dynamic has been magnified in public markets since 2020. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, trading stocks has become more popular than ever. In 2011, individual investors made up a little over 10 percent of total trading volumes in the stock market. By the first quarter of 2021, it was nearly 25 percent.
But markets have been more treachero's. One way to measure volatility is by assessing how often the S&P 500 makes at least a 1 percent move in either direction within a single day. In 2022, the frequency of such swings for the S&P 500 had been more than 87 percent of trading days, a rate previously observed only during the height of the global financial crisis of 2008. Another measure, the CBOE Volatility Index (or VIX), which measures the market's expectation of near-term volatility, has remained elevated from February 2020 all the way through early 2023.
All of this is to say: volatility is high, which makes the market seem erratic. If you try to react to the daily changes in stock prices, either you will lose money or you will stay on the sidelines. You will be successful if you maintain composure in spite of the fluctuating nature of the market.
Challenge #2: Consistency
Picking the right investment strategy is hard. You have literally hundreds of thousands of options to invest your money. Most stockbrokers offer the ability to buy stocks and commodities from all over the world. As I'm writing this, there are more than fifty-nine thousand companies worldwide that you can invest in. Then there are countless other investment vehicles, like ETFs, mutual funds, bonds, and commodities such as gold, silver, copper, and cryptocurrencies.
What's more, there are thousands of "experts" who predict all kinds of events in the economy. There are people on social media who have been warning for a decade of a total collapse of the dollar. Our world is getting faster, louder, and more chaotic, which is only overwhelming us. We can't distinguish what matters from what doesn't and what's true from what's not.
And if we do try to invest in something, we're distracted by the next best thing that comes our way. We try too many different types of strategies, which prevents us from ever being consistent. Successful investing comes down to tuning out irrelevant information, having the strength to stick to your strategy, and resisting the urge to follow other opportunities.
Challenge #3: Prior Losses
Losing money in the stock market is common. Studies that look into the success rates of those individual investors who are highly active show that only between 1 percent and 3 percent make money in the short term. It's hard to imagine that up to 99 percent of all traders lose money, but I'm not surprised. Every person I've spoken to who ever tried their hand at buying and selling stocks has lost money.
Trading stocks for short-term profit always sounds great (who doesn't want to make money with a few clicks on their stock-trading app?), but by the time people find out the odds are stacked against them, they have probably already lost enough money that they are fed up with stocks.
What about the pros? About 80 percent of professional money managers underperform the S&P 500 index. This is why so many people have a bad experience with investing. The odds are you've lost money by investing too. And I know from personal experience that when you get burned in the market, you would rather stay away. But you also realize you're missing out on free money. That's essentially what investing in stocks comes down to: putting your money into the market and waiting until you get rich.
Why Managing Your Emotions Is the
Key to Investing Success
I always believed that investing was an intellectual puzzle. I thought, If only I had the right formula, as if investing were like a math equation you could solve. I was not the only one. In the year 2021 alone, more than eighty million books were sold in the business and money category. Many of these books cover the rational aspects of investing. They teach you a methodology for investing. This is what makes so many of us think that investing is just a matter of learning how to do it from a practical point of view. The truth is that professionals know that investing is not about theory or knowledge; it's about managing your emotions.
