Dr James:
Fans of the Dennis who Invest podcast. If you feel like there was one particular episode in the back catalog in the anthology of Dennis who Invest podcast episodes that really, really really was massively valuable to you, feel free to share that with a fellow dental colleague who’s in a similar position, so their understanding of finance can be elevated and they can hit the next level of financial success in their life. Also, as well as that, if you could take two seconds to rate and review this podcast, it would mean the world. To me, what that would mean is that it drives this podcast further in terms of reach so that more dentists across the world can be able to benefit from the knowledge contained therein. Welcome, welcome to the Dennis who Invest podcast, welcome back. This is another episode of Dennis who Invest official podcast. This is a little bit of an unusual podcast today, unusual in so far as it’s just me. It’s just solo. There is no other guest. It’s just myself speaking down the microphone on a few things that I have learned throughout the last three years and through maybe this last year as well. Haven’t we all learned an absolute ton with over the last year, things that I think that would be helpful to share with others, things that perhaps that I’ve said on other podcasts, things that I’ve talked about with some of the guests that have come on the show, but maybe they’re just not all under one roof. Maybe this is the distilling of all the best pieces of information, tips and tricks that I have learned through doing the podcast, through creating the group, through speaking to all the people that I have, and things that I knew already. Nice to have them all in one place so that it is nice and convenient for everybody to listen to and those who may not necessarily have heard them before, it’s quite accessible to them as well, and that’s why I wanted to do this. I’ve been meaning to do it for a little while. As it happens, over the Christmas period, people are a little bit podcast. Guests are a little bit more hard to come by, which is totally understandable, of course. I think it’s partly because I haven’t been attempting to get as many guests on. I’m trying to be respectful of people’s Christmas holidays. It’s a nice time as well for me to speak. It’s pertinent in so far as it’s a nice time of year. It’s a year that we’re looking back, we’re reflecting on 2020, we’re looking forwards to 2021. A lot of people will be turning over a new leaf in the new years. A new year, new me that’s the cliche, and it comes at a time of reflection. It comes at a time where I think that, if we are well, we’re certainly more receptive to positive change in our life and maybe some of these things that I’m about to speak on a little bit in this episode. It’s a good time to enact them and I think it will be helpful to hear them and also interesting for me to just put it all down and just. I always have fun making these. I learn a lot, even if it’s things that I already knew. I refresh myself. So it’s just great to be able to put this all in one place and hopefully it will be of use to those listening, and definitely I’ve learned a little bit by reflecting on things as well. So, without further ado, let’s delve into the content of this podcast. We’re going to talk about investing, we’re going to talk about things that I’ve learned, things that I’ve learned about social media, and at the end I want to talk a little bit about what I’m expecting, where I’m expecting the group to go in the new year, where I am expecting the podcast to go and, as well as that, just some reflections on general investing and maybe a little bit on Bitcoin chucked in there as well. First and foremost, something that I could have benefited from hearing a long time ago. Now this might sound obvious. A lot of people out there will have already thought of this. Whatever stage they’re at their investment journey is probably the very first thing that you’ll think of, but it’s maybe something that I hadn’t really ever had articulated to me before, before I started investing, and definitely think it will be a useful thing to hear. And that is what is your plan for investing? Now that might sound obvious. A lot of people will say, well, my plan is to get rich, of course, but what is wealth? What is richness? What does that look like for you? It might look different to how it looks for me, and so on and so forth, to the next person, the person after that, and what have you? Whether you’re investing or trading, I’ve come to learn that a plan gives you something that you can objectively measure your successes by. Even if you don’t hit that very zenith, that objective of where you want to be, at least you’ll have a roadmap on a series of events that you can measure your progression by, which is incredibly helpful, and it motivates you, it drives you to continue and it lets you know as well you’re on the right path. So when I say a plan, what do I mean? So let’s split down investing. Investing and trading. Let’s split them separately. Just for a moment, we’ll talk purely on investing. Look, hurley was on the podcast not so long ago. He spoke of something really interesting and that was what is our long term goal for our investing portfolio? Is it retirement or is it financial freedom? And those are two separate things actually. There’s a gray area in between them. But I’ll explain what I mean. Retirement is when we reach a point in our lives that we no longer work. We cease to work. We cease to work forevermore. Retirement, maybe your ultimate goal. It may not be. Some of us lack our jobs. Some of us want to continue working, and that’s fine. I don’t think that I would like to give up dentistry anytime soon. I feel like I’m too early in the game for that. I’ve invested so much time. I’ve not been, I’ve only been practicing for years. I’ve been in uni five, I mean, that’s not. You know. I’ve got so much more to give so much more where I want to go. I wouldn’t like to retire, at least for the time being, and a lot of people will feel like that. So when we’re investing, we’re aiming towards retirement. Is this necessarily a healthy thing or something that we want to achieve? Maybe in the very long run, possibly, who knows? But all I’m saying is that maybe, when we think about investing in those terms and maybe it’s as black and white as when investing to retire is that always true? Not necessarily the case. Maybe, maybe you would prefer to have financial freedom. Financial freedom is the point where we no longer need to work to sustain ourselves financially. We can choose to continue working if we want, totally fine. However, we have the option, which is wonderful, amazing time, to talk about it at the end of 2020, given everything that’s happened this year. Coronavirus has taught us that maybe dentistry isn’t as certain, isn’t as much of a guarantee in terms of a source of income as what we previously thought it was. Will we ever see a point in time again where we have this massive black swan event like coronavirus, which stops us from working, prevents us from working? Probably not, but is it sensible to have a side gig to hedge ourselves against this. That’s almost certainly true as well, if nothing else, from the point of view of creating a more healthy, broadened lifestyle in which you don’t have to focus purely on one thing. I made the mistake of spending all my time learning about dentistry or at least 90% of the read and I did was about dentistry for many years, and I realised that when coronavirus came, that was all out the window to a degree, and it was my passion and my long-term interest in investing. Thank God I had that before back on, and maybe a lot of people weren’t really in the same boat on that. What it’s taught me is it’s the power of diversifying diversifying not only your investments, diversifying in your skills and knowledge as well. If you can do this, you’re more robust as an individual, as a human, and more robust financially as well. Perhaps this is something that we all ought to think about a little bit more, and there is always room for improvement, no matter who you are, no matter what you do. Definitely, I think that that this year has highlighted how much of an issue that is and maybe how much we didn’t think about that before. As dentists, I definitely could have improved and maybe I feel like I’m saying the obvious out loud a little bit to those listening, but hopefully there’ll be someone out there who will take we use this as an inspiration to branch out a little bit and do something else. There’ll be a lot of other positives that reasons that I have benefited from starting the podcast, the group being, you know, being into trading crypto, being into investing that so many amazing things that I could just never have envisaged that I would benefit from at the very beginning, and now I’m able to see those from the other side. I just think to myself why didn’t I do something like this sooner? And maybe somebody out there who’s thinking about taking the plunge. I absolutely implore you to just go ahead, put yourself out there. It’s so worth it. It’s so, so, so worth it, but we’ll come on to more on that later. The financial freedom thing is an amazing aspiration to have. When we have a go, we don’t always not want to stop working. Not all of us do. Financial freedom gives us the option not to. If we were all financially free before the start of coronavirus, we all would have had a lot less collective stress to deal with, something to think of. Maybe that’s a better ultimate end goal for your investing in finance, and when Luke spoke of that, it certainly made me reflect on what I do a little bit and maybe see things from another light and I maybe realize, hey, maybe I don’t necessarily want to to use the R word retire early. Maybe I just want to be financially free earlier and have that freedom to do whatever I want, whether that be exploring the world, whether that be more family time, whatever, it doesn’t matter. All of these things are the end goal of money. For me personally, it’s to buy back my time, it’s to not be flashy, it’s to not be rich. Maybe that’s something that we’re all indoctrinated to think a little bit. That that’s the point of investing is to get rich, to get so much money beyond or wildest dreams that we can have Lamborghinis, ferraris. Maybe that is your goal, but for some people out there listening, maybe that’s just another interesting way of thinking of it. To have money to invest is to save money in the first place so that we have the available liquidity funds, money, to be able to do so. The glamourized part of investing is the spending of the money, is the gains that you make from investing ridiculous gains, trading, futures trading, commodities, trading options, whatever, however, the less glamorous side and the more practical side is just to save the money in the first place, and this is a more healthy way of looking at it, rather than being risky, I suppose, the connotation of massive amounts of risk, dangerous financial practices or something that we’re all indoctrinated to think along the lines of because of what do you see of it in the media. It doesn’t always have to be as out there as that. It can be the simple things, the small steps that you take to create more money in the first place and therefore allow that to compound and grow in the long run A message that doesn’t often get shared as much as its more glitzy counterpart, and it’s something that I think that is helpful to hear. The other thing that I found interesting and was another way of looking at investing investing flipped on its head almost when I heard it for the first time. To save money. One of the best ways that you can save money is to reduce your outgoings. We all suffer from something called lifestyle creep. When we earn more money, we inevitably spend more. We’ve all been there, we do it. We think I can have this bottle of wine over this slightly more cheaper one You’re tempted to because you know that you’re earning more and you can afford it. While I’m not saying that you shouldn’t enjoy your life and enjoy your hard work, keeping the lid on it is something that we need to do to a degree. There needs to be a hard cap in there somewhere. Unless you’re a billionaire, which none of us are, there’s very few people in the world who are billionaires and can afford to live this opulently lavish lifestyle that reaches a point where money is absolutely no object. If you let yourself progress on that route or that mindset, that way of thinking, you can spend as much money as you want and therefore there needs to be some sort of self-imposed limit. There’s always going to be someone richer that you can show off to. There’s always going to be the Smiths next door who have something slightly nicer than you. You’re always playing this arms race or this catch up unless you put this self-imposed risk limit in there somewhere. That is a hard thing to do Real quick, guys. I’ve put together a special report for Dentist entitled the Seven Costs in Potentially Disasters Mistakes the Dentist may whenever it comes to their finances. Most of the time, dentist are going through these issues and they don’t even necessarily realise that they’re happening until they have their eyes opened, and that is the purpose of this report. You can go ahead and receive your free report by heading on over to wwwdenisoonvestcom forward slash podcast report or, alternatively, you can download it using the link in the description. This report details these seven most common issues. However, most importantly, it also shows you how to fix them Really. Looking forwards to hearing your thoughts. But of course, the more you can do that, the greater you can save money at and the earlier you might reach this point of financial freedom. So, first and foremost, saving money is the easiest way. Just looking at things, just maybe questioning things that do you need to spend X, y and Z on a really fancy car when it could be something a bit more practical but still look nice? It’s possible? I’m just trying to introduce this extra layer of screening maybe into your thoughts. That Coronavirus has highlighted how important it is, because the rug just got pulled just like that and we realise that maybe the sources of income that we took for granted they can go. If we have, the more of a cushion we have, then the safer that will be. A good rule of thumb is to have enough cash in the bank, so that’s available money that you can go six months without working. I actually think 12 months would be even more of a cushion. Still, the more money you have, the more you can hold out and wait for that job. That may be a more financially lucrative in the long run rather than just accepting something that isn’t very good in the short term. So in a way, it actually can be more economical for a few reasons to have that cushion of money rather than seeing as something that is extra and unneeded. That’s another way of thinking of it, which I think is quite nice. Debt is something that creeps into all our lives to a degree. There’s good and bad kind of debt bad kinds of debt. Now, I am, of course, not a financial optimiser, so I can’t advise everybody, generally speaking, what might be the best approach to their individual lifestyle. But let’s say, for example, that you have a credit card. You know that there’s some silly amount of interest on your repayments and that’s eaten away not only the money that you have to repay, but it’s increasing every month and it’s compounding. That is an instance where debt is biding you very hard and before any of us think of investing, a priority would be to get rid of that dangerous debt that is increasing every month well beyond the initial value of the amount you borrowed, chipping away at your wealth. It’s only ever going to go one way. It’s only ever going to get one worse, and this means that you have less capital subsequently to invest. An example of a good kind of debt, or a debt where you it’s not as important to pay it back sooner, would be a student loan where I believe the interest I can’t quote exact figures, but I know that the interest is quite low and that it does it only kicks in after you earn a certain amount Well-meaning advice would be go something along the line so pay off all your debts as quick as you can. If the interest rate is very low, it may be healthier to delay paying off the debt for as long as possible, providing it’s not dangerous debt, providing it’s not something that causes you to be liable to lose your house, things along those lines. So, again, something that you might want to think of and review on an individual basis, person by person. I can’t give blanket advice, but I do know that, by and large, if there is anything in your life that’s causing you to lose lots of money every month and it’s compounding because of interest. That is definitely something that we all want to get rid of. Fortunately, I personally don’t have any major debts of that nature. If you do definitely something to prioritize before you think about investing in any way, shape or form, tax is something, I have to say, I put my hand on my heart and I must confess I did find it very boring. I wouldn’t say still it is something that exactly gets the juices flowing. But when talking to Mike Bryan, maybe I realize just how important it is that we all think of like this. I filled in my own tax return this year and now the thought of doing that almost makes me shudder. Talking to Mike, it just made me realize the numbers of ways that I could be more efficient. With it I can save more money and therefore have more money to invest, something that I think is super important and definitely something that I honestly I couldn’t really have cared less about it until not that long ago. I suppose through seeing that it just made me realize the power of being smart with it, being clever with it, and how much more it can propel you towards your own financial goal, whatever that might be retirement, financial freedom, whatever, etc. Etc. You must consider as well we’ve talked about how to save money you must consider as well as part of your investment strategy how much time do you have to do this? Do you want to be an investor or do you want to be a trader? A trader is something that dips in and out of the market every day. They’re constantly following the fluctuations of the stock market, crypto, commodities, whatever asset it is they choose to study, which is fair enough, but we will struggle with that. Ultimately, as professionals, we don’t have that much time around doing what we’re doing. As someone who trades crypto, let me tell you it does take a lot of time. You need to follow what’s going on almost every day, and almost every day, you’re thinking of trades, your plot and entries, selling stuff, buying stuff, whatever, which is fine. It depends on your trading style. Of course, you can manage it around some styles. You can manage a lot more around work than others. When we talk about trading the ultimate strategy, people want the holy grail of trading. People want the indicator that tells you how to make unlimited amounts of money in the market. The truth is that the best trading strategy is a strategy that works for you. Really interesting Booker read. A guy called Van Thorpe interviews 50 traders. Each one of them have different strategies, completely different strategies, different indicators, different measurements of the market, different strategies when they might dip in and out of the market. Every single one of them was successful. Every single one of them traded for a living and none of them had the same strategy. What does that tell you? It tells you that there’s something more afoot, and it’s, more often than not, their psychology. It’s their psychology and finding a strategy which suits you in terms of how much time you want to invest and your availability to stare at the screen. Not everyone is prepared to do that, in which case you might be better off being an investor. An investor is someone who puts some money in the market, buys long term investments and maybe looks to many years or decades before they think about taking their money out For dentists. This might be a little bit more of a suitable strategy. You’ve heard me talk a little bit about this before on some of the other podcasts. Maybe some of you haven’t Again. Just another way of looking at your investments now, your long term goals. Another thing that I learned through time was I always thought that you had to be actively doing it every day, to be someone that invests your money. By no means whatsoever. The very lowest participation strategies involve you buying something, maybe once a month with your paycheck, and possibly rebalancing it maybe once or twice a year, that is to say, just to buy and sell to re-level the percentages of each particular investment in your portfolio. It is possible. Investing is something that it’s okay to be okay at. It’s okay to be okay at. Not everyone has to be making 300% returns on their account every year. Well, good job if you do and fair play if you do. You managed to do that, but by merely just having your money in some sort of index fund that’s proven to be inflation through time then you’re already doing better than what it would be doing in your bank account. Particularly, if you’re buying that passive index fund and you’re not spending that much time a year putting your money into it, then to me, putting your time into it, sorry, then to me that makes total sense. Just an interesting way of looking at it. We have to bear in mind what the effects of inflation are going to be next year. A lot of people think that because of the fact that interest rates have nowhere to go, that there will likely be a lot of money printing. Let’s not forget the central banks only really have two levers to affect how cash and credit works. They can only reduce or increase interest rates. Interest rates are at zero, so they can’t generate any more money through lending. They can’t generate any more credit in society and therefore cash through lending. Therefore, they’re only other option if they want to buy themselves out of trouble is to create cash. Now, inflation will only be an issue if they create too much cash, so much cash that there is basically so much that it completely devalues what you have in your bank account and it outweighs how much credit there is available. Let’s not forget that there is two types of how can I say, two types of currency. I suppose you have actual money, so that is the money that you and I have in your bank account and we have credit. Credit is money that is either created by the bank or lent by the bank to individuals, for whatever reason, to improve their business. It’s been shown that in the American economy, 85% of what we think is cash is actually credit. If credit dries up, for whatever reason, the banks get nervous. They think there’s going to be a crash. They think they won’t get their money back. Then at that point printing cash can step in to compensate for that. They have to get the balance right. If there is very little money, then that might be the only option that they have, and it’s at that point that inflation becomes runaway. It’s definitely not a guarantee that it will happen. It’s not as black and white as we print more money and therefore inflation occurs. It depends on a lot of things. It depends on what other measures are taken by the government to reduce their debt. A lot of those other measures are deflationary. Let’s say, for example, they ask for their debts to be restructured. Then again banks get more nervous to lend money. Therefore there’s less credit in society. Therefore people struggle to pay their debts even more, and the cycle continues. That’s one example of a method that it can’t be deflationary. So they’re very keen to not use those methods because they become a negative feedback cycle and they effectively drag the economy down further. Cash is something that you can use to proactively increase the amount of money in society and therefore keep the economy flowing. It’s only when this is overdone that it can become an issue, and certainly, if the government is out of options, it is in their interest to inflate their debts away to nothing. It’s not a guarantee. Like I say, it is possible, however, and it maybe highlights why it’s not sensible for us to keep all of our money in cash and therefore hedge by buying other assets that may protect ourselves. An example of a good portfolio that you might want to use is first of all, you have your monthly income. You’ll use some of that money to pay your outgoings and maintain your emergency cash balance of 6 to 12 months. After that, you have your invested capital, whatever that might be. So let’s talk about what you might do with your invested capital, and here is an example of a method that I use and that I think is quite safe. So you have 100% of your total invested capital, the money that’s left over after you’ve paid your outgoings and maintained your emergency fund. As I say, you might decide to keep 20-30% of that in cash. You might like to put 10 or 20% of that in gold. You might like to put some of that in stocks, some of that in bonds, some of that in Bitcoin. Whatever you’re into, all I’m saying is that it’s important to think about these things should inflation become an issue next year? Fingers crossed it won’t. There are some conditions that would make that likely to occur that have come about because of economic strife, heralded by the coronavirus. Again, interest and stuff. You’ve probably heard that in my other podcast, but if you haven’t, definitely a novel way of looking at things and protecting yourself. If anybody would like a great book on the matter who is UK based, then you may like to think about. How to own the world by Andrew Greg is a great book on the subject, and then the gone fishing portfolio in addition to that, which tells you exactly how to design a long-term portfolio for investing. And this is not about going out there and risking money. This is about protecting yourself. This is about hedging your bets about against what may occur in the long run, keeping your money in a roundabout way. If you kind of think about it, keeping all of your money in cash is actually less safe than thinking about buying some indexes, thinking about buying some gold stuff along those lines Because of inflation. You may argue not everyone will agree with me on that. That would certainly be my views and that would be with the caveat, of course, that you know what you’re doing with your money. I suppose when you thought about what you’d like to achieve and you thought about the means of which you’re going to achieve it and through and saving money as we’ve just touched upon, you might like to look at your goals and how you might want to get to those goals. Specifically, diversifying is very important, so that means holding a little bit off various different things. You can mix and match that as you want. There’s some ways that are better than others. I don’t think that anybody should be over leveraged, so that means have most of your money in one asset. There was a once a time in my life, a couple years ago, where I just liked to have as much as I could in cash. If I could go back now, I’d definitely give myself a good slapper on the face, because I’ve seen the merits or the merits of investing and maybe why that’s so inadvisable to keep it all in cash. There is the age old argument of whether you should hire an IFA or DIY. Once upon a time, I was very regimented, very restricted in my views and I always thought that a DIY portfolio of buying your own stocks and bonds was vastly more advantageous than having an IFA. There is a lot of. If you’re looking at it purely in terms of economics and you know what you’re doing, you can save a fair bit of money over the long run, even if the IFA’s fees only are maybe one to two percent. Not everybody will be comfortable with investing their own money. Some people like the security. That’s totally fine as well, in which case an IFA might be more suitable for you and you would prefer to outsource the obligation to somebody else. What I will say is an interest in fact that’s often thrown around is that if you look at passive funds versus active funds so that is, funds that purely mirror a large index, which are totally autonomous and have nobody running them, versus people who are well, funds that are actively traded by an individual who will buy and sell shares on your behalf, should you invest in it, it’s very difficult for those people to beat the market because of their fees that they charge. You might know that ninety three percent of passive funds ninety three percent of the time active funds are beaten by passive funds in the states. In the USA that is true in the UK. I actually recently told me that the stats are a little different in the UK it’s actually more like 75 percent of active funds struggle to beat passive funds such as the FITZ 100. Just something to bear in mind and maybe that if you were to do a little bit of reading around the subject of managing your own finances, managing your own investment portfolio, you’ll see that there are some inherited fantasies that you have over somebody else who is managing it on your behalf when things are going well. If you do start investing your money when things are going well, it’s easy to get carried away and easy to think you’re worn buffet. These things are not about being right or wrong. There is obviously an element of chance in there to a degree. It’s important to not let any Any times or instances that you’re doing well in the market go to your head. This can make you think that your bullet proof that your solid gold and anything that you touch Will continue to do well. This can lead to in risky investment strategies, investing in things that aren’t necessarily sensible. It’s best to keep a structure to it. It’s happens too many times where people get carried away with their own success and then they believe themselves to be Better than what they actually are. Bear in mind the market is so complicated that nobody can predict it 100 percent. Even the biggest maths ways kid in the whole world or someone who knows everything about a particular asset Can never predict exactly where it’s going to go. There’s too much information, therefore. There’s always that element of chance and it’s always best to be humble. Dollar cost averaging is such a good strategy because it takes all of the psychology that I’ve just spoke of out of the game. You buy a little bit every month. You don’t ever deviate from that, whether it’s going up or down, and because you’re taking advantage of Averaging your entry through time, that means you can remove most of the onerous task of analyzing it yourselves. This is why it’s so easy. It’s so easy and useful and accessible to most people. It means that you don’t have to Involve yourself in reading loads of books and materials and spending time meticulously studying things which you may give in. Even if you know every what every single book on the matter says on a specific subject, on technical analysis, you still will get it wrong because, as I said, there’s just too much information out there for any one person to get their head around. That’s why door cost averaging is so useful and something that you might find Easy to implement into your long term investing strategy. The most important thing is to stay in the game. When I say stand the game is what I mean is not have all your money in one stock, not all your money in one commodity, whatever, yes, that may come off. The biggest gains occur infrequently. However, I’ll say that again the biggest gains occur infrequently. You may get lucky. A chance is all you want, because it’s infrequent that that sort of thing happens. If you’re out of the game I, you lose all your investment, capital is gone for good, and those amazing opportunities that do come along with time, you won’t have the capital to capitalize on them. So it’s always best to manage your risk, not how too much money in any one thing, and Just always be conscious of that, even if it looks like the most surefire bet in the world, the number of Ridiculous reasons why companies fail that are completely unforeseen, well, no one can ever see. No one can ever see those sorts of things coming, and therefore it’s always best to hedge and never have everything all in one asset. Remember that the S&P has increased 10% year-on-year since 1957. That is Something that we can easily, easily have a stake in Through most cat, most stocks and shares ices. Something to think about. I’m not saying it’s as simple as that. Will that change in the future? Maybe who’s to say again, we don’t want to put everything into one asset just a healthy thing to think about. And something that definitely flipped how I looked at money and investing on its head whenever I Began this journey initially. You know those things. You’ll know that Investing doesn’t have to be as complicated as everybody makes it out to be. It’s okay to be okay at it. Which kind of turns on its head? The received knowledge that you have to spend a lot of time Analyzing charts and looking at the computer. I hope that those things have helped these. Some of those are things that are new Before. Some of these are things that I’ve been saying for years and some of those are things that I’ve learned from having conversations through this podcast that are definitely useful to hear once more. Let’s put the invest in aside from a moment. One more personal note the power of Social media is something that’s really blowing me away. I definitely really didn’t fully appreciate it until I started the group, started the podcast, all of the rest, and From the point of view of just how much it’s enhanced my life and how much I enjoy doing it. I really think that it’s something that maybe a lot of people who like myself or maybe not really conscious of, and it really has just I’ve learned an absolute ton. I think a lot of people have benefited from it. It’s been so much fun so far. I would encourage anybody else out there who does have a passion or something that they’re interested in to really think about Creating some sort of community, whether that be in dentistry, whether that be Outside of dentistry. There is always more space for groups on Facebook, for Communities of people who are interested in something that’s 100% worthwhile, and I definitely think a lot of people stand to gain from it. From the point of view of just maybe like myself, it’s just giving you a new lease on life worth thinking about 100%. I’ve made so many friends. I would like to think that I’ve Helped some people by Undertaking this as well. This year has sold me commit to being a dedicated lifelong reader. This is something that I have always. I’ve always tried to read throughout my life. But to put things into context before Before, a few months ago, before lockdown the book that I was reading, I’d been reading it for about six months, I Definitely didn’t dedicate anywhere near as much time as to as what I dedicate to it now. It’s a complete life hack. You’ll learn so much, so much more things that you can teach others, so many more things that you can enact in your own life From brilliant books. If you think about what a book is, it’s the distilled knowledge on a particular subject of an expert in that field. It’s the result of a combination of even, in some instances, a lifetime’s worth of effort placed in something that you can access and use. When you think about it in those sorts of terms, you’ll realize that you could devote your life to studying this particular subject and probably wind up roughly with the knowledge that’s contained in this book. So it’s a shortcut to achieving that, and when someone has devoted that much of their life to learning about one particular thing or studying it, there usually is a lot that you can pick up from them. Complete life hack. I definitely wish I mean, I always was interested in books, but I definitely wish that I had been a lot more dedicated to it than I had done before. Those would be some of the greatest things that I’ve learned this year, I think. As well as that, another really convenient method of learning a lot of things is podcasts, something that I’ve never really been aware of too much. The fact that you can just put them on wherever you fancy you can be at the gym, you can be driving somewhere and you can learn quite a lot through doing this is something that I’ve become a lot more switched onto, a lot more in-tune about, and certainly if there was no such thing as podcasts then I wouldn’t have been able to start mine as well, so grateful to them on that front too. I actually have to say I don’t think I’d listen to a podcast in years until I went on Jazz’s podcast. That was the first one that got me thinking. It was a little while ago, just getting up and running, and it made me realise that actually they’re quite a useful method that’s accessible to a lot of people to getting your message across. They’re very versatile and they’re interesting and they’re convenient 100%. I’m going to endeavour to listen to more in the new year. I listen to crypto podcasts almost every day, when I’m in the gym, when I’m in a car going somewhere. Really, really worthwhile, 100% useful, and I wish someone would have told me that a lot sooner. So, in essence. What I’m saying is if you have a passion, definitely put yourself out there. Probably, like me, you’ll never really realise just how many good things can come of it until you at least try. And as well as that, I’m going to make every conscious effort of every spare hour of every day to learn things. Apparently, the average CEO reads 20 books in a year, so that’s your benchmark to go on. If you can read 20 books in a year, then you’re comparable to the average CEO. I said that I talk a little bit about Bitcoin at the very start of this podcast. What an amazing few weeks it’s been for Bitcoin. I’ve seen the price rally from roughly well, just less than $20,000 to about 27 or 28 as of yesterday, which is amazing. I mean, that’s a 50% increase in value if you would have invested not that long ago. Most people who’ve ever bought Bitcoin have made profit at this stage. There is a few interesting narratives about why it’s kicking off. At this point, it’s really difficult to pinpoint it down to one. One would be the decrease in supply. Two would be the macro conditions of money printing. Three would be the fact that a lot of large companies are now getting involved with it, hoarding it Most people because they realise that the prices going up aren’t selling as well. Therefore, that’s only going to increase demand too, therefore driving the price up. It’s really difficult to pinpoint it down to one particular thing. What I will say is that, historically, when Bitcoin broke its all-time high as it did a few weeks ago, just as I said, when it went past $20,000, it continues to rally for a year afterwards. The last time it did this was January 2017. It stopped doing so at the end of December 2017. I think, off the top of my head, the date was 17th of December when it hit its previous all-time high, before it did again a few weeks ago. That gave it roughly a year to increase in price. It increased in price by 20 times. It was $1,000 and then it went to $20,000. Furthermore, the time before it did that was well. It was in 2016, I believe 2015, 2016 and it increased 10 times in price. Will it increase 10 times in price again this year? I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that. I think that it might wind up being between $100,000 and $200,000. It could be more, it could be less, I don’t know. All I’m saying is that if we go on historical trends, it shall continue to increase and increase, that’s. Having said that, there’s no guarantee that it will continue to do so, but if we can’t base what we expect to happen on the past, then what do we have to base any prediction on? Really, that’s our template. I suppose it’s not for everybody, definitely not. I’m really hoping that the altcoins are going to do well. So those are cryptos that are anything but Bitcoin. For people who are interested or didn’t know that already, they’re known collectively as altcoins, so you may have heard of Ethereum, ripple, xrp. Those are complementary to Bitcoin in that when Bitcoin rises, their value tends to go down, apart from when it breaks, it’s all-time high, in which case the whole market rallies, as we’ve seen in the last few weeks when Bitcoin stalls. Hopefully, altcoins are going to play catch-up over the next few weeks. I’m actually 100% in altcoins in my trading account at the minute. Therefore, I’m a little bit biased. I’m rooting for those. I believe it’s hit the point where Bitcoin’s market dominance is unsustainable. It’s very, very high at the minute. I think it’s 70% of the market roughly. We’ve seen it flutter. We’ve seen it falter in the last few days. Hopefully that’s going to continue to go down and I will be putting my profits from my altcoins into Bitcoin. But anyway, that’s just my strategy, just an interesting one for you. If you’re probably 90% of people who trade altcoins, trade the crypto space, it’s more profitable for them just to buy Bitcoin in the first place. It’s actually quite hard to beat the market. You have to be very, you have to analyze it all day, every day. It’s difficult to do and therefore that’s why I think Bitcoin definitely makes a good investment in my eyes. As I say, it’s not for everybody, but if we do go on past trends, it’s certainly looking like it’s an interesting time and it’s picking up. Trend will, of course, not last forever, as we have seen in previous years. When it will end and how it will end, it is very difficult to say. All I will say is that when we look at past trends, it looks like it’s just beginning. It usually continues for a year after Bitcoin breaks its all-time high. As I said earlier, I’d just like to run off by saying thank you very much to everybody who listens to this podcast. Thanks to everybody on the group. It’s been so much fun. The reason why I set it up was to help them this, so that we understand a lot more about finance, how to protect ourselves and what we can do, what we can achieve when we put our mind to it in the long run, through investing wisely. There is very little unbiased information out there. The group is an attempt to counteract that. I don’t think there ever was anything like that before. Hopefully we’re achieving our objectives. I hope that everybody has had a wonderful Christmas. I spent some time with family, some time to reflect on what’s been a crazy year. Fingers crossed. We’re going to be out of the tunnel, out of the woods, with this vaccine. Time will tell. On that one, I’m optimistic. I think it’s going to be probable. I would really love for things to go back to being normal. I don’t know whether that will happen. There will likely be a new normal, which I hope very much, that will resemble as much as possible the old one. Again, time will tell. I think it’s going to be a little while yet before we get there, but nonetheless, we’ll batten down the hatches, we’ll pull through. I’m sure we’ll be fine ultimately at the end of the day. Happy New Year to everybody, happy Christmas, and I shall speak to you all very soon. I hope that everybody has had a wonderful Christmas.