Non-Finance Book Review: Built for Speed - Bikes, Beers and Balls of Steel by John McGuinness28/12/2019
If you are into Bikes then you must know John McGuinness (and if you don’t, then where on earth have you been hiding?) as he is a true Isle of Man TT legend and I think his number of wins across the different classes only lags that of the true top dog, Joey Dunlop.
This autobiography is very raw and near the knuckle (in other words it is extremely rude in parts and not for the faint hearted or for children !!) and if you read it then it is likely you come away with the view that John is very much from a working class background and his council house upbringing shines through. I guess this explains to a large extent why he comes across in interviews and things as so ‘down to earth’ and he himself admits in the Book that he has not always been the sharpest negotiator when agreeing to contracts to ride for a particular team and he laments that not having a Manager earlier in his career probably held him back a lot. On that subject, it is quite astonishing how little John got paid in the early days and I think he even says somewhere in the book that he would almost have ridden for nothing if it meant he got on a bike and had the chance to compete.
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It’s the classic cliché that all us old gits say about how each year shoots by faster than the one before, and that most definitely applies to 2019 as we near the butt end of it. It really has been quite a year with just so much going on in terms of Politics and Economics etc. but also the Markets have turned out incredibly strong and many People will have brought home some utterly stonking gains. Sadly I am not one of them due to some inefficient Hedging, but it should still have worked out a very good year for me financially and to have done so with very little activity and very little Risk really isn’t too shabby. So I’m pretty happy with how things have gone (especially because the Hedging problems can be fixed) and I’m looking forwards eagerly to 2020.
I have been helped by having other sources of Income apart from just my Stocks and without doubt once Readers head into retirement themselves they will appreciate how handy it is to have other Income Streams and it definitely takes a lot of pressure off and means that Stockmarket gains are largely icing on the cake. I am also helped in this regard by not spending much money and ‘living off thin air’ means you really don’t need to be stressing over the Returns you have coming in.
I often think of subject matter that is way too short to justify its own blog, yet at the same time far too long to just send out via a Tweet and also I would like to store such stuff in the Website Archives so it can be retrieved by anyone who wants it; and of course with Tweets they tend to be quite ephemeral and soon lost in the River Twitter. On the basis of that, I am envisaging that this blog will cover a few possibly unrelated subjects but at least they get captured in ‘black and white’ electron imagery for the future.
Stay in control of your Position Sizes This is something I see so often and I know I have fallen into this trap many times myself in the past. It’s a very simple concept where we buy into a Stock, and we quite like it, and we give it perhaps 4% of our Portfolio and then we leave it to do its stuff. Then it turns out that this one is a real beauty and it keeps steadily pushing higher and after a period of time we find that it has grown to be much larger and could even be up to 12% or our Portfolio or more. If we have a very focused Portfolio with maybe just 10 Holdings or something, then a Stock like this could easily grow to be 20% or more. |
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