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Excerpt
Marvin Germo is one of the best stock traders in the Philippines. His knowledge base is something that very few can compare with. That being said, his career was not all about money. Rather, it’s about freedom. Listen to the podcast to learn more!
“Surround yourself with people richer than you and you’ll be like them someday.”
Marvin Germo is a stock trader. He loves his profession as it’s one of the few careers that let you do things on your terms—he does what he wants when he wants to do it.
Marvin is a person that pursues freedom over security. He did so way back when he was young.
That being said, freedom always has risks involved, while aiming for security will provide you with a safety net—eventually leading to good stability.
Marvin chose the road less traveled by. His pursuit of freedom eventually provided him with the security that most people aim for. He is someone that has both financial freedom and security.
In his own words, “Freedom gives security, but security can not give you freedom”.
Marvin can do these things only because he knows that he’s already got all of his bases covered.
Comparing that to the usual goal of security—yes, you’ll probably get what you want, but you won’t necessarily have the freedom to do the things that you want to do.
This can be likened to the Golden Handcuff dilemma.
The dilemma is experienced by people who usually earn a lot of money, only to not be able to do anything with it because they’re stuck in their current lifestyle. They have this 9 am to 5 pm job every day and they have to support a certain standard of living, that it almost seems like they’re stuck in a routine.
Marvin does things in his own time. As much as possible, he doesn’t have to be in his business, managing his people, instead, he prefers to have his time to himself.
He has chosen a lifestyle wherein he earns little, but has a lot of time, instead of the typical high paying jobs that leave people with little to no time for themselves.
You can see that he values his freedom well over the idea of earning a substantial amount of money.
As Marvin mentioned, the regrets that old people tend to have are not usually about the mistakes that they made, rather about the things that they could have and should have done in the past.
That is why he believes that freedom is highly significant. That being said, as a stock trader, Marvin does save up a lot of money, in preparation for the many other things that he wants to do in the future.
Right now, his current agenda is to travel. To him, traveling is a good opportunity to look for and find new investment opportunities.
While other people think of travel as an expense, Marvin sees it as a learning opportunity. I admire this mindset of his, always looking to learn, and always searching for the next investment.
One of Marvin’s recent fascinations is with Facebook’s stocks because of the rising integration of digital into the real world. He also mentions that he likes Globe’s stocks solely for their heavy investments in GCash.
He states that in China, almost everything is digital. Payments are done through WeChat.
Marvin thinks that the new cryptocurrency of Facebook, also known as Libra, will allow payments through Facebook messenger and WhatsApp. The difference here is that WeChat/WePay only supports Chinese Yuan.
But since Facebook is the one doing it, it might become one of the most widely accepted cryptocurrency. Marvin further supports this by explaining that the usual cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is based on nothing, meanwhile, Facebook’s cryptocurrency, Libra, is based on dollars—it’s based on a fixed currency.
Marvin didn’t start with stocks right away. Instead, he dabbled in things like businesses and mutual funds. However, once he tried and did stocks, he liked it so much that he just went with it.
He owed a lot to the 2008 crash where he learned a lot. He says that the urgency to learn is very different when your back is against the wall.
Dealing with stocks is not as easy as it seems. It’s heavily based on your emotions. For Marvin, he has the added perk of having a high tolerance for risks. He says that you can easily manage your risks, but you can’t manage your emotions.
Almost everyone that’s in the stock market relishes when they’re in the green—when they’re making a profit, but when things go wrong, many people don’t want to cut or sell.
But that’s not how the market goes. There will always be times when you have to cut when you have to sell the stocks.
I believe that Marvin got into stocks because of a series of divine events. It was something that he never planned, but because of the market crash, and the relatively good luck that he had with his earlier trades, he was molded to become one of the most successful stocks traders in the Philippines.
Marvin admits that even if the market didn’t crash, he would have still gone into stocks—though his learning curve would have been slightly slower.
It’s also worth noting that he was one of the first 10,000 accounts in the stock market. Marvin has been blogging and vlogging about his endeavors in the stock market, and he truly believes that it’s an opportunity that most Filipinos should take advantage of.
Marvin has his seminar about the stock market, Stocks Smart, and there he talks about how anyone can get into and make money out of it.
He says that instead of just being a guru that teaches people how to go around the stock market, he wants to be someone that encourages people to go along with him.
Right now, one of Marvin’s main goals is to make the people who attend stocks smart better than him. He wants his students to become the next big players in the Philippine stock market.
Marvin is a very humble man. He doesn’t need a lot of things in his life. He only needs the essentials. And his control over his wants is something that most people should integrate into their lives.
What he does can get tiring at times, but it never gets stressful. The only time that dabbling in the stock market gets stressful is when you put in the money that you need.
The Philippine population that does stock trading is only around 1%. But for Marvin, he thinks that we should expect the number to rise fairly soon because it’s now becoming talked about fairly often.
Marvin believes that right now is the best time to invest in the stock market. The growth in online accounts has almost doubled in the past few years. Aside from that, the stock market has also become more accessible thanks to the presence of smartphones and laptops.
