Want to Invest? Here’s Why Graham Stephan Believes You Can Copy Other People

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You should read Graham Stephan’s advice when deciding where to invest your money. 

Graham Stephan is a YouTube personality and he provides ample financial advice both on this platform and on other social networks. Recently, he tweeted out what he described as a “controversial take” regarding investing. He said, “You don’t have to be original to be a good investor.”

Here’s why Stephan believes originality isn’t necessary to make a profit in your brokerage account — along with some tips on why you should follow his advice and how you can do it.

There’s a simple reason copying other people is a good idea

Stephan explained in his tweet why he doesn’t believe originality is important to successful investing.

He advised that you, “Stand on the shoulders of giants. Copy their best ideas.” He also included a link to another tweet embedded in his own, which explained that being an innovator is challenging and that it is “way better to copy what works than to create something new.”

This is sound advice because many very smart people have been investing for a long time and there’s no bonus points for coming up with new ways of doing things. The goal of investing isn’t to be as creative as possible, but to make as much money as possible while minimizing your risks. And, the many very smart people who have been investing for decades have already figured out strategies for doing that.

In short, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel and find your own untested approach that could come with a far greater risk, why not adopt proven investing strategies that have already been shown to work and implement them with your own money management?

You don’t want to take money out of your savings account and put it into riskier investments without having a solid plan for how to approach your asset purchases. As Stephan makes clear, copying others is likely the best and easiest way to develop this plan.

How can you implement Stephan’s advice?

If you want to listen to Stephan’s advice, you can do so easily by looking at the advice and approaches taken by investors you admire. This could be people like Warren Buffett or George Soros or Peter Lynch or others whose approaches you find to best match your goals and desires when it comes to your investment portfolio.

You can also research different accepted investment strategies, such as dollar-cost averaging into index funds that track financial markets. If you don’t know a lot about investing and you don’t want to take the time to research what past successful investors have done and how you can implement their ideas, this can be the easiest approach. It simply involves regularly purchasing funds that track the S&P 500 or the stock market as a whole.

Adopting a proven strategy is far more likely to enable you to make money — without spending an unreasonable amount of time or taking on a lot of unnecessary risk — and there’s no real downside to doing so. So, unless there’s a very good reason to, don’t try to get creative with your investing. Just do what Stephan says and copy what works so you can grow your wealth.

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