Welcome to the Money Tree Investing Podcast. Stock market, wealth, personal finance, value stocks, invest in your life.

Hello, Smart Money Tree Podcasts listeners. Welcome to this week's show. My name's Kirk Chisholm,

and I will be your host. So today, we're talking with my friend Simon Rhee. Hey Simon, how's it going?

Really well, Kig. Good. Well, glad, how's it going? Really well, Kirk.

Good. Well, glad to have you in the show. So tell us a little bit about your background.

I've been fascinated by the stock market since I was a teenager.

1987, we had the big stock market crash. I was in my second last year of high school.

And I found the whole thing fascinating. I didn't have any

money at stake at the time. I was a bit too young, but I was transfixed by it all. Of course,

we had Oliver Stone's movie Wall Street was released, I think, the same year. And I had an

economics teacher at school who was really into it and kind of inspired me. I had the early inklings that I wanted to be

involved in the stock market, studied economics and finance at university, got my first job out

of university as a futures broker. I did that for a little while, but I just didn't find wheat and

orange juice as exciting and as dynamic as Microsoft and Cisco and what have you.

Eventually, about three years later, I made the jump to working on the equity side at Goldman Sachs,

and I spent the next 14 years there.

And it was during the global financial crisis in 2008, where I had a very powerful learning moment,

shall we say, well, it was more than a moment. It lasted for a whole year. I lost an enormous

amount of money that year personally. And that was through no fault but my own. But I was

listening to who I thought at the time were the smartest guys in the room,

the Wall Street analysts and strategists who kept proclaiming that stocks were cheap and a market

bottom would soon be at hand.

...