It took a long time to build up the nerve to make my first trade years ago.
I bought TDB900.
The name says it all: nondescript, humdrum, decidedly unsexy.
Despite this, I was pretty excited. And nervous.
This first foray into the stock market was a culmination of years of educating myself on the stock market—reading every investing book I could get my hands on, subscribing to blogs and newsletters, pouring over the financial section of the Globe & Mail, and polling friends and acquaintances on how they invested their money.
Looking back, all of this was my attempt to delude myself into thinking that I knew what I was doing and that I wasn't completely intimidated by the market.
Fifteen years and hundreds of trades later, the market still intimidates me—maybe more so nowadays as I have a fuller sense of how much I don’t know.
The market, like the rest of life, is unknowably complex. There are people out there who might claim that they know the whole story, but they don’t.
But just because you can’t ever know the whole story doesn’t mean you can’t start investing.
This Zen koan captures this idea:
A monk said to Chao Chou, “I have just entered this monastery. Please teach me.”
Chao Chou said, “Have you eaten your rice gruel?”
The monk said, “Yes, I have.”
Chao Chou said, “Wash your bowl.”
The monk understood.
Chao Chou’s eager new student wants to immerse himself in his studies, to wrap his head around Buddhist ideas.
Chao Chou brings the student back to reality with his utterly mundane instruction of “Wash your bowl.”
What’s he getting at?1
It helps to recontextualize a little:
A new investor said to Chao Chou, “I have just started investing. Please teach me everything you know.”
Chao Chou said, “Have you opened a brokerage account?”
The monk said, “Yes, I have.”
Chao Chou said, “Put some money into the account.”
The new investor understood.
Chao Chou encourages the new investor to focus on tangible next steps and not get bogged down by lofty concepts.
The loftiness of the stock market deters some people from ever investing. While others are haunted by “analysis paralysis,” trying vainly to out-smart the market by overthinking and overanalyzing every decision without ever pulling the trigger.
These people would do well to follow Chao Chou’s advice and take some baby steps: open a brokerage account, put some money in it and make some trades. [Check out the resources below if you’re coming up short on what to invest in.]
Investing is a process—the sum total of many small decisions over a long period of time.
Some of these decisions, like buying boring TDB900 (the investing equivalent of washing a bowl), might seem utterly inconsequential in retrospect, but they represent tangible steps down the path toward a deeper understanding.
- The Buddh-i$h Investor
Takehome points:
Investing is complex and this complexity can be intimidating.
Don’t get bogged down in the complexity of the market. You can invest successfully while keeping things simple.
If you’re looking for more:
A thoughtful discussion of the “Wash your bowl” koan from the Existential Buddhist
Getting started in investing:
The Value of Simple - John Robertson’s super-practical introduction to investing in Canada
A straight-forward and evergreen overview of index investing from the Canadian Couch Potato Dan Bortolotti
Great beginners guide to investing from the folks at Savvy New Canadians
Zen koans are notoriously inscrutable. They don’t have a clear-cut moral and are open to interpretation. But that’s the whole point of them—to encourage the reader to think about what it means to them in their own experience.