The best place to “store” cash is in the stock market.
When you receive cash there are several places you can store the “value”:
- Under the Mattress/ Shoe Box/ Vault (Physical Form)
- Bank
- Cash App/ PayPal/Apple Pay etc. (Digitally)
- Real Estate
- Precious Metals
- Art
- Stocks
- Household Goods
- Cryptocurrency
Every single time the original cash value is exchanged or transferred to another “medium,” a capital allocation decision is made.
I am here to tell you that the stock market is the best place to store value and allocate capital.
Before I get into why, I want to highlight that I keep reiterating the word “store.” When you buy a stock you are simply storing the value that once existed in cash, and before that your energy and time. There are many people that have a suspicion that the stock market is a mythical place where people gamble and lose their money.
No.
Not even close.
Absolutely not.
The stock market is not a game of fantasy. The stock market is the opportunity to invest in actual businesses that you interact with everyday. Retirement accounts are managed in the stock market. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are billionaires because of the value of the stock they own in the businesses they created. I pray this message reaches the intended recipient. The stock market is not the casino.
People who buy stocks for short term, speculative reasons, are the ones who lose their money. They are gambling.
I encourage people to “store” capital in the stock market, not gamble on speculative stocks. There is a difference. What I mean by storing capital in the stock market is: “buy stock in the best companies in the world, that provide tangible value to humans.”
Here is why:
1. Long term the stock market can provide returns unmatched by any other asset class. Please look up the 10-year returns of: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, AMD, Nike, or NVDA. I see a lot of corny finance people use the “S&P 500” as the benchmark for comparison and throw in a random number between “7-10%” as the average annual return of investing in the stock market.
This is not convincing enough if you ask me. It’s washed finance rhetoric.
The S&P 500 measures FIVE HUNDRED companies, why in the world would I invest in 500 different businesses and expect to get a great return?
I invest in just a FEW of the best companies in the world: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Uber, and Blackstone.
That’s it.
I keep it simple because I do not “depend” on the stock market to make me rich, I depend on God, then myself.
The stock market is a place of storage, that does cool things like pay dividends.
2. When you buy stock, you are buying a piece of a business that has actual employees working in effort to grow the value of the company. There is no other storage vehicle that has people working as the primary driver of value appreciation. Once real estate is built, market valuations are contingent on data points such as recent sales and rent growth. Once the amount of space is fixed, the amount of work people can do to increase the value of the real estate is limited.
3. You can invest in other asset classes through the stock market. You can buy a REIT if you want real estate exposure, you can buy gold or oil stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency, almost anything you want.
4. The opportunity cost of not storing money in the stock market is detrimental. We cannot go back in time and reinvest money.
I could keep going…
But, the time is NOW.
- MALC PE$O
The Art of Finance 1.5 is now available!!