No matter where you are right now - the kitchen, the front room, the bedroom or even in the bath you can be making money. Just follow these five steps to become a successful Home Investor.
No matter where you are right now - the kitchen, the front room, the bedroom or even in the bath you can be making money. Just follow these five steps to become a successful Home Investor.
Takeaways
Become rich without leaving your house
You can create your own business
Make money out of coins you find lying around
Reading in your spare time can build your financial IQ
The art of coin collecting. Finding those rare coins minted centuries or decades ago for an ancient King or for a special occasion like the end of the Second World War. They can be incredibly valuable if you then sell them at auction or keep them as the years roll by. Maybe there are some now tucked away behind the sofa or in the attic in a box of Grandad's old things.
Look around the room you are in, under the tables and behind the shelves. Maybe those old 20ps, 50ps or £1coins are jangling around in a coat or old pair of trousers.
Perhaps in the drawer under all those old papers and love letters are cents and liras from those holidays you took when the Euro was a mere pipe dream in the heart of Brussels.
Look out for coins commemorating past or more recent occasions, people or characters. It could be a limited edition for Peter Rabbit or our Olympics stars. Look at the dates, peculiar markings, miswritten words, a strangely shaped Queen of England's nose or any other errors which because of their rarity value could be worth more than a bob either today or into the future.
In March 2020 at the Stock's Bower auction in the US an 1854 S half eagle coin worth just $5 when minted was sold for $1.92million. Also last year in the New Forest area of Hampshire, England a family weeding in their garden during the Covid lockdown discovered 63 gold coins and one silver coin from the 15th century. Other garden finds by Brits during lockdown included a piece of Roman furniture and a bishop's seal matrix.
Some of the most iconic and valuable businesses in the world were set up at home. Amazon is a prime example. Its founder Jeff Bezos quit his job at investment banking firm DE Shaw in 1994 and opened a virtual bookstore out of a garage in Seattle. Even today he calls himself a "garage inventor".
Another iconic entrepreneur who found inspiration amongst the spades, broken chairs and paint splattered work benches was Walt Disney. He started drawing his first cartoons in his Uncle's garage in the early 1920s.
David Karp found somewhere a little cosier when setting up social networking site Tumblr - his childhood bedroom in New York in 2007.
So, grab that computer and notebook, find yourself a room where you can get some peace and quiet and start thinking. You never know where it might lead.
In the investing world there are two main strategies. One of those is passive investing. A passive investor primarily follows an index, making little change to their stock portfolio and just relying on the maxim of finding the right stock and sitting back for the long-term as they keep growing.
You can also be a passive investor at home. You could rent out one of your rooms, your driveway or your garage (perhaps to a young entrepreneur) and just sit back and collect the cash.
Stocks Amongst the Socks - The second main investing strategy is active investing. Those go-getting Wall Street types punching their algorithms, feverishly watching the financial media, flying all over the world to meet management teams to find the stocks that nobody knows about first. Or they make their moves like a speeded-up chess grandmaster. Replacing this stock with that one and putting it back in again or discarding it entirely after a few months or even days of below par performance.
An active investor always wants to be the first one to spot a new market trend and a vital component of that is research. They look at sales figures, new product launches, innovation, R&D, Instagram and other social media to discover what's next. The hit video game, the next fashion.
You can do this all from the comfort of your own home. The programmes you watch on TV, the radio shows you listen to, your own social media sites, listening carefully to what your children tell you about what the other kids are talking about at school.
You can also stare out of the window in classic Hitchcock fashion and people watch. Is there anything there of interest in your foreign portfolio investment? A certain handbag in someone's hands, escooters humming down the road, a new food delivery service, or parcels operator.
Perhaps there is a clue in there of what is the next big megatrend. The next big consumer wave set to hit which you see from a mile off. You are ready to do thematic investing and beat the market.
Tuck yourself in or pull up an armchair by the fireplace or just kick back and relax on the sofa. This is your time. All is quiet. Nightime. You reach for a favourite book - Andy Pandy perhaps or the X Files Annual 1994 - but toss it aside.
You can't waste your time on that guff when you could be learning about investing. The tricks of the trade from legendary financial gurus such as Warren Buffett. Perhaps the extraordinary life of Apple's Steve Jobs or Adam Smith's classic the Wealth of Nations.
There are a plethora of investment magazines you can subscribe to or of course you can log on to websites such as The Lazy Trader to discover its advice, tips and techniques.
Soak it up, read every word and pick the nuggets out which could help your own investment journey. Do they favour a particular style of investing? What mistakes did they make that they do not want you to repeat?
Grab a notebook, write down anything and everything of interest and put their teachings into practice. If they can get rich, then why can't you?
Group think can often be investors Achilles heel. Many institutional traders, portfolio managers and hedge fund traders work in the same offices alongside each other, live in the same houses and work in the same area.
As a result they take the same equity risk and buy the same bonds, committing the same errors (and have the same successes!). By being a home investor, away from the noise, you can perform your own analysis.
If you live near a green space, you will even have the time take a walk and think! This can be an advantage as you are able to buy into positions before the wider market does. With this is mind, who needs to go and work outside anymore?!
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