What Is Kingswell All About, Anyway?

I may not have been lucky enough to stumble upon the teachings of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at a young age, but I can do my best to spread their message now.

Last week, a very kind reader left the following comment:

You are performing a valuable service in bringing a great deal of additional history [about Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway] to our attention … Your work will help younger generations, who were unable to attend earlier meetings, learn how to become well-trained investors, and, indeed, wiser human beings.

☺️☺️☺️☺️☺️

I really do try my best to avoid any navel-gazing around these parts, so I hope that sharing this comment does not appear too self-congratulatory. But, I must admit, it’s especially gratifying to read this one because it gets right to the heart of why I started Kingswell in the first place.

This might sound like a strange thing for someone who writes an investing-focused newsletter to say, but I was well out of college before I knew anything about the stock market. (And some might argue that I still don’t know anything now…)

I was not a precocious young investor like Warren Buffett, who devoured financial books as a child and bought his first shares at age 11. Or a teenage Tom Gayner, who watched Wall Street Week on Friday nights with his grandmother. Or Berkshire director Wally Weitz, who plowed all of his lawn-mowing money into the market.

In fact, I never even heard of Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, or Berkshire Hathaway until I was in my mid-twenties. (Which really took some doing considering I majored in business management.)

And even when I did start to learn about investing, I had an incredibly blinkered view of the whole thing. I thought that stocks were only there to be traded — and that, to have any success at all, you needed to be constantly moving in and out of positions.

At one point, I even toted around a Jim Cramer book that I picked up at a used bookstore. Like I said, I didn’t know anything about this stuff.

I certainly didn’t know that buy-and-hold investing was a thing. Or that the very best investors of all time preached a patient, methodical approach.

So, in summary, I got a very late start to the money game.

And, as such, squandered the chance for a great deal of long-term compounding.

(I don’t even like to look at those compounding charts that show how much you could earn by starting your investments at various ages. It depresses me too much.)

I really wish someone had walked up to me in high school or college and said, “Hey, have you heard of Warren Buffett? Here, read his letters or listen to this speech.”

I don’t think that I’m overstating it when I say that an early exposure to the wit and wisdom of Buffett, Munger, and so many others can change a person’s life.

So, basically, that’s what I set out to do with Kingswell. I may not have been lucky enough to stumble upon these teachings at a young age, but I can do my best to spread the message now.

Nobody came up to me and told me about Warren Buffett — but maybe I can be that person for someone else.

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What is Kingswell?

Kingswell is a place to get rich slow with a mix of stock market history, timeless investing principles, and tips on becoming a more intelligent investor.

Stock picking and short-term gyrations in price dominate so much of the Wall Street conversation — while the crucial foundation of a composed and rational mindset falls forgotten by the wayside.

Anyone can outsource the nitty-gritty of investing to a money manager or an index fund. Select an ETF that covers a wide swath of the market — like SPY or VOO for the S&P 500 — and dollar cost average your way to big bucks (over the course of several decades).

What you can’t outsource, though, is the patience and discipline needed to stay the course when storm clouds thunder overhead.

Panicked, emotional trading has robbed investors of more money than all the bad stock tips in the world.

But don’t despair: This is actually good news.

Not every person is blessed with the kind of “money mind” necessary for prescient stock picking. But everyone can embrace their inner sluggard by making regular contributions to an ETF (or individual blue-chip stocks) and then sitting on their hands while the magic of compound interest does its thing.

No genius required.

Just the proper mindset.

In a nutshell, that’s what this newsletter is all about. I think it’s incredibly important for investors of all stripes to immerse themselves in the stories and lessons of the past and present. Including historical examples of fortunes won and lost in the market, as well as careful scrutiny of how the greats go about their business today.

I’ll leave it to others to write highly-detailed, technical breakdowns of a particular company’s financials and future outlook. They’ll do a better job than I ever could.

Here at Kingswell, my mission is simple — and lifted straight out of the preface to Adam Smith’s The Money Game: “Enjoy the stories, they always teach more than the rules.”

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The Journey So Far

I started this newsletter in January 2022 with zero following. I had no email list to import. No social media footprint at all. Nothing. I was starting from scratch.

If you go back to some of my earliest posts, they might have 1 or 2 likes at most. (Which would be my mom and my brother.) It was kind of like sending my writing out into the void each week. I’m still not entirely sure why I didn’t give up.

Two and a half years later, Kingswell is nearing 6,000 total subscribers — which totally blows my mind. More than anything, it’s incredibly humbling to have the support and trust of so many readers.

Not to mention receiving feedback like this from one of my writing idols…

Last September, this newsletter also became a Substack Bestseller — which blew my mind all over again. Let me pause here to offer my unending thanks to those who fork over their hard-earned money to keep Kingswell afloat. I could not do it without you!

Despite all that, this newsletter is not even close to self-sustaining. I still have big goals for it ahead — 10,000 total subscribers and 1,000 paid supporters are the next ones — both of which remain far off in the distance.

For anyone not familiar with how Kingswell operates, here’s the spiel:

• I write 1-2 articles each week — including a new edition of the Berkshire Beat on Fridays with all of the latest Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway news.

• Currently, paid supporters receive an annotated transcript of a Berkshire-related interview, speech, or Q&A session each month.

  • Plus, starting in July, there will also be a new quarterly bonus for paid subs that I’m pretty excited about. Stay tuned for the announcement next month!

• You can also follow me on Twitter/X for more of the same.

And, if you haven’t done so already, please subscribe to Kingswell before you go.