Guest Article: Michelle Marki's Investing Practice

Today’s article is a guest post from Michelle Marki, who is my co-host on the Investing Mastermind Podcast. Michelle is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) with a Master of Science in Biomedical Informatics, and on her YouTube channel and blog, Michelle seeks to help others achieve financial freedom through the educational lessons she shares from Warren Buffett-style investing and personal finance best practices. I hope you will enjoy this piece she shared about her investing practice.

Hey there investing friends, I'm Michelle Marki. Today I’m sharing my investing practice and personal finance habits and routines with you because knowledge is power and maybe you'll get some ideas from some of what I'm sharing that you might want to include in your own routine of how you go about learning about investing.

When I’m having my morning coffee and breakfast, I usually like to visit Wall Street Journal at wsj.com and check out the morning headlines across US and World News and the business and economic news. If I have time, I also watch some of their videos because I find them to be highly educational - like learning about how the Federal Reserve is losing money now that interest rates have gone up.

They also feature videos about the strong U.S. dollar and other macroeconomic or investing related topics that can really be helpful and maybe can help serve as some foundational knowledge as you also go through building your investing knowledge.

I check back to Wall Street Journal after the stock market is closed to learn about the market moves that day.

Sometimes I like to visit my local library and read the paper version of the Wall Street Journal in more depth because I don't have a subscription with the Wall Street Journal

What I also find myself doing often is Googling companies or investors and then that will lead me to a bunch of other sites and, I'll check out some sites that don't bring up a paywall too aggressively like CNBC or MarketWatch and Bloomberg sparingly, Seeking Alpha and other resources that have decent content.

I love reading investing books. I'll hear about investing books on podcasts or from investors that I admire. I'll read those books as well and try to gain some wisdom from them and apply what they've taught me to my investing practice overtime as I'm learning about companies that I might already like or that I've just heard about or read about.

I'll make lists about companies to investigate and then I'll add some of these to my watch list and my brokerage apps. Generally I’ll be on the lookout for new companies that investors I admire might be discussing or that they might already be invested in like on dataroma.com, you can check the “13F filings” for what some super investors are invested in and that might give you some ideas of potentially good companies to invest in. So I'll do a deep dive on some of these companies by checking out their annual and quarterly reports (known as the 10K and 10Q respectively) and also the companies’ earnings call webinars and the transcripts from these calls because that can help reinforce what you've heard on the webinar. And then that might validate what some of your understanding is of a company or if you don't like what direction they could be going in you might move on to another company if you either don't like what a company is doing or maybe hard to understand what they're doing and what their business model is all about

In addition, I also like checking out the blogs and websites of some famous investors like Ray Dalio and Bridgewater Associates, Jeremy Grantham of GMO or Howard Marks of Oak Tree Capital Management. They're really good to learn from. I read the historical letters of Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway. On my list of letters to read is Nicholas Sleep’s letters even though he doesn't run a public fund anymore. I've heard really great things about his letters.

I also like listening to investing podcasts like Invested by Danielle Town and Phil Town and also The Investors Podcast with William Green as well as any content that investors or everyday people might have on YouTube.

YouTube videos are great for learning. For example, like going back through some of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meetings on YouTube or video recordings from the Daily Journal meetings also features great content from Charlie Munger

Last, I like learning about investing from social media platforms so whether it's from professionals or just everyday people like my good friend Signe Lonholdt and her investing Instagram and blog. There's a lot of great stuff out there and you'll curate your own list of people that you like to learn from and also it's really nice to get some economic and investing indicators via e-mail newsletters as well as stock alert apps and you have to just trial and error some of these because some of them are more useful than others. 

I generally spend between 10 to 20 hours a week on all of this routine. Sometimes I fall behind on reading up on companies’ reports so sometimes I need to just get myself a little bit more motivated to check them out in a timelier way. But generally I try to keep tabs on my favorite company stocks and it's part of why Warren Buffett recommends not investing in more than six individual company stocks because you're going to put a lot of time and effort into researching and learning about companies

I hope that my routine and how I go through all this investing and economic matters is helpful to you and that it will give you some ideas that you can also add to your own life as you also try to grow your wealth. I wish you well on your journey to being the best investor you can be.