Podcast Episode - Suze School: Avoid the Biggest Danger to Your Future Investments

On this Suze School, we get a lesson on why you need to stay the course with your investments, that chaos always creates opportunity and more.  Plus, a very special set of messages for KT’s birthday!

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Podcast Transcript:

Suze: July 21st, 2024. Welcome everybody to the Women and Money podcast as well as everybody smart enough to listen. And today is Suze School. It is also KT and her twin sister’s birthday. They are 72 years of age today.

So we have a great day planned, weather permitting — we’ll see what happens. And at the very end of this podcast, I have a very special guest that’s going to come in and join us, so stay tuned for that one. All right, Suze School.

So I was in the pool on Friday with Lynn’s husband, Tom. And Tom, just like all of us, said to me, “I wish I had bought NVIDIA years ago.” And I was saying to him, who doesn’t wish they bought NVIDIA years ago? But then out of my mouth came these words: “You know, Tom, the biggest danger to your future investment success is your past wishes.”

And he just looked at me like, what do you mean by that? And then I explained to him — and as I’m explaining to all of you, because I know this applies to every single one of you out there — at some point in your investment career, you look at these stocks like NVIDIA or Apple or Palantir or Broadcom or whatever the stocks would be, or Meta or things that came out a long time ago, that if you just had bought them, maybe you would have invested $10,000 and maybe today it would be worth $1.2 million. And you spend all of this time calculating how much money you would have made if you simply invested in some of those stocks.

When you spend time doing something like that — you should have, you could have, I wish I had — then you spend your time trying to find the next stock like NVIDIA, like Amazon, like Apple, like so many that are out there, rather than looking at the stocks that aren’t necessarily the next NVIDIA. But why not continue to look at the stocks like NVIDIA, like Apple, like Palantir, like Microsoft — like stocks that have so much further to go.

Because I can tell you that there are people — because I’ve been doing this now almost 40 years, everybody — there are people that would say to me, “God, Suze, I wish I had bought Cisco when it was at X,” or “I wish I had bought this stock when it was X,” or “I wish I had done this when it was Y.” And I would always say to them, “Well, they’re still good stocks, you know,” and they would say, “Oh my God, they’ve gone up so much already. There’s no way they could go up any further.” Are you kidding me?

You look at things and you write me and you keep asking, “Is the portfolio that I recommended on January 7th still good to buy?” You ask me that you’re in certain stocks that have gone up tremendously — do I think you should sell? And you start to get so nervous because you’re watching the movements of these stocks go up and up and up, and then all of a sudden a few days ago the stocks that were going up and up and up have now been going down and down and down, and you get so depressed.

Are you kidding me, everybody? If I was to tell you about the biggest mistakes I have ever made in investing, it would be selling too soon — thinking, oh my God, the stock has gone up, it’s doubled. I’ll never forget when I first started out as a stockbroker and I would be investing in something and it went up 50%, and I would sell it because 50% was a lot of money. And then it would go up another 50% and continue to go up from there. But of course, when you’ve sold something that you’ve made money on, but then it continues to go up, you sit there hoping that it would come back down so that you could buy it again. Possibly what? When things start to go, you have to go with it — and you just have to know that.

So a lot of you, if you are invested in good quality ETFs, if you are invested in great individual stocks, maybe you need to just stop watching the markets altogether. Maybe you just need to know that over the long run, they’re really going to be doing OK. But the key, truthfully, to your investment success is to have the courage that if you bought something and it now has gone down and you have extra money — to buy more.

You know, I’ll tell you the truth: the other day when things were going up, I continued to buy Palantir, I continued to buy NVIDIA and Costco and quite a few stocks for Colo. And I was so proud because I said, “Colo, look how much these stocks have gone up right now, look at this just in the past few days.” And he looked at the number that it was and he went, “Oh my God, that’s a lot of money, wow.” And then of course, the next day or two after that, all that money that we had gained, plus some, was not lost, but now all the way down.

So rather than me freaking out about it — because I didn’t invest all of his money — I again tried to take advantage of it, especially on Friday when CrowdStrike absolutely obliterated all the global IT systems and everything like that. I tried, in Colo’s Schwab account, to buy CrowdStrike with some of his money — not all of it, again knowing that it could go down even further. So I would just buy more. But I wanted to take advantage of the fact that it went down 40-some-odd points, whatever it was at that time. And I was like, oh my God, this is an opportunity. It’s an opportunity. But because of CrowdStrike, Schwab wasn’t able to initiate any trades and do anything online. So it’s OK. I’ll see what happens tomorrow.

But it’s important that you literally see when things like that happen — you have to look at things in the market as opportunities. You know, I all love Keith Fitzgerald, and in his letter that he sent out last Friday, he was talking about three things that he had always learned from somebody — I forget who it was now in his family. But those three things were: chaos always creates opportunity; missing opportunity is always more expensive than trying to avoid risks you can’t control; and the markets are the only store on earth where people fear a sale.

So I was reading his letter on Friday going, oh my God, I’m going to tell everybody about those because they are so, so great. So I want you to write those down in your Suze notebooks because it’s times like this — when there is chaos in the world, there is chaos in the markets — this is when you start to dollar-cost average. This is when you start to take advantage of the down days and dollar-cost average into positions that you really love. Which is why I have been telling you now forever: always dollar-cost average. If you get a large lump sum of money or you’re going from a 401(k) into an IRA and you have a large sum of cash, dollar-cost average into the positions that you want. Don’t be afraid that, oh, I have to invest in it right now because it’s gonna go straight up and I’m gonna miss it. Nothing goes straight up.

And listen, if it goes straight up and it looks strong — all right, so buy it again at that point in time. But these are things that are really important for you to understand. So that’s really what this short Suze School is all about. However, I do want to give you a little bit of an update about the portfolio that Keith happens to be working on for the majority of you that don’t want to be quite as detailed or as involved as his One Bar Ahead portfolio. And he has been working on it; we talk about it almost every other day, and hopefully by this September, maybe October at the latest, it will be ready to go for all of you. So I just want you to know that he is so excited about it. We came up with an idea — it’s something that has never been done before. It will help you with doing something that both of us have been telling you to do and how to invest. So you might want to wait for that.

But it is something that I hope comes out this September or October at the latest, if everything continues to go right, because these things take a lot of testing, a lot of making sure that all of it works, that the logic has been programmed correctly so that you can get monthly correspondence that can tell you exactly Keith’s suggestions for you.

All right. Now, before I bring the Suze School to an end, as you all know, it is July 21st, which is KT and her twin sister’s birthday. And so I have a very, very special guest in the studio with me right now. He just came in and sat down — say hi to everybody, Colo.

Colo: Hi, everybody. It’s Colombia here.

Suze: Yes. And the two of us — so KT doesn’t know that we’re in here doing this. She thinks that I’m just doing my regular Suze School and Colo slipped in through the back door. But what do you want to say to her?

Colo: Well, I want to wish both of them a happy, happy birthday. And then I want to tell KT how much I love her with all my heart and thank you for being so special with me.

Suze: Oh, he’s starting to cry. Yeah. And you know, Colo, I got a text the other day on the Women and Money app saying, “Where’s Colo been? He hasn’t been on.” Right? And I said, oh, that’s a great idea. I’m going to put him on today. Do you miss coming on the air with us?

Colo: Yeah, of course. But you know, I’m always a little nervous to be on here.

Suze: Because you’re a little shy...

Colo: Yeah, I am super shy.

Suze: But you listen to the podcast every Sunday.

Colo: I do. Yes, I do. Of course.

Suze: And do you just love when you hear your name?

Colo: Yeah, you always give me a nice shout out, which I really appreciate and everything.

Suze: How’s our fishing been lately?

Colo: Let’s hope today we’ll catch some good fish for KT and Lynn’s birthday.

Suze: Yeah, but we’ve been going out there — we’ve been getting skunked, haven’t we?

Colo: Yeah, it’s been bad.

Suze: Why do you think that is?

Colo: Well, I think it’s also the weather. You know, you haven’t had good weather here, and I hope it gets better by the end of July.

Suze: Why not? Well, we’ll keep trying every single day. All right. So what do you want to say really special to Lynn?

Colo: Lynn, I want to wish you a happy birthday, and you’re one of the most special people in this world and I love you with all my heart as well.

Suze: Yeah. So there we are. So KT and Lynn, we all wish you the happiest of birthdays. What can I say to two of the most special women really in my life? And it’s kind of funny how, when we’re all in the pool together, they sit there comparing — are they taller than each other? Are they thinner than each other?

Colo: They have the most amazing smiles in the whole world. They could just make you happy just by looking at them.

Suze: It’s true. It’s true. But we just want all of you to know that we love those two girls more than life itself. We are planning a very special happy birthday for them. Want to tell everybody what you got for KT?

Colo: Yes, I got her a small lemon tree that she’s going to love more than life itself.

Suze: Tell everybody why you got her a lemon tree — a little lemon tree like maybe a foot tall.

Colo: It’s a small tree because it’s coming on a small boat today. So I’m getting her a tree because a couple of months ago I broke one of her lemon trees and she wasn’t so happy. So I’m going to make her happy on her birthday.

Suze: And for me, I painted Lynn this coconut — I’ll put a picture up of it, everybody. I painted a coconut green and then made fins and everything out of dollars with it and made it look like a fish. So it’s a money coconut.

Colo: Yeah, I know, I saw.

Suze: It’s kind of good, right? Nobody can believe I’m artistic. Right?

Colo: No.

Suze: Right. And for KT, as always, I wrote her my very special birthday letter that I will give to her later today. But I was telling Colo earlier, I got her a bottle of shampoo. That’s what I got KT for her birthday. She loves Aveda shampoo and she hasn’t been able to find this one flavor of it or smell — it’s called Shampure, or whatever you want to call it. And I got that for her. So we’re pretty extravagant in the Orman household, aren’t we?

Colo: But she’s going to love everything that we give her.

Suze: All right. So I just wanted you to hear little Colo’s voice — he’s not so little, is he? But anyway, he is our boy. There’s one more person who wants to wish those twins a happy birthday from the bottom of his heart, and that is Robert.

Robert: Well, thank you, Suze and Colo. Hi, KT and Lynn. I’m down the shore right now, and I know two Jersey girls will know what that means. And of course, from the bottom of my heart, I wish you both a very, very happy birthday. I am so honored to know both of you, and especially to work with KT. You know, the highlight of my week is editing the episodes where KT laughs, which of course then sets Suze off laughing as well. But I have something very special for both of you this morning. You see, while I’ve been sitting here editing this podcast, my little niece Imogen is also an early riser, and she’s been here right next to me, watching me put the show together. And then she heard Suze and Colo, and then she wanted to say something too.

Imogen: Happy birthday, KT and Lynn! Thank you for making my Uncle Robert smile while he works.

Robert: All right. There we go. Happy birthday.

Suze: So there’s really only one thing, KT and Lynn, that we want you to seriously remember — with our love and our devotion and our caring for both of you, we promise you: you are unstoppable.