Investing 101

I realize this is a gym and you aren’t here to learn about investing. Hear me out. In business school at the University of San Diego there was a particularly notorious finance professor named Professor Rivetti. His success in the private sector and lack of desire to climb the academic ladder made for remarkably interesting classes filled with immediate, lengthy deviations from the syllabus material into stories and tangents with real world relevance. Plus, he was hilarious.

Since the market is the great equalizer, I’d hope you didn’t come here thinking I (or anyone else) had some secret market busting trading insight for you.I do know that Professor Rivetti made a great point a decade ago and it has stayed with me.

You’d have to be in the room to get his humor, but he once said, “All these little kids, like imagine a little girl named Nicole. If Nicole doesn’t have her cell phone or her video game, she gets upset. Do you know what happens if she doesn’t get her food? ….Yea, she dies.”

“Invest close to the body,” he proudly summarized insinuating that companies that serve needs close to the body are more robust because we need them. He noted that even in times of stark financial downturn, people still spend money “close to the body” and everything else becomes a luxury.

The best question to ask now is, “Do you invest close to the body? Or, are you investing more resources to external things?”

Logan Gelbrich

@funcationalcoach