What Makes Us Rich

Author: MBI Deep Dives URL: https://www.mbi-deepdives.com/rich/ One-line: A personal essay from a road trip through British Columbia and Banff, where watching a portfolio whipsaw on his phone mid-vacation crystallized that daily stock-price-watching is incompatible with actually enjoying wealth — and that the real richness was his wife and son laughing at Coleman Creek.

Key claims

• The author was mid-way through moving ~85% of his portfolio from Canada to the US (the “transfer saga,” detailed in a companion piece) when he and his family turned the logistics trip into a road trip through British Columbia to Banff.
• Watching daily stock price swings during the trip was destabilizing — he noticed the iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX) routinely moves 4% on many days without concrete news, and that knowing SOXX’s move let him guess unrelated sectors’ moves — a reminder of “the privilege of being long-term investors who can choose not to go through these whipsaws on a regular basis.”
• He concludes that no amount of wealth is enjoyable if your strategy requires watching daily stock prices — and that mood swings tied to short-term price moves make it “increasingly more and more difficult to be a public equities investor,” invoking Charlie Munger’s emphasis on equanimity as essential to surviving markets long-term.
• He cites Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate on the “illusion of the unified self” (the Gazzaniga/Sperry split-brain experiments, where the left hemisphere confabulates false explanations for actions it didn’t choose) as an analogy for how easily investors fool themselves into believing they know why a stock moved.
• After deciding to stop watching prices and buy back the stocks he’d sold, he felt “20 lbs lighter” and was able to actually enjoy the trip — culminating at Coleman Creek on the Icefields Parkway, watching his wife and son run along the bank.
• The essay’s thesis: the moments that stick in memory — his family’s laughter at Coleman Creek — are “what makes us rich,” not stock prices going up and to the right.

Notable quotes

“No matter how wealthy I may become, if my strategy depends on looking at stock prices on a daily basis, I am not sure I could ever quite enjoy the fruits of such wealth.”

“Charlie Munger used to preach about the importance of equanimity for any investor and I suspect the importance of such equanimity and emotionally stable frame of mind will be of paramount importance to survive in the market over the long term.”

“It was impossible to not feel rich… one of the memories I would indeed like to reminisce in my old age is the laughter of my wife and son while running around Coleman Creek. It is perhaps a good reminder what makes us rich in the first place, and it’s not necessarily always the stock prices going up and to the right!”

How it connects

• Charlie Munger — invoked directly for his emphasis on equanimity as a precondition for surviving as a long-term investor; the essay’s central psychological argument leans on this Munger idea.