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The game of Scrabble, however, taught me it’s not WHERE you put your money that makes you an investor or a gambler but WHY you decide where to put your money.
Do you know what “stems” are? In Scrabble, stems are five or six letter combinations of the most popular letters that if you add another letter you will likely get new word. For example: add an S to STARE and it becomes STARES. Add an X to SATINE becomes SEXTAIN.
Do you know the Q words that don’t have the letter U such as QAT, QOPF, QI, or QANAT?
Do you know all the 3 and 4 letter J words?
I still don’t know all the answers to these questions but all it took me was getting annihilated game after game by my aunt to realize there was more to Scrabble than just blindly grabbing tiles (mutual funds/stocks/bonds) and hoping with just my knowledge of common words I could earn enough points (dollars) to help me win the game (retire on time).
It doesn’t matter what they’re buying (mutual funds/stocks/bonds), investors already know what traits they are looking for in their purchase, how this new purchase will complement their current holdings and they will tell you multiple reasons why they’re buying what they’re buying.
Gamblers, on the other hand, tend to just have one reason why they bought something: someone else (magazine, neighbor, advisor, etc.) said I should.
Look at your portfolio. How many of your holdings were purchased by you the “investor” or by you the “gambler”?
