 Good day fellow investors. Now, we constantly discuss, mostly discuss risks, investing risks, what can go wrong, what can go wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But that's not because I'm a pessimist. I'm 100% invested. I'm very positive about my investments, about the world, about the financial situation. But I just look at the risks to find lower risk, higher reward investments, not because I'm a pessimist or chicken lit and that says the world is going to crash, tomorrow is going to be a stock market crash or something. And in this video, I want really to be positive and show you what I think, what is my basis and then perhaps it will help you also in your investment decisions. So I'll discuss five reasons to be an optimist investor and why it's very important for an investor to be at first an optimist and then look at risks and rewards and compare them and find the best investments. But if you want to invest, you have to be an optimist. Number one, not being invested is not risky. It's a certainty that you will lose money. There is something called inflation. And if you have your money under your mattress, every day, every year, you are losing money. For example, if you had $1,000 in 1917 and not invested it, it would be now worth $52 as you can buy the same things today for $1,000 as you could in 1970 for $52. If I go back 50 years, what you can buy today for $1,000, you could buy for $136 in 1967. If I go back to 2007, the cumulative inflation is 15.3%. So just to keep the same purchasing power, you need 15% return over the last 10 years. And keep in mind inflation now is at historical lows. And everybody's target, the feds, the ECB is to raise inflation. So you will need to 3% returns just to cover for inflation. If not, you're losing money. So first, be an optimist, invest because if you don't, there's no risk. There is certainty of money loss. To put it in the words of George Soros, it's safer to take risks than stay passive. Number two, investing leads to wonderful things. Just look at this chart from 1976 of the SAP 500. It went up 24 times, 24 times in the last 40 years. That's about 8% per year, not including dividends. If I include dividends, I get to 10.5% per year for the period. If you invested 10,000 in 1976, you would be now about $540,000. So you would have 50 times your money with the reinvestment of the dividends. That's crazy. And that's why it's important to be invested. If we go back to the chart, we can see ups and downs, constantly ups and downs. But you see here how minor is the 1987 25% stock crash in the long term. So focus on the long term, be positive, invest for the long term, and you'll do good. Take and take advantage of those dips, 87, 2009, 2000s. Those will too probably in the long term look like minor blips like 1987. Number three, what you are buying now is probably going to be much more valuable in the future. There is inflation, there is economic growth, everything develops, everything grows. There is compounding where the companies reinvest in new businesses, grow, explore, become bigger, higher earnings, higher dividends. Of course, nothing is linear, but ups and downs, economical ups and downs, and you can't go wrong there. And if you buy now, you hold something that's valuable, that's creative, that's gross, like every business. And if you let it grow in the long term, you are definitely going to do well. And what's the benefit? What you pay now will be a small price of what you get in the future. And that's why investing is so nice. You have so many positives in the long term and practically no negatives if you are doing things smartly. To stay on this topic, one of the most common phrases I hear lately is that's better to rent than to own a home because owning a home, oh my God, you have to work on it. It's better to rent, it's fast free. And we can see that the home ownership rate with millennials is really declining. Millennials prefer to rent. I think that's a terrible, terrible thing to do because if you buy a house now with the fixed interest rate for 40 years, you can still move. You can rent that house out and rent something else. So you can still move, but 40 years from now, I really think home prices will be much higher. If we look at the last 40 years, home prices in the last 40 years are three times what they have been. So in 30 years, you buy now house for a million, that house will probably be three, five, 10 millions in 40 years. The mortgage, however, the mortgage payment with a fixed interest rate will be always the same. So you will pay one million over the 30 years with interest, something more, but after 40 years, you will have five, 10 millions of value. So it's really important to understand that concept, inflation, economic growth, value, demographics, that in the long term it's very positive. However, people are more focused, oh, I don't want the fuss of buying a home, I'll prefer to rent. 30 years of renting will lead you to exactly nothing, especially now that the mortgage costs are lower than rent costs. So think about it, not just for real estate, also for stocks for everything. Number four, the world is a better place every day. Just think of how your life is better than it was 10 years ago, 15 years ago we couldn't communicate like this, no way that there was a YouTube or was it not yet. So 20 years ago, 30 years ago, this was impossible. We can now type wherever you are from the world, medicines is so much better. If we look at the global life expectancy, continues to grow constantly, constantly, constantly, even if nature didn't make us to live more than 40 years. If you look at nature where you have to procreate and then die, we are now living up to 80 years and in the whole world that is improving and developing and will continue to improve. The children born now are expected to live even more than 70-80 years in the developed world, while those born in the 1960s were expected to live 65 years. So that's a difference of 15 years, 15 more years of consumption, pensions, enjoying your life, being healthy, unfortunately also medicines, when the doors are needed, but all that really improves the economics, the businesses, the growth, everything. So it's huge positive and if you keep it in mind as a basis for investing, everything is much easier. All those short-term panics are a bonus, not a terrible thing. Number five, when you're an investor, you are a business owner. For example, if we take LeBron James, practically if you own Nike, you can say that LeBron works for you with all the bucks that you're spending to endorse him and the marketing. So that's also a funny thing. So you can look at it that way. The second thing is you own great businesses. You own great businesses that employ, if you stay with Nike, hopefully they solve their issues. There are always issues in business, but all those businesses produce around the world, hire people, you feed lots, thousands of thousands of families. The children go to schools where somewhere in those countries where they produce, they didn't go to school. They go to school, they develop, they start using those products and the world becomes a better place thanks to you because your purchase of the stock keeps the capital there that allows for companies to grow, improve, develop the world. Thanks to business, there is more peace in the world. We haven't had a world war for now 70 years or more and that is because France, Germany are really in business. They weren't in the past and that's why there is more peace. So investing, capitalism, owning a business is really something that makes good in the long term. The best we have came up as humans until now. So to conclude, I always discuss risks. I will continue to discuss risks, but only with the goal of finding low risk, high reward investments. Not to discourage you from investing, not to be a chicken little and say the stock market is going to crash. Just look at risk reward. We talk gold, okay, but 5% of your investor has a hedge because if something happens, inflation and so on and so on. Inflation will be good for stocks in the long term. The short term, not that much, but in the long term again, it will be a positive. So if you just continue, look at it the positive way you can be positive about whatever happens in the stock market because you know what you own, you know where the world is going and that's definitely going to be a better place than it is now, even if it is a great place, I think, but it will be continued to be better. Developing countries are developing fast, using more products, growing and everything I see around the world is very very positive and the message for today is stay positive, enjoy your life, invest happily, but just try to invest where the risk is lower and the returns are higher. Thank you for watching, leave your optimist comments below, love to hear some optimism from you back and subscribe if you haven't, if you like the content and I'll see you in the next video.