Selective Learning

Francis Melia Tweeted "if you want to maximize your muscle growth potential, don't do keto." Melia is quite a bit younger than me and I included him on a Health list that I created on Twitter. 

Side bar, using lists on Twitter is a huge productivity boost.

His tweet is interesting because it is rare to find too much negative sentiment about keto but the comments on his tweet all piled on the anti-keto theme. If you don't know, keto is short for ketogenic diet which is usually no more than 30 carbohydrates per day. It is built on the idea that just about all health problems stem from too much sugar/carbs. Our metabolisms cannot burn fat until sugar has been depleted so exercise alone is very unlikely to result in meaningful fat loss. 

I'm a walking testimonial for this. I found out I was prediabetic when I was 50, despite being fit. I learned about cutting carbs, my prediabetes reversed right away and I lost 30 pounds I didn't know I needed to lose. I was lucky though that I did not need to go full keto. I reversed the prediabetes and lost the first 20 pounds cutting to 100 carbs/day, a far cry from 30 and then I made my way down to 60-70 carb/day and have been there for the last four+ years.

Melia and other workout experts do allow for more carb consumption than what keto calls for. What I don't see very often is anyone who has settled in where I have with carb count, at 60-70/day. The point is not that I am right about what people should do but to repeat a longstanding theme here, is that to find what works for me, I've taken bits of process from different sources to create my own process. 

This can all be an analogy for investing. Melia clearly has success lifting weights and eating a lot of carbs but his objectives as a much younger dude are clearly different than mine. I still have learned about weightlifting from him, that part of his process I can use but very little carbs and not eating before working out, bits of process I took from other people.

Think about your investment process. If you've taken anything from me, cool, but it seems unlikely that you'd take everything from a source. I believe in holding a little bit of gold, not because it necessarily hedges inflation but because it has the tendency to have a low correlation to equities far more often than not and that still works. Despite the inflation situation, stocks have gone higher so gold has gone lower as I would expect. That won't resonate with a lot of people. I am a big fan of trying to manage portfolio volatility but again does not resonate with everyone, maybe not even most people. 

I think there is a balance to be struck in how to learn and take from other people while leaving the things you don't need. I've noticed that in the various segments of Twitter I engage with or otherwise follow there seems to be shared political ideologies that to me are irrelevant to the topic. I don't really care about the political views from the workout guys or the Doomer Optimists although I am interested in the connection between Bitcoin and Libertarianism. I lean Libertarian in terms of smaller government and autonomy but not as hardcore as I perceive the Bitcoin crew to be. The balance there is I am interested in how they connect the two (Bitcoin and Libertarianism) but haven't changed my view on things. 

On a related note the ergodicity embedded into index investing is certainly interesting so I go part of the way down that road having held quite a few individual stocks and narrow ETFs for 10-15 years but I am far from passive.

The thing that really matters is that what you decide to do, with investing and beyond, has to make sense to you and you need to have a reasonable basis to believe that the approach you plan to take will get the job done. The other day I mentioned the guy who placed 1000 trades in one day. That could never work for me, I have no idea if it even works for him (will give him the benefit of the doubt) but he has interesting things to say about asymmetry which is all I take from him. 

It's ok to not agree with everything someone else says.