Hi friends,

Last year I finally started getting my finances in order. One if the first steps I took in this process was opening an investment account at my bank. This account lets me invest in funds for a relatively easy investment experience. Next to this, I also planned to try my hand at individual stocks.

After months of reading up and working up courage, I finally took the plunge last week. I had saved up a bit of money for the express purpose of investing, and I put together my initial portfolio. I decided to go with a handful of companies that I think have real long term potential, as I plan to hold these stocks for a long time.

I’m looking forward to following the development of these stocks, and getting a feel for which real world developments influence their worth. I’m also curious to learn what difference it makes to do so with actual skin in the game. I’ve already started saving for my next selection of stocks, and am planning to expand my portfolio as soon as I feel like I’ve saved and learned enough. So, if you have any good sources for a beginning investor, or a hot tip for a great stock, let me know! I’ll share irregular updates on Twitter if you want know how I’m faring.

Here’s what I want to share with you this week:

​Three Monkeys interview: Last year I had the pleasure of being interviewed for the December edition of Nyenrode Business University’s alumni magazine, Van Verre. The theme was “Weconomy”, and I spoke with them alongside my Three Monkeys partners Daan van der Zanden and Sjoerd de Bruin. We discussed how we got started, how we approach pro bono consulting, and the value we believe it can provide. The magazine is now also available in digital form, so check out the full article if you want to know more about my pro bono endeavors.

The Best Bits

The secret to really good scrambled eggs: Did you know you could improve scrambled eggs with corn starch? Well, now you do. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is my absolute favorite chef, not in small part because I learn tricks like these every time I watch one of his videos. If you like what you see, I can absolutely recommend picking up his cookbook The Food Lab, which is full of laboriously tested cooking techniques as well as delicious recipes.

​Roam Untangled: I’ve been using networked note-taking app Roam Research for a little over half a year now, and it’s completely changed the way I record and process information. Rather than save and bookmark information in several different places, all of the really important stuff now lives in my Roam “second brain”. Roam is notoriously hard to “get”, but I’ve finally found a resource that’s worth sharing as a starting point. It's a short online course called Roam Untangled. The course examines if and why you should use Roam, and then walks you through the basics, the "20% of features that will get you 80% of the benefits". Oh, and it’s free.

​Puparia: This gorgeous meditative art piece popped back up in my timeline last week. Animator Shingo Tamagawa made this over the course of three years, driven by his frustration with Japan's anime industry. Youtube documentary channel Archipel recently released a 20 minute documentary about the short, called Three Minutes, Three Years: Making Puparia. The doc provides an overview of Tamagawa’s career and the production of Puparia, and dives deeper into his mentality and motivation.

Berkshire Hathaway's 2020 Shareholder letter: In the world of investing, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are at the absolute top of the game. In learning about investing, I find it invaluable to get insight into how they approach this process. One place to get that insight is their annual shareholder letter, the latest of which describes the exact reasoning that finally convinced me to get started:

[O]wnership of stocks is very much a “positive-sum” game. Indeed, a patient and level-headed monkey, who constructs a portfolio by throwing 50 darts at a board listing all of the S&P 500, will – over time – enjoy dividends and capital gains, just as long as it never gets tempted to make changes in its original “selections.”

I aspire only to be as patient and level-headed as Buffett’s monkey.

See you in two weeks!

Martijn

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