For The Love Of The Game: Investing As A Calling
When I was a kid I collected baseball cards. Most of my friends did too and we used to make trades. There was a monthly price guide called Beckett in which the fair value of all cards could be found. Because I would study the price guide, I had a better sense of value than most of my friends and could generally add to the value of my collection through trading.
One of my older cousins was also a collector and he had a unique strategy. Instead of buying the expensive cards of the stars of the day, he searched for prospects that would be the stars of the future. Instead of buying 1 or 2 cards for $10 or $20 each, he’d buy hundreds of some rookie for pennies. I remember buying hundreds of Craig Biggio rookie cards – among others – over the mail. He ended up becoming a college basketball coach but he had the knack for investing.
I wasn’t much interested in school as a child because I didn’t see what it had to do with me or my life. Until I read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as a Freshman at UC – San Diego. For the first time someone connected the life of the mind with my own well being and personal happiness. Instead of drifting through life, Rand argued, one should use one’s reason to understand reality and make good choices. And, just like working out develops your body, by reading and thinking, one could develop one’s mind. It was a revelation that changed the course of my life.
I became an Economics major and then a Philosophy major. After college, I went to work for an economics consulting firm in West Los Angeles for two years. While the work was tedious – mostly entering massive amounts of data into Excel and “proofing” the data – it did make me adept at Excel which would come in handy when I turned to investing.
After that job, I entered the Phd Philosophy program at UC – Davis in the Fall of 2003. While I’m glad I spent the two years I did getting my MA in Philosophy primarily because it introduced me to Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, I ultimately realized that a career in academia was not for me. For one thing, everything was so subjective. If a Professor didn’t like my thesis because it was the opposite of his, he would sometimes give me a low grade even if the quality of my argument was excellent. Further, academic Philosophy had long ago drifted away from a concern with the practical concerns of life and developed into an esoteric field of little interest to anyone beyond its own specialists.
The prices of stocks are affected by literally everything and anything that happens in our world, from new inventions and the changing value of the dollar to vagaries of the weather and the threat of war or the prospect of peace. But these happenings do not make themselves felt in Wall Street in an impersonal way, like so many jigglings on a seismograph. What registers in the stock market’s fluctuations are not the events themselves but the human reaction to these events, how millions of individual men and women feel these happenings may affect the future – Bernard Baruch, My Story
Which leads me to one of the reasons I love investing. Investing is an intellectual pursuit grounded in our everyday pursuit of material well being. Everyday most of us work for money which we use to consume the things we want and need in our complex division of labor economy. I frequently buy coffee at Starbucks (SBUX) or Dutch Brothers (BROS) first thing in the morning. I shop at grocery stores for my food (Kroger (KR)). I fill my car with gas at Exxon (XOM) and Chevron (CVX). I buy drinks at 7/11 which leases many of its properties from one of my favorite REITs Realty Income (O) – (which just now reported another solid quarter). And on and on. The more you understand the markets, the more you understand how the contemporary world works.
For another, the stock market is objective in the sense that your returns depend on the impersonal verdict of the market, not anybody else’s subjective opinion. You don’t have to persuade anyone else of your opinion. If you are right, your stocks will go up and the market will validate your judgment. It doesn’t matter what color you are or which way you lean politically.
Being intellectually inclined, I didn’t want a job that was tedious and boring like my first job. I wanted something that was intellectually stimulating and financially rewarding at the same time. People often ask me how I went from Philosophy to Finance. But the transition was quite natural for me. Robert Hagstrom, author of the renown The Warren Buffet Way, titled another of his books Investing: The Last Liberal Art. For young people who are intellectually inclined but are more interested in worldly wisdom than science, computers or the theoretical minutia the humanities seem to be preoccupied with these days, I highly recommend investing. For me, it has become a calling.
While the financial rewards obviously entice many, I subscribe to the sentiment expressed by the poker player Lancey Howard in The Cincinatti Kid: “To the true gambler, money is never an end in itself; it’s simply a tool, as language is to thought.”
Also see “The Education of an Investor”, July 29, 2025
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