At the time of recording this, I'm 44 years old. But if I could go back to give advice to my 20 or 30 year old self so that they could get wealthy faster, retire faster, here is what I would say. Now, because this video contains a lot of tips and a lot of lessons, Winston, my trusty golden retriever, said to me, "Felix, you're going to have to give people a list. Well, how do we how do we make a workbook?" I've done exactly that. It's completely free. You can download it down below at felixfriends.org/4. org/40lessons. And if you go through that, not only do you have my full list, but the little exercises within that, which means you're uh nervous system and your brain is going to absorb this information, and according to Winston, you'll be the richest man alive. My name is Felix. I'm a former wage slave like you might be, and I managed to retire in my early 30s by learning from smart people how to make my money work for me so I didn't have to work for my money. In the next few minutes, I'm going to give you my top 40 lessons that I've learned in the last 13 years in a quick fire away. You might want to take notes of these so that you don't have to go through the decade plus it took me to learn all this. So, let's start off with the mental foundation for becoming a successful investor because this is really the most essential level. Now, number one, anyone can master money. Investing is a skill you can learn with practice. No genius involved. I have like a GPA of 2.5 if you convert my economics degree. I'm not the sharpest tool in the box, but I put in a little bit of effort and I learn from smart people. Number two, patience pays off. Wealth grows slowly and steadily at first. If you stick with it for years, not months, you get there. Warren Buffett, 90% of his wealth was built after his 65th birthday. Doesn't mean it has to take that long, but you want to have a little bit of a longer horizon than most people do. Number three, emotions trip you up. Fear and greed will cloud your judgment. So, you need to have a plan. You need to have rules so you can eliminate those feelings and those emotions in the moment and make smart decision. Number four, knowledge beats luck. Everyone's a freaking genius in a bull market and we probably experienced that recently as you're watching this. But you want to study the market patterns. You want to understand why you're invested in the company. Not because some guy on YouTube is talking about it, but because you could actually write out the three reasons you're in this stock. Random bets rarely win in the long run. Number five, start small and win big. Even $25 a week will build a fortune over over time. begin wherever you are. Obviously, $250 or $2,500 a week or whatever will get you there faster. But compounding is the magic. And if you understand that from a mindset point of view that every little literally helps massively, you're going to get there much much quicker. Ignore the crowd. Popular trends peak and you're going to want to think independently to buy low and sell high. Whereas if you follow the crowd, you tend to buy high and then not sell at all or sell really, really low. Number seven, mistakes teach you. Losing on a bad pick sharpens your skills if you study why you made the mistake. So don't just try to forget about that one. Look into that one really, really hard. Learn and move on. Eight, goals keep you focused. You're going to want to set a clear goal as in I want to have a million dollars by the time I'm 60 or whatever it might be. That will guide every move you have. If you don't have a map with a destination, well, where the heck do you think you're going to arrive? And the first one here, which is our number nine now, compounding is metric. $100 invested a month at just 8% returns, which is way below the market has been for the last 12 years will grow to $149,000 in 30 years. Write that down. $100 a month at 8% is $149,000 in 30 years. So, we can turn pennies into millions. And now you might be thinking, well, maybe I could eliminate $100 of wasteful, pointless spending a month. And now that's actually worth $149,000. Number 10, use the 4% rule. You can withdraw 4% yearly from your investment portfolio without ever running dry. So if you have a million dollar that you're retiring with, you can spend $40,000, no more, no less. Well, obviously less is okay. And your portfolio will continue to keep growing and continue to beat inflation. Number 11, invest weekly or monthly. Putting that 50 bucks a week or that 200 something bucks a month into stocks consistently beats timing for most people, unless you want to spend a little bit of time learning how to do that. Stocks crush inflation. Quality companies outrun rising prices, whereas cash just sits there and shrinks. And people think, oh, inflation is, I don't know, 5%. It's not. If the stock market goes up 12% a year, inflation is actually 12%. Because the guy who's invested, well, he's 12% wealthier than you. So, by comparison, you're 12% poorer if you're sitting in cash. Number 13, slash I debt. Pay off anything over 6% interest first. Investing can't really beat credit card fees. When I first got my first job in corporate, I had a credit card that was nearly maxed out. They always pay off a little bit, but I'd never paid off the whole thing. And it was just this weird mindset that I got myself into that, you know, I can like it was my money. The balance that they gave me was my money. Of course, it isn't. They were just making 20% out of me a year. Finally, I paid the whole thing off in one go. And I've never ever had credit card debt again. I actually pay my credit card off every week. I think it's a great thing to do. It means the balance never gets to a bigger number and it just always goes back to zero. and that you also have that credit balance should you ever need it for something. And then number 14, keep cash handy. You're going to want to save 3 to six months of expenses because emergencies happen. People lose their jobs and that way you don't need to sell stocks to cover them because imagine if you had to sell your stocks right now as I'm recording this. We're in the midst of a major market crash. Would not be a good thing to do, right? So what should it be three months or six months? I'd say it depends on how many income streams you have. If you only have one income stream, six months is probably more safe. If you've got multiple income streams, you know, you could do a little bit less. Number 15, fees steal your money. A 1% fee. Say you're paying a mutual fund or like an ETF, like a 1% fee, and if you have a $100,000 invested, that 1% fee is going to cost you $28,000 over the next 20 years. Can you believe that? $28,000, just 1% fee. So, hunt for low costs if you're invested in index funds. Number 16, budget weekly. Check your spending every week. You're going to find 20 bucks here. You're going to find 50 bucks here. And then you can take that money. You can invest it instead. Go back to the compounding lesson above. I do this every single Sunday. It takes me 30 minutes, maybe an hour every week, and it means I know exactly what's going on. It gives me 52 opportunities a year to pivot and to fix something. It means if I look at those credit card bills, I'll still remember what they are. Whereas if I do at the end of the month, I've got no idea what I spent in week one. So if you take only one lesson away from this, honestly, you do that one, you're going to be a lot wealthier. Now, let's move on to the next section here. How do we choose winning investments with simple high value strategies? You want to buy strong companies. So, you want to buy companies with solid profits, loyal customers, steady beats, flashy, and you're a consumer. You know, some of those companies, right, that you've been buying things from for decades. Maybe your parents been buying from them. Maybe your children are buying from them, and you're kind of starting to realize, okay, they're going to be around. That's probably a pretty good business. Now, what about growth stocks? I'm a fan of investing early into innovative firms. Big risk, yes, but it can mean a big reward. So, how do we deal with that? We put a very small percentage of our portfolio into that. Say 5% is in growth stocks. Maybe it's in five different growth stocks in different sectors. It's a pretty high likelihood that some of those are going to go to zero. But if one of them just 10xes, just the one, well, you will have doubled your money and the other four can go out of business. So, it's sort of adopting the private equity or the venture capital mindset rather than putting all your money on the one thing that's really risky and then if it goes out of business, well, then you're really screwed. Number 19, dividends. People like getting paid on a continuous basis. It's sort of the mindset that we've been taught by having all been wage slaves and salary slaves. So, stocks that pay kind of 3 to 5%, they give you nice cash flow that you could reinvest that money. uh uh you want to look at the tax impact of that. You could spend it if you really want to. Personally, I don't buy stocks for dividends, but I know for some people it's just a sort of calm mindset because it feels like they're getting a salary. So, if that works for you, nothing really wrong with it. Number 20, sell your winners high. Cash out after stocks double. Hang on. Actually, that's the worst advice in the world. People tell you that, right? You don't want to sell your winners early. What you want to do instead is you want to learn how to set a stop-loss rule so that that thing can continue to go up and up and up and up, but eventually when it starts coming down, you're exiting at a really, really good price. I'm going to give you that in just a moment where to set that. 21. You want to drop your losers fast. That's definitely a good rule. If sales tank or the debt spikes or there something terrible happens to the business, don't hope for the turnaround. Don't hope that the new CEO is going to fix it because well, what if he doesn't? It's your money. You can take it out. You can put it into something better. 22. Mix it up. Own some stocks, maybe some real estate, maybe an ETF or two. Don't bet it all on one thing. Having said that, diversification for the sake of it doesn't really help. There is a lovely lesson that nobody really teaches you, which is that 4% of all stocks are responsible for 100% of all gains, which means 96% of all stocks are a waste of life. So, taking that into account, maybe you want to put a little bit more effort into actually learning what makes a great company. Now, number 23, don't buy cheap stocks. Let me repeat that. Don't buy cheap stocks. Write this down. Looking for low PE stocks is just a really really terrible thing to do because low PE stocks usually have a really really bad business underneath it. That's why nobody wants to buy them. So looking for cheap does not work. 24. Check cash flow. And that's one of the things I look up when I look for a really really good business. Companies with lots of cash flow grow stronger because those are real profits. So that's really real money left over after they have to pay any everything. Now a bad miss is let me give you an example. Say you're manufacturing I don't know phones. Um now you sell your first thousand phones. Brilliant. Now you get an order for 10,000 phones. What's your problem? Well, you need to go and take out some more loans. You need more cash so you can build out a bigger factory. You can buy more components. You can have more inventory. And there is no cash left at the end. And then you grow and grow and grow and there is never any cash left. Those kind of businesses suck and they don't have any free cash flow. Now I now let me give you some beginner friendly tools that you can use to just really get good and and get some great data. Now there's one tool which I use every single day. It's called tradevision.io. I'll put a link down below. I got to be transparent about that. We build it. I'm building it with one of my former students. And our goal here is to give you the same quality data that Wall Street has access to. And you can get yourself a free trial to it. It has amazing indicators. It gives you an indication of when you might want to sell, for example, if you're a little bit more of a trader. It gives you those rare breakout move moments which tell you when it might be a really really good really rare opportunity to buy something and and a whole ton of more. You can track your own portfolio in it. You can see darkpool data and a load of other stuff that is just super super useful for investors and traders alike. 26. Buy indices below the 200 day moving average line. What the heck do I mean by that? Well, let's have a look at the NASDAQ for example here. And you can pull open down here an MA 200. That's a 200 day moving average line. Just going to get rid of everything else. You see that gray line there that I'm looking at. That's pretty rare for that to go below this line, that gray line there. I did it briefly here. Doing it right now as I'm recording this nice big crash. And those are moments where you can pick up the index for cheap. Why? Well, because the index will always go up in the long run, but individual stocks will not. So, this does not apply to individual stocks, only to the index. 27. Learn to draw stock trend lines. You're basically connecting low points on a stock chart. And if it goes up, like I've done here, that point and this one, and that one, and this one, and that gives me a trend, right? We break through that trend like we did here catastrophically for Tesla. What does it mean? Well, it meant that that was probably a pretty good point to sell. And well, yes, it absolutely bloody was. That's how we know when to exit if we're a little bit more active. 28. Set stops. Set stop losses. If you're an investor, you could set them at, this is not financial advice. This is just what I I I tend to do at the 150day moving average line. And it means that in a normal kind of market scenario, you rally up quite nicely here. And then as you come down, it means you get a sell signal here, which means you didn't go all the way to the bottom of the market, which is never really fun. It caps losses very simply. 29. Watch volume. Very few people do it, but it's the one thing that tells you a huge amount. For example, you see that beautiful rally up here, right? Volume is nice and high, and then volume starts to flatten out and go down a little bit just as the rally goes a little bit sideways. And then at the moment the stock starts to come down here. Watch out what happened there. Volume spikes again, right? And that's telling you get out. So volume tells you often more than the stock price on its own. Number 30, read those price bars. Big drops followed by a recovery on the chart show that buyers are fighting back. So you're going to look for those shifts. So for example, here we're falling off. little bit of a recovery. Uh but what happens on the recovery? Well, again, volume goes down, we go a little bit sideways, the buyers give up, and then we really, really tank. 31. Track steady trends. Stocks that move up smoothly over months are safer than the ones with wild swings. Tesla, for example, is a stock that has very, very wild swings. Let me give you one that is a little bit less uh wildly swung. For example, Philip Morris, not the most exciting business in the world, but it's a very good stock in my humble opinion. You got that nice sort of longer trend going up here. That's kind of what you want to look at. You kind of want to look at the steady growers. And then 32 spot reversal signs. Three highs or three lows in a row are a hint of a turnaround. Here's a nice example. Here is Amazon. So, we got got one high here. We got one high there. We have another high here. And then the next high is much lower than the previous highs. Right? You see how these were still moving up a little bit. That one much much lower. That's a really really bad thing. So this is like a horrible top situation. Now let's wrap up with some daily practices and some wisdom for for long-term success. Get up at 3:30 in the morning, jump into an ice bath the temperature of 4° and stay there for 12 minutes till you freeze to death. No. People say that that's how they became successful. That is bollocks. they did that or they're doing that now because they're really bored and they're looking for meaning in their life. They got successful by knuckling down and actually studying and getting really good at something. But a little easier than that is, and this is my number 33, plan with a partner. Team up with your better half on money goals. Sit down every week and look at the numbers together. Two heads keep you accountable. Women, by the way, not only about 5% of my viewership are women. I managed to repel the other 95. Um, you guys are better at risk management. So, if you have a better half with you, my male audience, then use it because she's good at the risk management and stuff. That's just what women do. Number 34, tune out the noise. Job reports or rate hikes don't change great stocks. So, focus on the quality of your picks, not the headlines. 35. Reinvest gains. Put your dividends and your profits back in and you will grow so much faster. You wouldn't believe it. And there's no extra effort required. 36. Buy on dips. Market drops are chances to grab more. The easiest thing to buy on a dip is the index because it'll always go up in the long run. If you want to buy individual stocks, you need to understand a little bit more about what makes a great company. Cash flow is one of those things. Great margins. There's some other things to look for, but the index is the easy place to start. And then 37, hold good stuff. Keep winners until they stop being winners. 38. Check your facts quarterly. If you own individual stocks, you need to review whether their companies have gotten better or worse, the business rather, the underlying business every quarter. It'll take you like five minutes per company, per quarter. And think of it this way. If you invested in your best friend's business, do you think you'd look at his finances once a quarter? Probably, right? It's the same thing if you own a stock. You actually own a business. And number 39, invest before spending. Always invest first, then spend what's left over. Don't do the other way around because that way you prioritize wealth building and that way you get to freedom faster. And that way you can escape the slavery that most people find themselves in. 40. Stay the course. Markets will always wobble, but steady investing wins. Don't quit when it's tough. That's actually the best opportunity for you. You got some value out of this. Share it with a friend or two or three or five. I wish you a tremendously successful year. All the best.