This is who I am

Compounding Dividends

Oct 31, 2024

Do you know how Compounding Dividends started?

On a Friday night, I was staying at my childhood home because the day after one of my best friends had his bachelor party.

I was bored and didn’t know what to do that evening.

Why not create an anonymous account on Twitter?

I thought it would be cool to say whatever I wanted about the stock market at any given time (at the time I was still working in the Asset Management industry meaning that you aren’t allowed to speak openly about investment-related topics).

So it happened and I created an account on Twitter.

Fast forward to today, and we have over 600,000 followers across Social Media and over 300,000 readers on the website.

Famous readers include among others Jeff Bezos, Bill Ackman and Lebron James.

When did you start investing?

When I was 13 years old, on a nice summer evening, someone told me about the stock market.

You could make money without having to work for it?

This was one of the most beautiful things I had ever heard. I remember the conversation as yesterday as it sparked a light in me. My passion for investing was born on that summer evening.

The day after the conversation, I set up a brokerage account (via my parents as you aren’t allowed to invest in stocks under age 18).

After a few days, the account was set up and I transferred the hard-earned money I earned that summer to my investment account.

But there was only one small problem…

… In which stock should I invest? I didn’t know anything about stocks.

‘Luckily’ the broker I used had a top pick list and they recently added a new company to this list. It was a local company active in the production, storage, supply, and transportation of oil and gas.

The people who managed the top pick list were so-called experts.

They should know what they were doing right?

So I blindly followed them and bought that specific company with all the money I earned that summer.

After 1 year I sold the stock…

… with a loss of 60%.

And you know what? It’s the best investment I’ve ever made.

My worst investment ever has become my best investment ever.

After selling my first investment (which was very painful), I could beat myself up.

How could I be so stupid?

When something like this happens to you, you can do two things:

You conclude investing isn’t something for you and you give up
You promise yourself to never make the same mistake again and educate yourself

I decided to choose the latter.

From that point in time, I became completely obsessed with the stock market.

Starting from age 14, I did the following:

Read all financial newspapers every morning
Read at least 1 finance/investing book every week
Listen to everything I could find about investing on YouTube, the radio, … for several hours

My ex-girlfriend once said to me that I loved the stock market and books more than I loved her. She was probably right as we broke up a few months later.

What you can learn from this?

Making many investment mistakes at the beginning of your investment journey is probably the best thing that can happen to you.

It’s way better to make a mistake with $1,000 than making a mistake with $100,000.

Failures are part of life. If you’ve never failed, you’ve probably never tried anything new.

The life of optimistic investors is beautiful in that sense. If you make a good investment decision, you make money and if you make a bad decision, you’ll learn something new.

As Thomas Edison beautifully said: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

In my office, there still is a framed picture of that first investment which I sold at a loss of 60%.

I do this to remind myself that you should always stay humble.

Portfolio Characteristics

The Portfolio Characteristics of Compounding Dividends look as follows:

✅ The portfolio will invest worldwide (developed countries only)
✅ We’ll own 15-20 stocks
✅ The portfolio goal is to build a reliable income stream while growing your wealth
✅ We won’t trade a lot. Activity and costs harm our results
✅ We won’t try to time the market (We’re way too dumb for that)
✅ The characteristics of companies in the portfolio:

Sustainable competitive advantages
Quality management in place
Healthy balance sheet
An attractive history of growth in earnings and dividends
Good capital allocation
History of returning capital to shareholders
Ability to grow shareholder returns in the future
Trading at fair valuation levels

Portfolio goal

Our portfolio will focus solely on the long term.

While Wall Street likes to think in quarters, we like to think in quarter decades.

Here’s what Jeff Bezos has to say about this topic:

The goal of the portfolio?

To build a reliable income stream while growing your wealth.

Get 30% off for 1 year

What separates Compounding Dividends?

At Compounding Dividends, there are no commercial incentives (except for the subscription fee).

Honesty and integrity are very important to me. I want to genuinely do the right thing.

And what’s even more important? We are PARTNERS in this.

We’re in this together. We invest REAL MONEY in the Compounding Dividends Portfolio.

If you do well, I do well, and the other way around.

Here’s what Charlie Munger said about the power of incentives:

So who are you?

Up to a few months ago, I ran everything anonymously.

But as we are Partners in this, you have the right to know who I am.

Here's some basic info to get to know each other:

My name is Pieter Slegers
I live in Belgium (Antwerp)
I used to work for a Belgian Asset Manager
Hobbies: running (I ran my first marathon two years ago), lifting weights and reading books

This feels so good and liberating!

And remember... The best is yet to come!

Happy Compounding
Pieter (Compounding Quality)

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