As Charlie Munger once said, “The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the waiting.”
In a world obsessed with portfolio decimals, that sentence should be printed above every investor’s desk. Because while most people try to predict what’s next, those who actually win build systems that don’t require constant tinkering.
Freedom isn’t about timing the market. It’s about designing something that works without your intervention. And that only happens when you invest for cashflow, not for speculation.
Every day, I reflect in my journal on what I’m learning. What’s working. What’s repeating. And there’s a pattern that keeps showing up.
The hard part isn’t finding the perfect asset allocation. The hard part is letting go. Accepting that your assets are wild animals, not obedient machines. They go up, they go down, they do what they want. Your job is not to control them. Your job is to let them work in your favor.
Every time I see someone post a portfolio with 2.37% in one asset class and 7.84% in another, I think: this person isn’t building wealth. They’re playing a game. Because real portfolios—serious portfolios—stand on just a few big, disconnected ideas.
The secret is picking assets that:
generate income,
can be pledged as collateral,
or protect you from systemic risk.
You don’t need twenty. You need four good ones. Ideally, assets that don’t even know each other exist. While they do their job, you do nothing. You collect the yield and let compounding do the work.
But then comes the hard question. The one nobody likes to ask:
What about the assets that don’t generate income?
What about gold? What about index funds? What about Bitcoin?
They don’t pay you. They just sit there. You know they have value. But they don’t give you a single cent.
So what do you do?