Hello dear investors,
My name is Kevin, the author of Atmos Invest. My nuclear engineering background helped me break down the investment process. ⚛️
Since finding several multi-baggers over a decade of investing, I’ve started sharing what I’ve learned online. 💸
At Atmos Invest we use two specific approaches:
Fish where there are few fishermen -> mispricings due to neglected or underfollowed smaller companies
Catch babies thrown out with the bathwater -> mispricings because of a sell-off irrespective of the quality of the companies
If this dual strategy resonates with you, check out our company deep dives through the button below.
Or immediately go to one of our articles:
I often get feedback from friends or family that they cannot invest in stocks like I do.
They just don’t have the time.
If we’re lucky, time becomes our most precious resource at a certain moment in life. It’s the only thing that is truly finite.
While figuring out how I can spend my time most effectively and efficiently, I came across a wonderful article written by the great Geoff Gannon: How to invest when you only have 1 hour a day to do it.
Here is a 5 step plan you can use to get the most out of that precious time you have.
We’ll zoom out before zooming back in and get to the nitty-gritty details of what you can do.
How much time do you have?
A 168 exercise: align your priorities
Define your Return On Invested Time (ROIT)
Use the magic word
Be Ruthless
Step 1: How much time do you have left?
Before diving into what you can do, let’s put time into perspective. We have the great Tim Urban from waitbutwhy to help us with this.
Here’s a human life depicted over several months.
The red dot is me. I’m halfway through my life.
Well, that sucks.🤔
On the positive side, I still have more than 500 months or 2,000 weeks left!
And, I’ve got more great news for you!
You can do a lot in a single week, but you first need to take a look at how you’re spending your weeks at the moment and check if you’re satisfied with that.
Step 2: What are you doing?
Do you know what a 168 is?
One week has 168 hours in it. The goal is to visualize how you’re using those hours.
Some activities, you cannot go without like sleeping or eating. So let us assume that you get 8 hours of sleep each day. We assign 1 hour per day to eating and bathroom breaks. Over a week, you now have 105 hours left. Let’s round it down to 100.
How you spend that time is up to you.
But I bet, if you’re interested in companies, stocks, and the markets, you can carve out 1 hour each day or 7 hours a week. That’s only 7% of those 100 hours.
That seems doable, right?
If you’ve never done this, you can use the template below to see how you spend time on average in a week. Writing it down might surprise you.
Here’s my 168
As you can see, I spend on average a good 20 hours each week on stock analysis and writing.
Once you are done doing your 168, you need to compare this with your priorities in life. The first time I did my 168, I was not happy with it. I had to shift my life to get where I wanted to be, to find balance.
So my hypothesis from here on is that you know how you spend your time. It’s in line with your priorities and you manage to carve out some time for investing.
So what’s next?
Step 3: Return on Invested Time (ROIT)
After taking many courses and reading lots of books on investing, I noticed something.
You get diminishing returns for every book that you read.
If the return is defined as the amount of knowledge gained, then reading investing book after book will only get you so far. The return for the same hour spent will decrease.
However, this is less the case when reading annual reports. There are so many businesses out there with wildly different business models, that you’ll always learn something new.
Knowledge compounds. After a while, pattern recognition kicks in.
Now when it comes to investing in stocks, there might be a threshold when it comes to this knowledge, meaning there is a minimum you need to have.
Your success in the stock market is a marriage of skill and luck. Skill is the combination of knowledge and experience you have.
There is a minimum threshold for knowledge when investing in the markets (for fundamental investors). You should at the least:
Learn the language of business (accounting)
Learn how to value a company (valuation)
If you can combine these 2 things while honing your temperament and embracing volatility, now that might just be a winning formula.
The same thing applies to the time you can spend on investing. I believe there is a minimum amount you should be able to apply.
Combining both minimum thresholds gets you to the following matrix for people interested in picking stocks.
If your goal is to build wealth, and you’ve chosen the asset class that is equity, then without a minimum amount of knowledge, and time available, you might better be off investing in index funds.
Index investing works if you want to get rich slowly.
What do you think?
So, you have the time and the knowledge, now what?
Step 4: Use the magic word
When a journalist asked Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to write down one single word that defined their success, they both wrote down:
FOCUS
When Gates was building Microsoft, employees said that in any meeting with Bill Gates, he was the most intense person in the room. He cared deeply and was laser-focused.
Are you reading this article, because you just opened up your phone, and you’re scrolling through your notifications and emails?
Or, did you schedule a block of 1 hour this week, to read the articles you filed away?
The second way shows focus
You could pick it up a notch.🔥
While you’re reading, are you reading casually or are you taking notes on a notepad?
I call this focused reading. It takes more time, but the returns are bigger.
Now, how can we apply focus to our investing approach? Geoff Gannon shows us the way:
1️⃣ Schedule 1 hour each day of focused time for your investing
2️⃣ Eliminate as many choices as possible related to stock investing:
3️⃣ Ignore portfolio management, each position is the same size
4️⃣ Forget about selling, your focus is on buying a great investment
5️⃣ Aim for 5 stocks (20% per stock or 10 stocks (10% per stock) in your portfolio
6️⃣ Target longer holding periods to avoid turnover (5 years+)
His goal is to make sure that during that 1 hour, you’re laser-focused on finding and buying a great investment and ignoring everything else.
The reason to limit the number of stocks in your portfolio is simplicity. Imagine you have a portfolio of 5 stocks and your holding period is about 5 years. This means you only need to find 1 good idea every year. Once you’ve built your portfolio, you have 365 hours each year to find 1 single great idea.
That’s very powerful.
Now this is theoretical and doesn’t take into account the most important factor of all in investing: Your temperament towards volatility.
Step 5: Be Ruthless
Let’s be honest, you can’t be 100% focused all the time. You need some procrastination in your life. As the great Jeff Bezos proclaims, I’m a big fan of letting my mind wander. It goes back to the Yin and Yang, finding the right balance between wandering and a laser-focused state.
I know several investors who have checklists, but when they talk about an investment, they rarely complete that checklist on paper (they might do it in their heads). There is a difference between planning and actual execution. It all comes down to deliberate practice. Putting the reps in.
A last thing to mention is your circle of competence. Your ruthlessness, you’re superpower to say ‘NO’.
Your ability to refuse opportunities will increase your ROIT. Learning an entire new industry before you can even understand the company you want to study takes a lot of time. It might be better to stay in what you already know and say NO to ideas as often as you can.
Bringing it all together
1: Do a 168: How many hours are you spending on your investments?
2: Be mindful of your ROIT. There is a minimum threshold in time and knowledge to go out and pick stocks.
3: Focus. Add focus to each hour you spend on investing, especially if you have little time. Use the notion of deliberate practice.
4: Align your strategy to your time constraints, position sizing, idea funneling, etc…
5: Be ruthless to find balance. Life is not about 100% focus all the time. Investing is a marathon, not a sprint. Say no often.
For more deep dives into the investing process or specific companies, check out Atmos Invest.
May the markets be with you, always!
Kevin