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Hey, this is Sharan Trivadsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And in this episode, I'm going to tackle probably one of the top two questions I've ever gotten asked, which is how to pick an investment. I used to be a banker at Goldman Sachs and a Credit Suisse on Wall Street. I've managed money for billionaires and also built and, you know, sold companies myself. And I consider myself a professional investor because I allocate resources and capital to help me build and grow my vision overall. But there is a process, a framework for how to think about it. And whether you have any money to invest or whether you don't is irrelevant. You need to. You are always investing something. You're always investing your time, your resources, your capital. Whether it's an automatic 401k or whether you're buying a stock, or whether you're investing time and resources, or whether you're trying to get passive income. It is all the same because you're making an investment, because your life is literally an investment and you're choosing to deploy resources every day, I break down for you exactly how to pick an investment, all starting right now.
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One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and.
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The exact how to. How to grow your business, how to.
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Blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharon Srivatha, and welcome to Business School Foreign.
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Over the years, two of the most common questions that I've gotten asked all the last 10 to 15 years have been these. Number one, how do you find a mentor? And number two, how do you pick an investment? I have answers for both of those for you right now. Now, clearly, everything kind of changes, but I want to give you a framework, a blueprint, something that you can go do with right away, as opposed to the philosophical thing of, oh, if I can do it, you can do it too. So how to find a mentor is. When I started this podcast, it was the most common question that was asked, and I just used to type up the same thing over and over. So if you have not. If you currently don't have a mentor, if you want one, and I will tell you, it is the best cheat code for success because you're literally leveraging someone else's all of their experience and success and collapsing down decades into minutes for yourself. So if you want that, go to episode one of this podcast. Literally, I would stop this episode, scroll all the way back to episode one and listen to that. Episode one, how to find a mentor. That is the answer. Number one. Here's question number two that I get asked often is how to pick an investment. And it does not matter whether you make, you know, $10,000 a month, a hundred thousand dollars a month, a million dollars a month, $10 million a month, $100 million a month, it does not matter. Every single person in every stage of their lives are thinking about how to make an investment because they want to. You should want to convert your active income into your, into passive income. And when I say passive, all that, I actively managing that thing. Meaning you're not trading time for money, right? So let me explain this process. Overall, how to pick an investment is the number one thing that is on people's minds. But society has bastardized this idea of you can't talk about it often, which is why most people just go to YouTube, go to TikTok, go to all of these channels and see if they can get the information there as opposed to talking to somebody about it. So today I'm going to give you a my personal framework on how to pick any investment that is good for you. Now, it's not the be all, end all. It'll give you an instant wait to ask the right questions, to think about it in a thoughtful way without having to figure out, oh, let me go pull out Tron's framework. You can do it right in your head. And I call this the investment X ray. All right? This is called the investment X ray. And let me tell you where I learned this. I learned this from one of my billionaire clients when I was a investment banker at Goldman Sachs. And he taught me this method or some version of this, and I codified it, the things that he said, because he did this naturally. So whenever you look at any potential investment, when your friend says, hey, invest in my real estate deal, when your client says, hey, I'm working on a startup and you feel compelled to do that when you think you want to, the market is down and you want to invest in Bitcoin or the stock market's struggling, you're like, man, can I get in and put something in the s and P500. Maybe you have a job and you're thinking about how to reallocate your 401k. Maybe you just want to keep money in cash so you feel better about yourself, whatever it may be. All of that is irrelevant. All that matters right now is when you're presented with an idea of how to make an investment, which you're presented with often. How do you actually make this investment? All right, so by the way, if you want a visual version of this where I draw and explain this live in a more in depth way, just go to my YouTube channel, just type Sharant Srivatha on YouTube. And I actually have an iPad way of explaining all of this. So this is not a ripped version of that. I'm actually re recording this just for the audio platform, just for you. Right. So when you think about an investment, I want you to memorize these four things. This is the investment X ray. It is capital preservation, tax efficiency, cash flow and growth. So I'll say it again. Capital preservation, tax efficiency, cash flow and growth. Capital preservation. What does that mean? It means that if you invest $100,000 today, in five years or during the time of the investment, what is the probability that you are going to get your $100,000 back? For example, let's say you put a hundred thousand dollars in the bank. There's a, you know, almost, there's a good chance, let's just assume for theoretical purposes that there is a good chance that in five years that $100,000 is still going to be there in your bank account. So the capital preservation component of leaving your money in cash in the bank is 100%, very, very high. Right. But if you were going to put the $100,000 in, let's say a, a startup that makes, you know, Pez dispensers. Well, you don't know. You're not sure you could, that could go to, that $100,000 could become a million, that a hundred thousand dollars could go to zero. So the, the probability of that changes. Right. So that is what I talk, I'm talking about when it comes to capital preservation. You want to ask the question, what is the capital pres of this in some way the reason. And the second is tax efficiency. Tax efficiency is are there any tax advantages or what are the tax implications of investing in this deal? Now investing and not investing is the same exact thing. If you don't invest, you still have tax implications. If you put your money in the bank, if you put $100,000 in the bank and you got, I'm just making this up. And you got a 3% interest rate at the bank, that is $3,000. That $3,000 is taxable as ordinary income, as interest. So you're going to pay taxes on the $3,000, there are tax implications for that money in today's world. Now, unless you take the $100,000 and stick it in your mattress, which people talk about sticking money in their mattress, I don't know where you can stick money in your mattress. Like, do you cut it and slice it in, like, layer? It's weird. Like, I don't know how people used to do that. I should probably Google it. I don't know how you stick money in your mattress, by the way, but if you keep money at home in cash, you don't have to pay any taxes, right? But then you have money at your house in cash, which is weird. So. So second is like, what are the tax implications of it? Are there any tax advantages? So if there is a. If you're investing in an oil and natural gas deal, is there a depreciation allocation of it? If you invest in multifamily like I do, and then you say, well, do I get depreciation around it? Well, you do, but you have to be a real estate professional to actually activate that depreciation. How do you manage that? Is that. What are the tax advantages associated with that deal? If you take that money and you give it to charity, you get an instant tax deduction from it. Well, cool. Now you understand the tax implications from this deal. Please let me say it again. That was number two. But the key part here is for you to think about, number one, capital preservation. Number two, tax implications or tax efficiency. The reason I'm telling you this is not just how you think about it. The reason I'm also telling you this is because when you're talking to someone that is pitching you this idea, pitching you this deal, pitching you this thought process, you can ask them the same questions. You're like, hey, so let's say your friend Jimmy was presenting your real estate deal, and he said, oh, Sharon, you should invest in this thing. You know, it can go. You put in $100,000, you can get $10 million back. I'm like, okay, I'm like, jimmy, walk me through what this means for my, you know, return of capital in five years. You know, what is the probability that I get my $100,000 back? And just walk me through. What situations will I not get my hundred thousand dollars back? And what situations will I get my $100,000 back? And what questions situations will I make more? Now, whether or not you frame it in that way, you at least are able to ask a thoughtful question on how that. How the capital preservation bucket works in this as opposed to you instantly going to managing a risk in your head. So number one, capital preservation. Number two, the tax efficiency, which is the implications or advantageous advantages of taxes. Right. By the way, if you are not in the United States, it's totally makes sense. Your tax laws are going to be a little different in the domicile or the country that you live in. Outside of that, this entire process is exactly the same. So you don't have to do anything significantly different. The tax efficiency, I think most jurisdictions have some tax component associated with it. So you have to manage that in, in some way. All right, so number one was capital preservation. Number two was tax efficiency. Number three is cash flow. Now, the technical term for it is yield. And let me tell you what I mean by that. Assume you are investing in a apple orchard, and I say apple orange grove. That's probably easier. Let's say you're investing in an orange grove. So it has a piece of land that is a 500 orange trees. All right, so let's say you paid $5 million for it. Well, if you paid $5 million for it, and, and let's say every year you get $500,000 with the oranges that you can, that you can, that you, that you can sell. Well, the cash flow from that that is $500,000. We call that yield. What is the yield of that investment? Meaning the investment's value stays the same. The investment does not change. But what, what amount of cash flow does it kick off? Right. So it's no different than when you're putting $100,000 in a bank. You get a 3% yield. What is that yield? The yield is the cash flow from that process. I use cash flow because it's an easier terminology for everyone to understand. But the yield component is important because what it does is it explains the fact that it does not change conceptually, does not change the original baseline investment, and it is something that is generated from that investment. A lot of people think that you can just generate passive income without actually doing anything like that. That does not exist. Right. Let me explain. This is the bucket that most people fall into when they think, oh, I just want passive income to save my life. Passive income is a myth, like just me. Let me explain. Passive income does not exist. Passive income is a term that is actually structured to help you understand that you can get income without trading time for money. That means you don't have to go to work, but you still get paid. And the only way the world works, like no one woke up in the morning and said, I want to send Sharon $500,000 this year. Like that doesn't work like that. Right? So you've got to do something to generate the passive income. So the sidebar on the story about passive income. Let me please explain. There are, there are three components to passive income. Component number one, right? If it's passive for you, it has to be active for someone else, right? If I'm investing in an apartment complex today, it is passive for me. Meaning I'm not actively working the deal, but someone has to be actively working the deal so that I can generate cash. Like there is no passive, as in, like the world is not all passive. If it's passive for you, it has to be active for someone else. That's number one. Number two is passive income is replacing your trading time for money, right? You're just replacing the time for money trade. And as soon as you do that, you automatically get leverage. And that leverage is called passive income because it has changed the leverage of active, the passive overall. And here's number three. Let me give you the, my personal definition of passive income. It is pre funded income. Say it again. It's pre funded income. Which means you can generate passive income by either funding it with capital or funding it with resources. You don't. No one woke up in the morning saying, I'm really excited to send sharon, you know, $10,000 a month. Like it doesn't work like that. You got to either pre fund it with capital or pre funded with effort. Now how do you pre fund it with capital? For example, let's say I go buy a house and for $500,000, right? And so I'm buying this house and then I'm going to rent it out. Well, if I buy this house for $500,000 and then I get $8,000 a month in rent and net net, I pay expenses and I have $500 left. Cool. I'm making $500 a month on this $500,000 investment. That's awesome. But I'm getting the cash flow, passive income from this $500,000 investment. Now I'm not spending my, you know, a full work day managing this rental property. I'm not doing that. So I have the time for money trade, but I made a investment up front. So I've pre funded it with capital. Right. I can also pre fund it with the resources. I can prefund with time, effort, relationships, et cetera. So for example, let's say you are in the affiliate business and you market someone else's Property, someone else's company. And because of that, so let's say you go and say, hey, you know what, HubSpot or ActiveCampaign or what have you, I'm going to go market your software. Well, they'll say if you're going to sell my $300 a month software, I'm going to give you 10%. So as long as the user is paying $300 a month, I will give you $30 a month. Now you don't have to deliver the software, you don't have to manage the support, you don't have to do any of that. But you pre funded it with effort, you did some marketing, you solicited some people, you sold some software. And after you sold it, you are committed to getting the company's contractually giving you $30 a month for the life of the contract, which is a really nice deal for them because they don't have to spend money on marketing, which is a really nice deal for you because once you complete the sale, you keep getting paid the affiliated income, which is really powerful. There's a lot of these revenue share programs out there which are very, which are very helpful. You spend a lot of time upfront generating the process of getting somebody onboarded onto your revenue share network and then you support them to be in your network in a lot of ways. And so the revenue that you generate for the company, the company pays you a portion of that, which creates a very lucrative situation for you to create passive income over time. Now again, it's not passive as you don't do any work. It's passive in such a way that there is a time to money trade is not one to one and therefore that allows you to have that. So coming back to this bucket number three of yield or cash flow, we're asking if that investment provides a methodology, a mechanism for you to get yield or cash flow associated with it. So you can ask the question of the person pitching at this investment, hey, what kind of cash flow can I expect from this? What kind of yield can I expect from this investment? It can be if I'm investing in the stock, can I get a dividend? That's a yield. If I'm investing this real estate fund, can I get a, you know, a coupon payment that's a yield. If I'm investing this orange grove, am I getting, you know, sales from it? Because that's yield. If I'm investing in this affiliate business, am I getting some cash flow from it? That's a yield. So the yield, it reduces the volatility, because it slowly gets to kind of giving you back your return on principle, which is a really good thing. So what is the yield component associated with that? Right. And the last part of it is growth. So this is bucket number four, which is growth. And what I mean by growth is if you invest a hundred thousand dollars today, does it grow over time? And growth is a function of risk. Right. There's if you have zero, if you want to take zero risk, AKA UN United States Treasuries, sort of, or putting your cash in the bank, you can expect almost no growth because the growth on that is like, it's not risky, therefore it's not going to grow. But if you're investing, say in the stock market, well, the stock market has risk associated with it, but it also, on average over a long period of time has seen 7 to 11% growth on a given year based on when you enter and when you exit the market. Now if you, you know, believe in the time based, long term investing based component, now you know that you're taking a little risk on the market, but over time you market, the historical facts say that the market will outperform. Okay, cool, awesome. Or you can say, hey, I'm going to invest in a piece of real estate. I believe that, you know, they're not making any more land. So there's a supply demand issue. And since there's a supply demand issue and more people want to live and have a good life and all of that, the value of that real estate is going to go up there because of inflation, because of demand, et cetera. Therefore, that real estate potentially could be worth more based on where I buy it and how I maintain it, et cetera. Great. So now you get growth associated with it. So that, that or you invest in a startup company, the company's worth zero money right now. It's just an, it's just a deck and an idea. They're going to hire people, build a product, get sales, et cetera. So now you know that that investment component associated with it is helpful, right? Because they know exactly that you're going to get growth from that investment, which is a good thing overall. So the question here becomes in bucket four, you want to map what the growth is in this potential investment. So those are the four buckets. Capital preservation number one, tax efficiency number two, yield number three are cash flow and growth number four. And you want to figure out the reason I'm telling you this is not just to evaluate something for yourself, but also to ask the right questions associated when someone is pitching you an investment overall. Now let's actually take a couple of quick examples for me to run you through this. Now the way I run through this when I do it on paper is that I try to do it with a score of 25 per box. So 25 for capital preservation, 25 for tax efficiency, 25 for yield and 25 for growth. And what happens there is I get a score on total of 100. Right. So let's take some easy math. I'll do three investments with you. Number one, let's do cash. Number two, let's do Bitcoin. And number three, let's do real estate. Right. Multifamily real estate. Let's do cash. Number one, cash. What is the capital preservation score on cash? It's 25. Right. I'm just going to assume for this purpose that I, I get, I, I'm completely going to get my cash back. Great. What is the tax efficiency associated with the cash? Zero. Right. I got assume that I'm getting no tax efficiency. What is the yield associated with the cash? Assume I'm not getting anything from my bank account, so or say I'm getting 3%. Well, that's out of a score of 25, probably 5. Right. So I get some yield. So I get 5. And then what is my growth? Zero. So net, net my score on this is 25 for capital preservation and 5 for yield. So which is a total of 30 out of 100. Right. So now I have some kind of mechanism of this scoring in my head now. Great. Now let's take bitcoin as the idea number two. By the way, if you want to see a broken down version of visually how I do this, please go to my YouTube channel. Look at this video called How I Pick an Investment the Goldman Sachs X ray method. I literally like draw this all out that you can be really helpful for you. So the second is bitcoin, let's say bitcoin capital preservation. Now if you're a bitcoin fanatic, you will agree that hey, it's all liquid gold. They're not making any more of it. So capital, like could bitcoin go to zero? Yeah, more easily than cash. Could bitcoin. Could you lose all of it? Could you make all of it? Probably. So I'm not going to give it a score of 25. So let's just, let's just give it a random score. Right. Let's give it a score of 15. So I have 15 out of 25. Capital preservation. What is my tax efficiency around it. Well, unless you're doing some staking and things like that, it's not easy to get tax efficiency associated. So I'm just going to give it like a 5, right, so 5 out of 25. And so that would mean that now you're a score of 20. What is the yield or the cash flow component are? Unless you're doing staking, you know, mining and things like that, you're probably not getting yield from it. So I'll still give you another five. So call it, you know, now, now we're at 25. And then what is the growth? The growth could be enormous, but you also have the risk. Right, but we're only looking at the growth component. So I'll give you another 20 out of 25 for growth because you don't know it could be volatile. So now I have 24, you know, I have 15 for capital preservation, I have 5 for tax efficiency, I have 5 for yield, that's 20, and I have 24 growth. So that's 20, that's 25, 45, 45 out of 100. So my cash was 30 and Bitcoin is 45 out of 100. Now let's take a real estate investment investment. I'll be pretty conservative. So let's say you're investing in multifamily real estate. Like I invest, I invest with ARK Multifamily Group. You can check them out at ark multifamily group arkmf.com arkmf.com Again, I'll put the link in the show notes if you're interested. But I do all my investing on real estate through ARK Multifamily Group for multifamily investments. Because I just trust the team and they, they, they implement everything kind of on a, on a fully owned basis. Right. So essentially how this works, let's talk about capital preservation. So you're investing, you're investing capital in this property. There's a loan on it, but, you know, like a mortgage. But it's still, you're investing in, in a hard asset, which is real estate. So as long as it's bought, well, you have decent capital preservation. So I'm gonna say, I'm just gonna make it easy. I'll call it 20 out of 25. The tax efficiency. You get enormous tax advantages, benefits. With investing in multifamily and real estate, you get depreciation from day one, etc. So I'm going to give it 20 out of 25. Cash flow, you in because of the business, it's run like A business and people pay rent and then you get those cash flows distributed to you. I'm going to say cash flow is 20 out of 25. And then what is growth? As the building and the apartment complexes run well, the value of the property grows. And so you can almost expect to have, you know, the investments that I make, you get a passive five year double, which means in every five years roughly doubles your money. So you put in $100,000 in year one and roughly three to five years, you get $200,000 net net back. So I like that investment overall. So I'm going to give it another 20. So to me, that is 80. So that's an 80 out of 100. So again, that's my subjective view on the world because everything is subjective. The way I'm scoring one thing is the way I'm scoring everything else. So your scores may be different, but your scores have to be the same on the investments that you make. My scores are the same. I'm the same person scoring the investments that I make. So it at least gives me a methodology for thinking through that investment process the same way as opposed to just going to emotionality of, oh man, markets are down. Should I invest or not? Right. So capital preservation, tax, efficiency, yield, which is cash flow and growth overall. The reason I'm sharing all of this with you is when you are pitched in investment, the job, your job is not to make a rash decision. Your job is to ask better questions. And the way you ask better questions is by going through a structured process of thinking about the right questions to ask. And I wanted to give you the buckets of the questions to actually think through. I've taught this model to dozens of influencers. You'll see it on several YouTube videos on the Internet. I am totally okay with, you know, people using my stuff because I just want good information to be out there. I codified this based on what one of my billionaire clients at Goldman Sachs kind of taught me. I took their thinking and made it a model which I use every single day and every single investment decisions that I make. Now please let me explain this. I'm just a random handsome guy on a podcast on YouTube on, on these social media sources. I'm giving you a framework on how to think about the world, not an investment for you to make. So you should do your own research. Of course. And this is not a disclaimer. This is common sense. You should talk to your advisors because your personal situation is not the same as my personal situation. You may not live in California you may not have the network that I have, you may not have the cash flow that I have, you may not have the risk tolerance that I have, you may not have the skills that I have, you may not have the experience that I have. So you got to manage that overall because what's, what's suitable for you may not be suitable for me. Right? But the framework of how to think about it so that you can ask the right questions of somebody. Pitching you this investment or how you evaluate this investment is really important and that's what I wanted to communicate to you today. The two biggest questions that I get asked are, number one, how to find a mentor, which is episode one of this podcast. So please go back and listen to that or episode or this one, which is how to pick an investment. Essentially this is the X ray method on how to actually pick an investment. Capital preservation, tax efficiency, yield, which is cash flow and growth. And score them in buckets of 25. So you get a score of 100 overall. The main purpose of this is to actually ask who's pitching you this investment, even if it's yourself or someone else, the right questions. If I were you, I would actually make this a piece of AI. That way when you're given an investment, you can upload the investment or ask it questions and it will score this for you, which I have done for myself as well. And that's why I'm sharing this idea with you. I've done this for myself which allows me to like cycle through the investment ideas really fast and keeps me less emotional and be a good long term investor in this process. So if this was interesting to you, can you do me two favors? Number one, go to my YouTube channel and check it out. I just started on YouTube this year. It's slowly growing. I wanted to kind of do things visually. Just go to my YouTube channel. If you like it, you know, hit subscribe or whatever if that's interesting to you. But more importantly, check this out if this is helpful because I drop all of this out on an iPad and explain this process. You will see it as how to find an investment. It's called the Millionaire method. So you'll kind of see there. And the second is, if you like this episode, can you screenshot it and share it? That way more people can get access to it and I can make more like this for you. Again, if you like this episode, please screenshot it and share it. Tag me on social media. That way I can make more like this for you. I hope that was helpful. This is the Investment X Ray. How to actually pick an investment in this modern changing world. I hope you enjoyed it. If you like this, screenshot it and tag me and I will make more like this for you.
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Hey Tron, I have a cool gift for you.
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You.
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Since you like this podcast. I actually have an ultra super secret private podcast that I make just for my partner companies and the CEOs and influencers that I advise. It's called 10K Wisdom because I try to wrap $10,000 worth of value in every single episode in just under 10 minutes. That's why it's called 10K Wisdom. It's raw, it's real, it's got no intro or outro or anything like that. It's just straight to the point and to the insights. Since you like this podcast, I think you will like that. So for the first time I'm making it available to you. Just go to 10kwisdom.com the number 10kwisdom.com and my team will activate it for you as my gift. Go to 10kwisdom.com I'll see you there.