Finance Fridays - Issue #20

IPOs, World Class Investors, Tailor Made Business Ideas

Author

Seyi Agboola
June 14, 2024

#20 - Finance Fridays - IPOs, World Class Investors, Tailor Made Business Ideas

This is the Reality Cheque’s newsletter where I document my journey to financial freedom through learning more about personal finance. Every week expect curated content on personal finance, career advice and entrepreneurship. And the best part is it'll always be less than 5 minutes to read!

*This is not financial advice, just me brainstorming about things related to money. Stocks are extremely volatile - value can go down as well as up. All investments and income streams may be subject to tax.

Contents:

  • 💹Investing - Why IPOs are for suckers

  • 🥗Side Hustles - When a Side Hustle is too good to be true

  • 💹Investing - Proof that World Class Investors Can’t Predict the Future

  • 💸Entrepreneurship - Step by Step Tailor Made Business Ideas

💹Why IPOs are for suckers

Some High Profile IPOs most likely to attract the attention of naive retail investors.

Firstly, I’m annoyed that I’m not able to invest into Reddit pre-IPO as a UK citizen so a dedicated, long time Redditor. Overall I believe it is too big to fail completely and will benefit massively from AI companies mining its data.

Secondly, in the video they made a good point at 12:40 about post IPO stock prices tending to crash more frequently nowadays. It hasn’t been that long since Deliveroo gave London its worst IPO in history.

Thus I can’t wait to buy Reddit shares after the inevitable post-IPO crash.

💹Proof that World Class Investors Can’t Predict the Future

This is a great lecture even in hindsight as this guy ended up being wrong about:

  • Tesla

  • Netflix

  • Uber

  • Ferrari

This proves that the best investors have amazing logic, experience and critical thinking skills but still cannot compete with the unpredictability (or irrationality) of the market.

💸Step by Step Tailor Made Business Ideas

If you’re struggling to come up with the right business idea or side hustle, grab a pen and paper and watch this. The first 4 minutes by itself is enough to upgrade your knowledge of starting an online business with the rest providing a masterclass in finding business ideas that suit your interests, skills and personality traits.

🥗2 Truths About Content Creation

2 Lessons I took from this video:

  1. Stack failures.

 Every failure is a lesson so fail more to learn more.

  1. Make noise, find the signal. 

This means you find what sticks by delivering enough content to see a pattern. I remember James Clear talking about how he was blogging without a niche for a few years before realising his content on productivity was the one that got the most traction. Thus he leaned into that niche more and the rest is history. I wouldn’t say this is effective on all platforms but it’s probably most applicable on TikTok, Twitter and YouTube where the algorithms reward consistency and volume.

🥗When a Side Hustle is too good to be true

The best takeaway from the video is to be wary of business ideas that seem almost too easy to start. This is because there’s likely already other people jumping at the same opportunity, over saturating the market very quickly. 

I am thinking that it is better to identify business ideas that have some barrier to entry that are favourable to your unique skills and strengths thus making it harder for others to compete with you.

✍🏿Quote of the Week 

“The 3 words you need to be able to say openly in investing is I was wrong”