From Benjamin Graham To Angel Investing

Bram de Haas
Male
1982
Netherlands
Former professional poker player
Investor and investment writer

I'm primarily interested in investing. I make my living doing it, thinking about it and writing about it. You can find my work on Seeking Alpha, Gurufocus and Forbes.

My girlfriend (we have a 5 month old boy together) sometimes says "oh it's about money, you'll like it" but I don't like investing because it involves money.

I like it because every day you can study new things. One day you learn about how the construction of a refinery influences farmland prices and another day you're trying to figure out what's going on between Apple and the PRC. It's like solving a challenging, endless and everchanging puzzle. The money (after many, many years) will function as an objective (but not perfect) measurement of how good you are at solving these puzzles.

I do like the objectivity of capital as a scoreboard. In many domains there are social dynamics, sometimes quite random, that influence who becomes a celebrated artist or who becomes the top dog of political party. Sure, you can get lucky in investing. No doubt about that. There's no way to differentiate between the results of two similarly skilled investors even over very long time periods. However, you'll clearly be able to see whether you excelled in the field or performed below average.

It will be very satisfactory for me to spend a life learning and writing about this subject as it is misunderstood and there's a lot to gain for future generations by understanding it better. Investing revolves around sound capital allocation. That means making the right decisions about where resources (in this case capital) go.

Bubbles, like 1999 or the tulip bulb one, are in part the result of massive misallocations of capital. Misallocations cost us all because the capital could have gone to places where productivity of our society would have increased.

The more money you end up allocating over a lifetime, the more you'll contribute to it being done wisely. It's not just about bubbles. It's also about deciding whether it's time to bet on electric vehicles and whether buying Tesla stock is the best way to express that opinion or whether it is a good idea to build a house and add to the inventory of homes or not.

None of this means I know how to do it or what's the best way to do it. Practices that work in investing are constantly changing. There are certainly strategies that have worked for many people. Some can be explained by behavioral psychology and we could expect them to continue to work... But the exciting thing is we can't be sure they will continue to work. Markets are a complex adaptive system and the strategy could be obsolete going forward. Perhaps because to many are applying it thereby making the market more efficient. I won't run out of subject material any time soon :).

If you'd like to learn more about investing, which means "the world around us" start following. My subset of interest range from angel investing and cryptocurrencies all the way to old-school real estate and Benjamin Graham's net-nets.

Here's my Twitter: https://twitter.com/BramdeHaas
Here's my Seeking Alpha feed: http://seekingalpha.com/author/bram-de-haas/articles#regular_articles
Here's my LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bram-de-haas-97544137