We live in a day and age when I need to include some personal stories in my updates to prove I’m not an AI bot. I aim to still keep it relevant to the topic of investing.

Over the weekend, my teen athlete saw the fruits of his labor in an offer to play youth soccer in the Elite Academy League. It resulted from thousands of hours of technical training, strength training, endurance training, and leadership training, all combined with his focus on nutrition. He only started taking soccer seriously three years ago. Most kids playing at his level started training much earlier than he did. He knew that if he wanted an opportunity to play at a competitive level, he would have to work harder than the rest to catch up to or surpass his peers’ abilities. Eating clean when they’re eating junk, drinking water when they’re drinking Coke, and running sprints when they’re playing video games. He put in the work, and it is paying dividends.

Investing is no different. It takes thousands of hours of study to learn how to do it well, but you get out what you put in. Luck has nothing to do with it. Time passes by regardless of what you do with it, so you might as well do something that will eventually pay off. Studying fundamental analysis helped, but it was decades of experience that made me into the investor I am today. My athlete didn’t master a skill the first time, the 100^th time, or the 1400^th time. But he chose to try again for the 1500^th time, and then mastery was his. You have to be willing to fail 1400 times and keep trying.

To be clear, we don’t force this on my teenager. It has been his dream to play soccer at the highest level. He can pursue any dream he wants. I wouldn’t care if it’s ballet or the Math Olympiad; I just ask that whatever his dream is, he puts in the effort to achieve it. Hoping it will happen is far less effective than putting in the work to make it happen. Again, I draw a parallel to investing. Don’t hope your stock picks will win. Put in the work to understand fundamentals to determine which stocks are in the best position to win. This is actually far easier than athletics. You don’t have to fail at it 1400 times to master it. That would get expensive. You just have to read books and pay attention – skills you mastered in first grade.

Back in the 90s, do-it-yourself online investing came onto the scene, and everyone wanted to learn how to pick stocks. A popular strategy back then was to buy stock in products you liked to purchase, such as Starbucks or Nike. There was no emphasis on researching that company’s fundamentals; just your taste in their product was touted as a reason to invest. I like Oreos. Always have. Had I owned stock in the company that makes Oreos over the last two years, I would have earned a 2.7% return on my investment over those two years. I’ve never purchased a GPU made by Nvidia. My little laptop only needs to run Office software and an internet browser. Nvidia shareholders have captured gains of 392% over the last two years. There needs to be a really good fundamental reason to own shares of a company, not just an affinity for snack foods. This is not an investment recommendation, only an example to illustrate a point. I don’t advocate investing in something just because it did well in the past. I advocate investing in something because its fundamentals show a likelihood of doing well in the future.

There’s an app for your phone that will track your spending and build an investment portfolio for you based on your purchases. It’s the same strategy from the 90s – invest where you spend. I would end up with shares of Chevron, Target, Costco, and coffee franchises, some of which don’t meet my fundamental criteria. How often does your credit card statement show transactions at large tech companies? Tech is one of the sectors I currently focus on.

In soccer training and in investing, a contrarian viewpoint helps. Just doing what everyone else does isn’t a strategy. There are players with exceptional ball-control skills, but they don’t have the power left in their legs to win a sprint to the ball in the 50^th minute of play. My athlete’s ball-control skills are good enough, but his sprint is where he shines. He can get to the ball when no one else can. And he can do it for 60 minutes of play without fatigue. That came from sprinting and distance running on his days off, while many elite players practiced juggling the ball. It doesn’t matter how well you can handle the ball if you can’t win the ball first. This echoes a concept from my book Makings of a Millionaire, where I teach beginning investors that focusing all their time on trying to pick the best stocks is less effective in building wealth than focusing on earning money to invest in the first place. The fastest race car in the world goes nowhere without gas in the tank.

My kid also chose an unpopular position – center back. It’s all grit and no glory. He doesn’t get to score goals. It’s his job to stay back in his position while the others go for the glory. He does his job well. Every player wants to be a striker and a star of the show. Few want to be the center back. A lot of players showed up at tryouts to fight for a striker position on the team. Few showed up to fight to be center back. You really have to want to be on the team to be willing to be the center back. Family members come to watch his games, and they ask me, “When does he get a turn to score a goal?” He doesn’t. Then they ask me why he’s even here. It’s because there’s no place he’d rather be.

Plenty of investors and even fund managers want to become a star by picking the hottest stocks and winning the most exciting returns. It’s harder to stick with a steady and stable growth stock like Microsoft. Microsoft doesn’t make exciting headlines like Nvidia, nor wild returns. But they keep doing what a portfolio needs, like a strong center back. I can’t see a winning team or a winning portfolio without a blue chip as steady as MSFT or a center back willing to train this hard to excel at a job that most players don’t want.

In February, after capturing nearly 11% gains by trimming shares from an overweight position in AAPL, the Mainsail Equity Model at Northshore Wealth Management saw an attractive entry point to deploy cash into additional shares of MSFT. Today, while many stocks are down, those shares of MSFT have captured a 6% gain. We’re exchanging those shares of MSFT to capitalize on an attractive entry point again for AAPL. The Mainsail Equity Model seeks opportunities in blue-chip growth stocks with the flexibility to capitalize on fluctuation. It’s an actively managed allocation model with a buy-and-hold growth strategy focused on fundamental analysis, supplementing its returns through active trading based on technical analysis. Does it take a lot of work? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes.

This is not a recommendation to sell MSFT or to buy AAPL. This is an update on activity in our Mainsail Equity Model. This is a recommendation to set a goal for yourself and then put in the work and sweat to make it happen.

Live long and live well,

Alyse