 Good day, fellow investors. The main questions one wants to see answered when it comes to investing in stocks are the following. How to invest money in stocks? How much money to invest in stocks? What are the best stocks to buy? How to find the best stocks to buy? How do I protect myself from a stock market crash? What are the best stocks to invest in? A little bit different there. Should I invest in penny stocks? Bitcoin? Should I invest in blockchain? And then how to invest in stocks on your own? Hi, my name is Sven Karlin. I'm an independent stock market researcher and analyst. I do this full time. I look at stocks and what to buy. Before that, I was a professor of accounting and finance at the Amsterdam School of Business. And before that I was a data researcher at Bloomberg. I'm also a book author, modern value investing, where I discuss 25 tools to apply on stock analysis and also other interesting topics that enhance your value investing. But now let's dig into the matter and answer the questions we have set up at the beginning of this video. So how to invest in stocks and how much money to invest in stocks? I'll simply tell you what I do. So on a monthly basis, I have started the model portfolio and I invest, I think I started with 10,000 and now I invest 1000 every month and I put it in the portfolio. Each month I see, okay, I do my analysis. What is cheap to buy? How much, what's the risk of the market? How much should I buy of that 1000? But I make it a habit to invest 1000 per month, put it in my stock market portfolio. If I reach returns of 12% per year, that's my minimum target, perhaps I'll make even more, then in 20 years, I should have about a million in stocks. So that's my long-term investing strategy. 12% should be obtainable, value investors, Buffett, Klarman, Schloss all managed to do more than 50% over the very long term, so constantly over the very long term on average. So I hope that I will manage to reach also those returns by applying similar or improved investment techniques. I have done that over the past, unfortunately it's not an audited track record, but I am somewhere at 18% over my 15 years of experience, which is very, very good. Now the stock market portfolio is just one part of what I do. I own real estate, I own businesses and I will own some hedges and I will dig more into options when the right time comes for doing that. And then I see, okay, what is now the best investment opportunity among those asset classes? And then I put more money into that. If stocks become cheap again, like those were in 2009, 2002, then I might subtract money from the cash position first and put it more behavior into stocks. Now the stocks are so expensive after nine years, I still invest in stocks, but I am much more careful about the exposure. This will give me firepower in case of stock market crash. Now as I still buy stocks, the next question is what are the best stocks to buy? Well, the answer is really simple. If you buy great businesses with great earnings, with great cash flows, with great growth, you have nothing to worry about. Let me show you an example on Nike. So Nike's earnings in 2008 were $0.95 per share and in 2017, the earnings were 2.51 per share, thus almost three times higher. The stock price similarly went from 15 in 2008, it dipped in 2009, but it went from 15 to the current 76. My fair estimation for Nike would be a price around 40, 50 and that's exactly when I made a video recommending it as a buy last year, because that's, let's say, a fair estimation of growth and value there. Now it's a bit overvalued, but you can see how earnings are the main driver of stock market returns. So as I said, finding great businesses with great earnings, with great growing earnings. This leads us to the next question, how do I find such stocks to buy? And here it all boils down to research. The more you research, the more you analyze, the more you know about what's going on, the more opportunities you see. I was following the shoe sector last year and I was following a few stocks there, one of those was Nike, I bought something else and still made a good return, even better than Nike's. However, you follow as much as you can. For example, now we are looking into Latin America because there are some cheaper opportunities, good investments for the long term. So the more you follow, the more research you do, the more stock analysis you have. The easier is to compare everything, see where the value is and then buy that with the amount of money you have or even rebalance from other portfolio positions. So the only answer here is do more and more research. By having a fair value model, intrinsic value model of as many stocks as possible, then you simply watch at your screen, okay, this is now below my value. Let's look at the company, read the report, you have the overview over the company and then decide, okay, is it a buy or not? Now that it is in my buying range. This is what I do constantly, day by day, full time. Let me show you an overview of what I did in the last two months. So the most recent sector I analyzed was Argentina. We analyzed a few stocks there, all the stocks that are traded on the New York Stock Exchange, a few of them I really went deep and now I have a model on, in this case, Central Puerto, Cresud, Irsa and I am finishing on a model of another Argentinian stock. So I have the intrinsic value and then I see I compare that value with the market price before I decide on buying. Other reports, for example, I have analyzed the Chinese vintage sector online consumer lending. I have added the gold miner because I thought it was a good value. Chinese online e-commerce business, there is the model portfolio, my transactions, how often do I buy something, how often do I transact as it was the start, the number of transactions is a little bit higher. There is a comparative table where all the stocks are listed and you can see what is where in comparison through intrinsic value, stocks to watch. So companies that are not buys or not so interesting, but if they come into the sweet spot in the future, we might make them a covered stock. Quick notes on some stocks, a merger arbitrage opportunity also good to invest in those solar industry complete research, Brazil complete research on the sector. And the next sectors I'll be digging in is 5G, China, there are some opportunities opening up there. So it's good to have those models ready and gold miners as a hedge. The lower gold prices are the better gold is as a hedge. So that's what I do. I do this full time. And this is what gives me a great overview. And then I make good risk reward decisions. So research, research, research is the key to finding the best stocks to buy. Now don't get confused. I don't only buy stocks that are falling in price, it's also about growth trends. As I said, the 5G trend that I will investigate soon, then it is electrical vehicles, electrical development, solar technology, how can I get ahead? How can I position myself at a low risk high potential reward investment in those sectors that are going to change the world? So it's all a bit about balancing your portfolio to be exposed to the right things at the right price. How do I protect myself from a stock market crash? Well, the first thing is cash. The more cash you have, the little will be the impact of a crash on your portfolio. So depends really here on the personal situation. As for stocks, you can't really protect yourself because let's see what Peter Lynch has to say about that. In the 13 years I have been managing fidelity. Every time the SAP 500 dropped 10% or more, my fund dropped even more than the SAP 500. So this happened more than a dozen times in the 13 years he was managing his fidelity fund. So you can't really protect yourself except by buying options, but that's something very tricky for the average investor. So you can be hedged a little bit with some miners or with some stocks that do the opposite, like take advantage of volatility or such things. But in general, you have to expect that when there is a crash, you will be down and then the only thing to do is buy more of those great businesses that are now on sale. And especially when there is such a sale, then we come to what are the best businesses to invest in. You can buy some stocks, merger arbitrage catalysts. This is really cheap now. So risk reward. But then you can come to businesses stocks to invest in for your lifetime. As I said, great businesses, growing businesses, businesses that will do well no matter what. And when you find those businesses on your research, you buy them and you hold them forever and enjoy the dividends forever. And that's a great investment, which might be different than a stock to buy. For example, when you see Nike at the price earnings ratio of 15, you know your long term returns will be at first 7%, but though those will grow at around 10% per year. So over the next decade to you will have 10 15 20% returns from a great business like Nike. Now the following question should you invest in penny stocks, Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies or blockchain? Well, this is a very attractive sector to many people because of the high volatility. And then you see you hear a lot of stories about great gains. However, in investing, you never hear about the losses. So always keep that in mind. Now for penny stocks, which are usually small corporations, there is a lot of scams there. But if you really know, I don't know, the CEO is your brother-in-law and you trust him, then you might invest some of your money in a penny stock that might become something big. However, you need a lot of research there. You need a lot of investigation there. So a lot of time. And usually those are really low volume stocks. So you might spend a lot of time only to see that you cannot buy enough. So if you are really not dedicated to that and full time, then I would not go into penny stocks. As for cryptocurrencies, it has been really a sentiment play. People were expecting that cryptocurrencies are as the blockchain technology. But here we are talking about investing in the blockchain technology. And now IBM has even a blockchain website. So investing in IBM is investing in IBM and everything else. But it's also investing partly in blockchain, being exposed to blockchain. So they have the technology, they will develop the technology. So that's how you position yourself for the long term. And to the average investor, I would really advise to invest in blockchain technology, not all the other scams through a proper blue chip company. For example, like IBM is at, of course, the right valuation. If you want to be exposed to that. So it's all the more research you do, the more proper investments you will find. Then the final question. How do I invest in stocks on my own? Well, first you need to know your finances. You need to know accounting. When I get the time, I'll make a course accounting for investors. I still haven't got the time to do that and really do it properly. So that's a start. And then when you know all the lingo, all the factors, all what's going on, how to analyze properly a stock, then you have to invest a lot of time to do the research on your own. And then see how each stock, how each component of your portfolio fits your risk reward. So if you are a value investor, if you're a long term investor, and if you're not afraid to invest in stocks that are volatile, but have value, then you might want to see my research platform in depth and see, get a bit of ideas from what I do and from my research. So that's one. If not, you can always follow the YouTube channel. We give a lot of educational value here. And I think it will help everybody in their investment decisions. So to sum up everything, I think the key is, okay, I'm going to invest for the long term. I'm going to take my time to learn about what's going on, about what risk reward investing means. What can I lose? What can I gain? I'm going to compare that to what are my investment goals, my financial goals, my dreams. How are those the vehicles that would lead me to that? So you invest a lot of time in first getting awareness of your financial life and what's your financial well-being and potential. So what you can do and what you can't do. So first be aware of yourself. And then when you know exactly what you want, then you start researching, learning as much as you can about the field that you think will lead you to your goals. And on that, then you research what are the best investment options to do that. I know it takes a lot of time, but it's your financial life and you have to take responsibility for your financial life. Thank you for watching, looking forward to your comments, and I'll see you in the next video.