January 2023: Investing Review of 2022

Talmud, Fun and Growth

This isn’t advice on how to invest your money or someone else’s money. I’m sharing my experience. A lot - if not all - of these investments have a risk of losing value or going to zero.

Overview of funds

I split funds into three buckets:

1. Talmud.

My goal is steady growth and not losing money.

The strategy is one third stocks, one third real estate and one third reserves. I originally read about this strategy in Gigerenzer’s book Risk Savvy. Then I found out the strategy is in the Talmud and realised “Talmud” is a shorter name for the strategy!

I try to avoid index funds. My original reasoning is that too much money in index funds is bad for the overall market. There’s now an additional reason - given I’m now in Ireland. In owning an index fund, I’m forced to realise a capital gain for taxes every seven years (which one could argue is justified as a tax on the negative externality of passive investing… although that probably wasn’t the law’s intention).

Avoiding index funds probably goes against my own self interest. I lose the benefit of strong diversification and am subject to my own stupidity in picking the wrong investment managers or stocks. The original piece about my Talmud approach is here:

More Passive Investing without Index Funds

2. Fun.

It’s a small stash for geeky projects, mostly crypto.

3. Growth

This bucket of funds is a way for me to learn about public and private stocks. I am doing stock picking, which is very hard and likely to lose money. I spent a reasonable amount of time in 2022 thinking about this - maybe 200 hours. One of my goals in 2023 is to spend a less time, maybe 100 hours max, so that I can focus my time instead building Trelis.