Learning from Charles Schwab

Charles Schwab built a Fortune 500 company whose value compounded at an average rate of 19% a year since IPO in 1987; twice the growth rate of the S&P500. The customer was at the heart of everything Schwab did. He entered a race that for fear of revenue loss, the large incumbent brokers didn’t want to be involved with, a lucrative niche providing customers with cut-price stock transactions which he exploited and expanded with new technologies. Charles Schwab tells his story in a recent book, ‘Invested – Changing forever the way Americans invest’.

Following are his views on the Stock Market & Investing

“With the stock market, there are no guarantees. You can guarantee service, costs, quality, and certainly integrity. But you can’t guarantee performance; Risk is just part of the deal.”

“I don’t think human nature deals very well with the patience and strong stomach investing requires. We’re wired for fight or flight.”

“I have now seen nine crashes in my life, and it still troubles me that investors react this way [sit on the sidelines], because it always ends the same. The market roars back and leaves too many investors sitting on the sidelines missing out. Sometimes I wish I could just tie them to their chairs to help them ride out the temporary storm. To this day our advice is the same: ‘Panic is not a strategy, stick with your investment plan, and don’t let emotions get the better of you.’ Heeding that advice when you’re in full panic mode is just not easy. People aren’t wired to be good investors.”

“The most natural instinct is to run for the door. To sell. Sell everything,’ I said [in 2008 when reaching out to clients]. ‘You’ve got to fight that emotion because you want to be able to hang on for the recovery. Which has happened every time we have had an experience like this in my career and that goes back now some 40 years … nine different cracks in the market like this. Smart investing is about taking it year by year. It is a little bit of a nightmare, but we handle those by living through them and looking forward to better days.’ Did I get the timing right with my advice? Not exactly. You never do. And that’s exactly the point… Timing the market is impossible. As the saying goes, it’s not timing the market that counts, but time in the market.”

“Successful investing is not easy, that’s the bottom line. It involves so much of your emotions, your sense of self-worth, your ego.”

source: http://mastersinvest.com/