May 31, 2020

Recently, I came across a person who told me that it is impossible to learn investing in 15 hours. I thought that was pretty interesting because I teach people how to master investing in 15 hours.

So let’s backtrack… I was on a call with an accounting professional and his name was Bob. Bob learned accounting and mastered accounting for the last 20 years. He worked in multiple countries and big corporations around the world.

Bob has seen a lot of people claiming they master the stock market so he developed a sense of distrust in coaching programs (especially get rich quick schemes). When Bob got on a phone with me and learned about Investing Accelerator, Bob couldn’t comprehend how it is possible to learn investing in 15 hours when he spent his life studying, experimenting and losing money when it comes to investing in the market. So, how is it possible?


90% correct transcript:

So recently I came across something pretty interesting. A subscriber told me that it is impossible, Eric, to master investing within 15 hours. And then he said, I have spent years studying investing. You know, I've been looking at the markets, he is a CPA, I'm a CPA as well and it is not possible to master investing within 15 hours. Okay. He knows.

So before we start, I just want to celebrate another success story within investing accelerator where Mike in Indiana took a profits of 108% from ABT where he sold half of his position. Now Mike is the 7th students within investing accelerator to make over a hundred percent gain and ABT is his second investment. So after joining investing accelerator for two months, Mike masters all the concepts within the program and he invested in multiple companies. So two of these companies have already made over a hundred percent for him. And right now he's also making around 41% from Disney as we speak. So congratulations to Mike and I look forward to your next investments as well. So that's why I want to make this video for you. So the question is, you know, let's, let's say this person is Bob and Bob learned accounting when he is in school and he mastered accounting for over 20 years.

He worked in multiple countries, he worked in big corporations in us and Asia and blob has seen a lot of people are YouTube claiming that they have mastered investing the stock markets. And you know, Bob has learned to develop a sense of distrust in investing. You know, it's not possible to beat the markets because that's what a lot of analysts and professionals will tell you. And Bob has also seen a lot of get rich quick schemes, which I don't blame Bob. Now when Bob got on the phone with me and learn about investing accelerator, couldn't comprehend how it is possible to master investing within 15 hours, even though he has spent years looking at the markets. So on and so forth, studying, experimenting, losing money when it comes to investing in the markets. Now here's what's interesting. When you're looking at other fields of sports, like basketball, like tennis, soccer, school education in general, you get coaches, why you get mentors, you study under someone else.

Why is that? And that's really because when there is a mentor, it helps you shortcut and think through certain a lot faster than you would otherwise would have if you do it alone. Now for myself, I've been investing for over 12 years now and I've spent at least 3000 hours or more on investing, studying, you know, doing my accounting degree and bachelor and master's degree, getting a CPA, auditing different funds around the world, so on and so forth. And I figured this out myself, which surprisingly, it's quite a long route. And if I have to do this all over again, I'll tell you, it is not possible to do this by herself within 15 hours. You should budget at least four to five years if you want to learn investing by yourself, by reading, by watching YouTube videos and by testing out, back testing different strategies on the internet.

And that's kind of what I did. And I went down what I consider to be to difficult path. So if we are talking about this difficult path, it is not possible to master investing within 15 hours it period. I agree with you. But what if you have a coach? What if someone is there to tell you what the shortcuts are? For example, let's say you're looking at the financial statements and for a financial statements there's generally around 300 page or 200 pages depending on what kind of financial statements you're looking at. There's the management discussion, there's the audit, the financial statements, there is the notes, and there are quarterly and annual financial statements. So when you're looking at three to four years worth of financial statements, suddenly you're dealing with what at least a thousand pages worth of material. And then from this 1000 pages worth of material within the last three to four years, you need to siphon out what is really important.

So then you can make a good investment decision. Now, for most people, they're not going to go through it. For most people, they're going to think, well, there's no way you can go through this and figure out what is it you're looking for, which within a short amounts of time. But when you're looking at, you know, professional accountants, seasoned accounting partners, they can go through a set of financial statements in less than an hour and find exactly what they're looking for. And that was because over the years there are shortcuts. People developed things people look for that allows you to save hours of time. So if you are reading a set of financial statements, you're spending hours studying the company and you realize the company is not a good buy, it means your investing strategy itself is inefficient. So here's another example. What if instead of trying to figure things out by yourself, you can just copy someone's strategy that already works, that you know what kind of results you can expect.

Now, for example, let's say you're investing in the market and you, you got, you're following a mentor. And this mentor focuses on swing trading. I'm not a string trader, I'm a longterm investor. But let's say you're following someone that is a swing trader and there are three to four things exactly he looks for before he enters the market and are three to four things, exactly what he looks for when he exits the market. And if you just follow one strategy and you understand and you learn it really well, then chances are you can finish learning it within a day. So if you dedicate around three to six hours, then yeah, you can pretty much learn it. And from my experience after testing over 300 technical analysis strategy or so any short term strategy when you're looking at day trading, when you're looking at swing trading or these kinds of short term strategies, you can finish learning it within a day or so for longterm strategies that involve fundamental analysis that involves news, that involves more complicated concepts over a long period of time.

Then I think you need to budget around 15 hours if you are following a mentor. So if you split that across a couple of weeks, you can generally finish learning about investing within a month. So that's why investing a celebrator is designed for you to master investing within a month. So is it possible to master investing within 15 hours? The answer is yes. If you know exactly what you're looking for, can you master investing within 15 hours? That answer is yes. If you know what the shortcuts are and if you don't know the shortcuts of course it would take you more time. It only makes sense if you are a video game player like myself. When you're playing a video game, there are something called glitches or bugs that you can take advantage of that allows you to skip certain stages or certain storyline which allows you to complete the game a lot faster.

And these people are called speed runners, so they will try to maneuver in a certain way. Let's say there are seven stages within the game. A speed runner will try to skip two to three by exploiting a glitch or a bug that is not fixed yet within the system. So then instead of a 30 hour game, a speed runner can actually finish the game in, you know, one third of the time, like 40, 50 minutes. Some speed runners will try to beat other speed runners records and they can finish within 20 minutes or so by discovering new glitches, new shortcuts throughout the way. So when you're are looking at investing, it is same as sports. You know, you're learning tennis. You would hire a tennis coach. If you're learning piano, imagine you're trying to learn piano by yourself. That's going to take a long time, right?

I'm not saying you don't need to practice when you're learning piano, you still need to practice. There are still those chords. But with a good piano teacher that is going to speed up your learning by a lot. You know exactly what you're practicing. And then you can apply those learnings to your own songs or to your own music to create your own music. And that's essentially what learning investing is. You're trying to learn from a trustworthy mentor where you know he has a proven strategy where you know what kind of results you can expect and you know how much time you need to put in in order to master investing and how much time you need to put in after you master investing. And here's what I mean. Now when you're learning about investing, especially on YouTube, which is what where you are on right now, there are a lot of mentors and I don't disagree with that and there are a lot of investing styles from high risk to low risk from short term to long term from swing trading to options from leverage to no leverage.

You get the idea. So most of the time you are going to spend searching is for the right mentor for yourself. So that is going to be the biggest part for it. Then the next thing you need to ask the mentor is probably what kind of return you should expect. Now if the general market goes up by around 7%, so if you are going to manage your own portfolio, then you better aim for something higher than 7% or else you might as well just give it to an ETF fund and don't worry about it anymore. So you need to know what kind of return you can expect and the risk involved. Then the question is how much time do you need to spend to learn it? Now generally for investing accelerator it takes around 15 hours. I know some program takes around six hours. I know some technical analysis strategy you find on Google takes like two hours to learn.

So I wouldn't think there's anything you need more than 20 hours to learn. So investing is not rocket science at the end of the day unless you're doing algo trading which then you might need to learn programming. But anything less than 20 hours I think would be reasonable. And it finally is how much time you need to spend on maintaining and managing this investing strategy. And this is a crucial question and this is often a question that is overlooked. When people are learning about investing. For example, for day trading, you might be able to learn the strategy within one day. I have seen a lot of courses, a lot of mentors can teach day trading within a day, which is fantastic, but then afterwards you need to be glued in front of the screen. You need to spend around 20 to 40 hours each week day trading.

So I wouldn't be very surprised if there is a very high maintenance cost to it. And that's exactly why I avoid day trading after years of trying to crack the code for longterm investing. If you are investing in ETF funds and perhaps it might be an hour or two hours a week, a month, my bad. So that is pretty passive but the return there is around eight to 10%. If you are a semi-active, which is kind of what I am and I invest five to seven times a year, then I spent around one to two hours per week on investing and that's pretty much my budget. So if you divide it by one to two hours across seven days, then it's around five to 10 minutes a day. So I don't really spend that much time on investing, which is why I have all these time to record YouTube videos for you.

So is it possible to learn investing in 15 hours? The answer is yes. If you have a good mentor, if you know what the shortcuts are, add the system is extremely efficient. If your system or strategy or learning, it's not efficient, then it is not possible to learn investing within 15 hours. If you are trying to read a book, you know from Warren Buffett's and master investing, is it possible to learn it in 15 hours? The answer is no, because once you learn it, you need to test it. You need to comprehend it and you need to piece together the entire strategy yourself. So it's not possible to learn investing within 15 hours if you are doing it by yourself. So hopefully, Bob, I have answered your question and you, you're seeing this video because this video is made just for you. So thank you for watching and I hope you enjoy the video. Please help support me by like, subscribe and you can watch the next recommended video here as well. So I'll see you next one.

About the author 

Eric Seto

Investor, CPA (Canada) based in Hong Kong and Vancouver

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