Please I want to be bastardly rich. How do I go about it?
While I am not bastardly rich (yet). I think I have done enough research to tell you how.
1. Get a job.
It could be anything but you need something that pays you to have enough money to invest and grow your wealth, and if you need to upskill to get a better-paying job, then do so. Regardless you need a source of constant inflow.
2. Pay your debts.
Especially the ones with interests. While borrowing is not a bad concept in finance, you should only borrow when you stand to gain more in the form of investments. Which I’ll get to.
3. Cut down your spending.
A lot of the things we pay for or buy are unnecessary, waste, redundant and luxurious even if we aren’t rich yet, for example, if you pay for both Netflix and Amazon Prime, why? Sometimes you pay for a subscription you do not even use, if possible, have a budget and track all your spending from time to time. You should know where every kobo of your money is going, You want to make sure you are not leaking funds. And Finally, just because you can afford it, doesn’t mean you should pay for it, so for example, if you use iPhone 11, and your 11 is working just fine, there is absolutely no need to upgrade to the latest even if you have the cash. You can use it for years until it breaks. The goal is to build wealth not live like you’re rich when in reality you aren’t. Being rich is based on how much you have, not how much you spend. When you spend it, you no longer have it.
4. Save.
Having savings is very important, for two reasons. One is for emergencies, so you do not have to go against your budget in case of unforeseen events. The second is very similar, but that is in case you lose your job or your investments fail, so you do not have to start from 0 again or borrow, and you can have something to live on while you work on your next move.
And this should be done in 3 ways. Many people would like to say these are an option but I have never seen a bastardly rich man without these 3 investments:
A. Your own business.
Have a for-profit business that does something meaningful which you can maintain to earn more or build to the point where you can sell it to an even bigger company.
B. Real Estate.
And I don’t mean buying land 5 minutes away from the Dangote refinery and hoping that the price rises in 5 years. But rather more like owning houses and having tenants or buying, renovating then reselling those houses. These are also great options for constant inflow.
C. Stocks.
You should learn how to invest in stocks of companies like Tesla – TSLA and Apple – AAPL and also smaller companies with great potential as well as index funds like the Vanguard 500 index funds ETF – VOO. And others. It’s important to learn and do your research cos this is just me citing examples and not financial advice. Check out this Stocks investment guide
6. Read and watch a lot of finance books and videos.
There is a lot I possibly can not put in one post and a lot of not common knowledge that you can only know by reading finance books.
7. Japa
Yes. Nigerian economy is relatively small and weak. You cannot become bastardly rich in Nigeria cos the economy can’t support it, to be a billionaire for example that billion dollars has to come from somewhere, and since we do not have that many billionaires in Nigeria, plus most of the population are very poor, your chances are very very very slim. However people do, but there is a common trend with them, most are government-affiliated, so you know its either forced or stolen.
8. Be prepared to take calculated risks
And while this can mean different things, I am just going to add here that many bastardly rich people have had to make some very difficult decisions in their lives, some of which are against their characters, morals, will and sometimes agaist the law. As you grow in wealth, one day yours will come, and it’s important to make the right decision, cos sometimes, the risk might be worth it.
This is the ULTIMATE GUIDE on How to Invest in US Stocks.
In this post, I will teach you how to invest and make money, in a simple and easy way.
I want to keep this post as short as possible so let us get right into it.
Disclaimer:
This is not financial advice; I am only teaching you how to use the tools available to do your research and make your own decisions on what to invest in. Like any other form of investment, Stocks also involve a fair amount of risk, so make your own informed decisions and talk to a financial expert if need be.
What is Investment?
First of all, what does it mean to invest? Well, it is kind of like buying something, anything, for example, buying a smartphone, and then keeping it until the price of the phone you bought has changed, so you then go back to sell it to someone else at the new price.
But in this case, we won’t be buying physical products like smartphones, we would be buying stocks instead.
While there are other forms of investment we can make, like in crypto or real estate, I will be focusing on stocks in this post alone, because, unlike crypto, stocks are not as volatile, as it is regulated and do not just depend on demand and supply, and unlike real estate, stocks do not require you to have a large amount of capital.
Also, you might be surprised to know that you can still invest in crypto and real estate using stocks. I will teach you everything here.
What are Stocks?
Stocks are ownership in a real existing company, for example, buying stocks in Apple means you own part of Apple.
Owning stocks of a company sometimes means that you even get to vote on decisions made in that company, while in some other cases, the company gives you part of the profits made, as an owner that you are.
If the value of the company goes up, so does your stock value, and you can then sell at the new price, and make profits.
Where can I buy Stocks?
You can only buy stocks in a company that is “publicly traded”, meaning that the company has allowed anyone in the public to be able to buy shares in their company, and for them to do this, they have to be on what’s called the Stock Exchange, which is like a marketplace you go to to sell your stocks.
The marketplace is regulated by different regulatory bodies, many countries have their own Stock Exchange, for example, the NGX (formally NSE) is the Nigerian Exchange Group which regulates the market of publicly traded Nigerian companies, while the NYSE (The New York Stock Exchange) and NASDAQ regulates the Stock Exchange for publicly traded US companies.
These regulations by the Stock Exchange is a lot but most importantly, unlike private companies, public companies must disclose their financial and business information regularly to the public, this means that how well or bad a stock does on the Stock Exchange is not just random or entirely left to demand and supply, it is many times based on news of how the company is actually doing in real life, and because of this, just like companies do not open on weekends or holidays, so does the stock market.
This is one reason why investing in stocks is not as risky as some other kinds of investments that are totally left to the forces of demand and supply. Before investing in any company stocks, you can and should learn about the company, learn about how they earn revenue, review their quarterly reports and subscribe to news about the company.
ONLY INVEST IN COMPANIES YOU KNOW AND TRUST, not companies some random guy told you to.
The companies I will mention in this post are only used as examples to teach you how to invest.
How To Buy US Stocks In Nigeria
To continue, we need to download Bamboo. Bamboo is an app that allows us to buy stocks listed on the NASDAQ and NYSE Stock Exchanges, and the NGX.
Other apps can be used for this but I will only recommend Bamboo because that is what I personally use, and it is the best for stock investment.
After you have downloaded the app, tap on “start building wealth” to create an account and complete all steps in the signup process.
Fund your wallet
Now it is time to fund your wallet, you can do this in multiple ways, but what you should know is that there are 2 main wallets, a USD wallet and an NGN (Naira) Wallet.
Funding the NGN wallet is like funding any other Nigerian app wallet, tap on your NGN wallet and tap on deposit, enter an amount, a minimum of $1 when converted so you can literally start with 2k, choose your preferred payment method, you can either transfer or use your Naira card. It is that easy.
Similar to the USD wallet, the process is the same, you can fund your wallet using a USD/domiciliary card from any bank or you can transfer to a brokerage account using Swift or ACH, for those that know.
However, because we are buying stocks of American companies, we buy every stock in USD.
Meaning that after you fund your NGN wallet, you have to convert that NGN to USD, using the transfer option, when you tap in your NGN wallet, just beside the deposit button, you can easily convert your Naira to USD.
Let’s buy some US stocks
Now we have our USD, it is time to buy some stocks. You can go back to the homepage and tap on “Invest” in the bottom navigation. There you will see a long list of companies to choose from and you can even search for a particular company.
Searching for a company is easy, this is because every company on the Stock Exchange has a ticker symbol, which is like a username to help identify specific companies. So for example, the ticker symbol of Apple is “AAPL”, while Alphabet(google’s parent company) is GOOG.
You can of course just search for the company names in full, but if you know their ticker symbol (which you can just google), it is a lot more straightforward, as multiple companies can have similar names.
When you find the company you want, you can tap to see the company details, its stock chart, recent news about the company and just a lot more.
Bamboo shows a lot of information to help you make a decision, so much so that I cannot possibly list each and everyone here.
But just below all that information is the “BUY” button.
When you tap on buy, you are presented with a couple of options, with explanations of what those options mean, but let us just tap on “Buy Now”.
Enter the amount you want to buy, review the order and complete your purchase
Congratulations, you just bought your first stock.
You can do the same process for any other companies you are looking to invest in, or if you do not have the funds yet, you can just add that company to your wishlist using the love icon in the top right corner of the company details.
If you are not sure what companies to Invest in, Bamboo offers “personalised investment”, where by answering a few questions, Bamboo can recommend a list of companies to invest in based on your risk appetite. This can be found at the top of the list on the Invest page.
But even on top of that, Bamboo has various categories of stocks you can invest in, including “the Magnificent 7” (the 7 most popular stocks), stocks their ambassador like Falz are invested in, stocks world-renowned investors and finance experts like Warren Buffet are invested in, and categories based on different industries like REIT for Real Estate and Bitcoin stocks.
What are Bitcoin Stocks (ETFs)?
Bitcoin Stocks, you ask? Well, first I have to explain what is called an ETF.
ETFs, or Exchange-Traded Funds, are investment funds that are traded on a Stock Exchange, just like individual stocks, but rather than an individual stock, it is usually a collection of multiple individual stocks or multiple assets in other forms.
They are designed to track the performance of a specific index, sector, commodity, or asset. This means that when you buy shares in an ETF, you are essentially buying a piece of a portfolio that represents a particular market index or sector.
Think of an ETF as a basket of fruits sold at a market. Each fruit in the basket represents a different company’s stock. When you buy the basket (the ETF), you’re buying a small piece of each fruit (each company’s stock) within it.
This allows you to own a variety of fruits (stocks) without having to buy each one individually. And just like how the price of the fruit basket depends on the prices of the individual fruits, the price of an ETF changes throughout the day based on the total value of the assets it holds.
The S&P 500
The most popular ETF is one you have probably heard of, it is the S&P 500. The S&P 500, or Standard & Poor’s 500, is a stock market index that tracks the performance of 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S. It is like investing in the biggest 500 companies at once.
However, note that they are different S&P 500 ETFs, but the most popular one is the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF and the ticker symbol for that is VOO. ETFs are just like individual stocks so they all also have ticker symbols.
Other ETFs
Similar to the S&P 500, there are different ETFs on Real Estate that track the real estate market and on physical commodities like Gold and Oil, as well as Crypto.
So you can invest in various things and various industries, all using ETFs, all on the Bamboo app. That’s why when people ask me about getting started in Investment, I tell them that the Bamboo app is all they need for real.
Diversification
This is also great because, every financial expert will tell you the importance of diversification, you should diversify your portfolio into different stocks and ETFs to help reduce risks and make your portfolio more stable.
Conclusion
So back on your homepage, you would find your investments, with two options, “US Stocks” and “Fixed Returns”. Fixed returns we would maybe talk about in another post but US Stocks is where we can click to see the list of your current investments and wishlists.
On the US stocks page, You will see a button called “breakdown”, tap here to see a full breakdown of your investments including charts, and other useful data. On this page, you would also see your Portfolio “Cost Basis” and “Current Value”.
Cost Basis is how much you invested and current value is how much you have right now.
So now you know how to buy stocks and how to track your investments.
If you want to learn more about investing, bamboo has a tab called “learn” specially dedicated to that.
If you want to stay ahead of the curve and make the right investments, there are tons of YouTube channels and Twitter profiles you can follow, but you can also join Bamboo’s Whatsapp channel to get the latest news and information on what’s happening to help you make better decisions, because like I said, Stocks are not entirely a gamble, they are affected by real-life choices, news and announcements, so being an investor in stocks means you have to follow the news and watch out for useful information.
That is all for today, if you have any questions, please let me know below.
If you invested ₦100,000 on the 1st of January 2024, in these options, how much would you have today, at the end of 12 months? (January – December, 2024)
⚠️*THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE*⚠️
1. Left in a Nigerian savings account: ~₦90,000
2. Just converted to Dollars: ~₦136,844 ($83.19)
*Saving & Investments Apps*
3. Piggyvest (Quick Save): ~₦120,000 (*up to)
4. Piggyvest (Piggybank): ~₦114,000
5. Locked in Piggyvest (SafeLock): ~₦114,000- ₦120,000
6. Locked in Piggyvest (Target Savings/HouseMoney/Flex Naira): ~₦112,000
7. Added in Piggyvest (Flex Naira): ~₦112,000
8. Added in Piggyvest (Flex Dollar): ~₦146,402 ($89)
9. Cowrywise (Save by myself): ~₦114,000
10. Locked in Bamboo Fixed Investment (364 days): ~₦147,800 ($89.85)
11. Locked in Bamboo Treasury Bills (359 days): ~₦127,261.51
“~” means “Approximate”. The figures above are not accurate to the dot, it is just an estimate based on the information accessible, some other contexts and nuances can make your final value differ slightly.
2024 is gone and today is the first day of a brand new year, which means today is the beginning of another opportunity to take investing seriously.
Crypto bros. Congrats on your brand-new cars and welcome to the bull market. This might be the first bull run for most of you and it pleases me to see a lot of you all leaving the trenches. I bought my first BTC in 2016 at $900 (I believe) way before most of you knew anything about blockchain technology. Made close to $650k at the height of the bull market in 2021 and round-tripped the entire thing until I had very little to show for it. I do not want you to make some of the mistakes that I made so please take the time to read this post.
First, do not think that you’re now invincible cos you made life changing money from solana memes. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. They say “market giveth and market taketh”. The point of making life changing money is to ensure that your life is actually changed forever and that you never go back to the trenches. You need to be smart and be nimble about your strategy.
Sure by all means, treat yourself with your brand new cars, you’ve earned it. Whats the point of making money if you don’t change the quality of your life anyways but always remember that you need to have a plan. Take a chunk of that money out of crypto else you’d regret it.
Life-changing money means different things to different people. For some, it’s $1m and for others it’s even $10m or as low as $20k. I like to define life changing money as money that you’ve never seen in your entire life. The moment you see money that you’ve never seen in your entire life stacked in your wallet, you need to switch to defense mode.
Remember the golden rule; you build wealth by taking high risks and sustain it by switching to defense mode by taking low risks. So here’s what I would do if I were you:
1. Convert 30% of your portfolio into USDT and USDC. Split both equally and gradually increase your stables allocation by say 5% every month. When it gets to the 50% mark, reduce the allocation to 2.5% every month up until a max of 60% stables.
2. Hold some of that money in actual fiat. Open bank accounts with crypto-friendly banks like Xapo and Mural to have a stash. I don’t recommend keeping your money in any Nigerian DOM account.
3. Invest in real estate. Remember the entire idea is sustaining your wealth and not being aggressive.
4. Allocate another sum into stocks and ETFs. Frankly, just leave picking of stocks for the experts and put your money into ETFs. I have my money in QQQ, MSCI world and emerging markets MSCI. A good ETF delivers between 8-12% per annum net of mgt fees.
5. Startups: Thanks to platforms like https://hoaq.co, you can invest in vetted startups across Africa with as little as $1k I think. To be honest, startup investing is like the lottery. Many of the startups you’ll make investments in will inevitably die but it’s a numbers game and working with the experienced professionals at platforms like Hoaq improves your chances of making pretty decent returns from startup investing.
5. Self development: You see, I have been an investment professional for over a decade with experience that cuts across Corporate finance, Investment banking and Private Equity and across the entire spectrum, crypto is one where you don’t really need technical skills to make money except you’re a futures trader. Trust me, I know how to track wallets and use Bullx to find the next 100x plays but i stopped cos it’s no longer worth my while. Making money from solana memes is mostly about luck and getting the right info. You don’t really learn any real life skill of practical use in the real life. Take some days off to improve yourself. Take up soft and hard skills courses on coursera and Udemy so that the world doesn’t leave you behind while you’re neck deep in solana trenches. A word is enough for the wise.
Had to do this thread cos I have gotten a lot of messages from really young guys who have made life changing money this year and not sure what to do with it. Hope you learnt a thing or two. Selah
