I built most of my wealth as a real estate investor, but some of my best ideas have come from

stock investing books like these five favorites of mine. So in this episode, I want to share at least one big idea from each of these books and how you can apply it as a real estate investor. If you're new here, my name is Chad Carson. You can also call me Coach Carson. I've been investing in real estate for over 22 years, and I teach other investors how to use real estate to become financially free.

Let's start with the fifth book on my list,

Money for the Rest of Us, by David Stein. So the author of this book, David Stein, used to manage billions of dollars for institutional clients who are investing money, but I came across him because he's a podcaster. He has a podcast by the same name, Money for the rest of us. I like his podcast and I like this book

because he's one of those people who can break down really complex concepts and a very simple, easy to digest

ideas. And this book is basically that. It has 10 different rules of thumb or heuristics you can use when

you're investing your money. And one of the ones I liked that I took away is sort of a theme you're

going to hear recurring in all of these books is he, every time you invest your money, whether you invest in stocks or real estate or anything else, it can be one of three things. It's either an investment, a speculation, or gambling. One of the three. It can't be anything else. An investment means that you have a positive expected return. So if you analyze that investment, you have some reason to believe that it's going to be positive. You're going to make more money in the long run. For example, if you buy a rental property, and let's just say you keep it simple, you paid cash for it. You'd have the rent from that property that even if it stayed the same or maybe went up a little bit with inflation, you're going to make a positive return. Maybe that's 5%, 6%. And you can look at stocks the same way.

They produce earnings and then they have some growth on those earnings over time. So investments in real estate and stocks in

particular have a positive expected return. That's category number one. Category number two, though, are speculations.

Now, there's nothing wrong with having some speculation

inside your portfolio.

I do a little bit of that, but these are things like currencies.

The most famous of those right now is like cryptocurrencies.

They don't produce anything.

They're used to trade or to exchange or their store value,

even like dollar bills. you know, having cash

is a form of currency. It doesn't produce any income. And so that's different than investments

because it's uncertain. The future earnings of that, the future earnings just come from the

changes and the price up and down. And that just depends on people and what we value those

commodities at. So it's possible they could go up,

it's possible they could go down, but that's a speculation. The third type of thing you can put

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