Stephan Hanner

My story of how I got into investing started in 2014. I had inherited some stock a few years earlier and I had seen how well they performed over the years. This made me curious about the stock market so I decided that five weeks would be a suiting amount of time to spend in learning about this. Five weeks later and it was quite clear to me that I had very little knowledge on this subject. I had just scratched the surface. So a new phase ensued. I got hold of some books about investing, and now the real learning started. A surprising thing to me was that I found it interesting, since I couldn’t understand how numbers and digits from different companies could interest anyone. After almost a year of learning from some of the great gurus (that’s how they’re called) I was evaluating business and found some that I realized filled all the criteria for a worthy investment. It was time to start buying. Then in my first year of investing I was surprised. Why? Because I was beating the market with a comfortable margin with my first investments. I guess I was surprised that the success had come right away, without a period of trial and error. In hindsight it really isn’t that surprising. Anyone could have done the same using their knowledge. I was applying the strategies of the best investors in the world and I was just disciplined in doing exactly how they did. That my results were close to theirs is just logical. I guess I was just surprised that it happened so early. This went on for a few years, and I kept getting good results from the market while also obtaining a degree in languages on the side. But I also had a few learning experiences from the market. My most important one, I think, was that I diverged slightly from the strategies of the gurus during a period. Up until then I had had a few successful years on the market, but here my returns diverged as a result. Still okay, but not as good as before. Probably a good lesson for any investor to learn. And fairly easy to remedy. Later I started to find myself in conversations with friends and colleagues who were curious about investing. These conversations seemed to always follow the same pattern, and the idea to write a book about how anyone could benefit from the market was born. So that’s my story about how I got into this. But not everything in life is investing (even if 99,8% is) and it’s good to have other interests on the side as well. When I’m not investing or writing books about the subject I can be found exploring the world of retro video games together with friends, searching for odd teas or learning new languages (four so far). I also don’t pass on an opportunity for some good freediving, something I’ve practiced on three different continents so far. Hopefully this number will go up in the future.