My son Teddy just finished his freshman year of high school. Now he's home for the summer. He gets to do pretty much whatever he wants during summer, but we encourage him to keep his mind sharp. We have him block out two 30 minute blocks for reading, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. This year he selected Stephen King's Green Mile for his book.
Like me, math isn't Teddy's strong suit so we have him dedicate 30 minutes to math each day. I got tired of writing out math problems so I decided to take him to Barnes & Noble's to pick out a math workbook. This doesn't take very long. Teddy grabs the first math book he sees and says, “This is good, let's go.”
One day after lunch and I said to him with fake excitement “It's math time! Grab your workbook!” He grumbled and opened his book. He set a 30 minute timer and I went back to my office. 10 minutes later he came in my office and said, “This math book is boring.” I said, “Fine, what are you going to do instead?” He said, “Why can't you teach me about investing?” Teddy can be pretty slick at times. He knows I love talking about investing. There's math involved. I thought about it and decided this is a great opportunity to teach him about investing and finance. Besides, if I don't teach him how to invest, then how's he ever going to learn? Public schools don't teach it. Colleges may or may not teach it. I said, “Let's do it! We'll start tomorrow afternoon.”
I had him come up with a list of companies he'd be interested in learning more about. He started naming companies and we wrote them down... Dr. Pepper, Coke, Oculus, SnapChat, YouTube, EA Sports, Riddell (football equipment), Panini (football cards), Star Wars, Marvel, Funko (the popular figurines with over-size heads), and Nike.
Next we went through his list of companies to see which ones were publicly traded. I explained to him that not all companies offer stock to purchase. There are public companies and private companies. Private companies don't offer stock for purchase. He was disappointed to learn Riddell and Panini are private companies. We removed them from the list. The rest of the companies were all in play. He learned Star Wars and Marvel are both owned by Disney. YouTube is owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company. Oculus is owned by Meta, Facebook and Instagram's parent company.
I had Teddy pick one company off his list to research. I'll share the stock Teddy selected in an upcoming newsletter. For now I'd like to give you an opportunity to create a list of companies you're interested in. This list is called your Circle of Competence.
