I was ten years old and I had saved up enough to open an account. My parents didn’t push me into it — I pushed myself. I’d been reading about compound interest in some book aimed at kids, and I remember thinking: this seems like something you should start as soon as possible.
So I did.
The first thing I bought, I didn’t fully understand. I understood the name of the company. I understood that they made something I used. What I didn’t understand was that a company making a product you like and a company being a good investment are almost entirely unrelated concepts.
I lost money. Not a lot in dollar terms — at ten, I didn’t have a lot to lose — but enough to sting. More importantly, I lost the comfortable illusion that following the news and buying recognizable names was a strategy.
That loss was the best thing that could have happened.
It sent me to primary sources. Not investment newsletters or YouTube videos but the actual documents — 10-Ks, earnings releases, analyst letters. Buffett’s shareholder letters. Charlie Munger on psychology and markets. I read things I only half-understood and went back and read them again.
The fog lifted slowly. I started to see the difference between a business and a stock price. Between a competitive moat and a recognizable brand. Between price and value.
I won’t claim I became a sophisticated investor at twelve. But I became a serious one. The kind who thinks before buying. The kind who asks “what could go wrong?” as often as “what could go right?” The kind who knows that discipline compounds better than intelligence.
People sometimes ask if I think starting this young gave me an advantage.
The honest answer is: yes and no. The technical knowledge I’ve built is real. But the more valuable thing I got wasn’t knowledge — it was time. Time to be wrong without it mattering too much. Time to sit with bad decisions and understand them rather than just moving on. Time to develop a process through repetition rather than theory.
The vineyard at the end of the road makes a lot more sense when you’ve watched something compound for years. You start to understand why patience isn’t passive — it’s a discipline as demanding as any active one.
The market has been teaching me for seven years now. I’m still paying tuition. I expect I always will be.