I remember my first stock market investment, in 1999 after I had moved to the United States from Zimbabwe. My math teacher gave us an assignement to pick out a stock. This was during the heady dotcom boom, and I came home from school to tell my parents. My father got so excited. He rarely showed any interest in my school work, but upon hearing about the assignment – to pick one stock and track it – he brought me downstairs to his work computer and booted it up. We were soon on the internet. This was dial up time, and all new to me. I hadn’t developed an appreciation or addiction to the internet at that point. I distinctly remember the different tickers on the screen, the jumble of colors, arrows and numbers, and what basically looked like a complicated, messy newspaper. But htere was something more to it, it looked fun. I saw excitement in my father, how he tried to explain to me what was important, and what I could by. To him the important thing was often how well the stock had done. At that time, everything did well. After considering several options we settled on Akamai, which traded at roughly $300. I remember that distinctly, $300 for one stock. That seemed outrageous. I don’t remember how it ended. The stock market crashed, and my math teacher either let the assignment lapse or I don’t remember it finishing. My father didn’t talk to me about it again. But that assignment is engraved in my head, etched there is the excitement my father showed in something of my work. Since then, I went on to study finance and philosophy, build several businesses and work for others, and now am returning to write more about investing. What does that mean? Well, I’m going to lay out the foundations of my investment philosophy, and take you on my journey to becoming a great investor. Let’s get started:
So what is an investment?
When I think about investments I think primarily about financial investments. These are most accessible to me. I can download an app, buy a stock and complete a financial investment. My expectation from an investment is some sort of appreciation of value, some future cash flow that I will capture. Basically, I want to make money. How that happens isn’t really up to me, it’s up to the people whose company I am buying.
But really, investment should be looked at as three separate but related areas: Macroeconomic investments, microeconomic investments, and financial investments.
Macroeconomic Investments
In a macroeconomic context, investment is defined as:
- Gross Fixed Capital Formation (GFCF): Spending on physical capital like machinery, factories and infrastructure.
- Inventory Investment: Changes in unsold goods (i.e. additions to inventories)
- Residential Investment: Spending on new housing construction.
These three components of macroeconomic growth make up GDP, which we use as a rough benchmark of growth for a country. We use GDP to measure macroeconomic investments mostly because it is easy. My view is we should use something else, and I think the World Bank is doing a good job with its Changing Wealth of Nations metric, which I will talk about below.
Investment drives productivity growth, increases production capacity and makes it possible for more production to occur.
In the United States and Germany, most of what I see are programs that directly flow into the GFCF. The big spending bills are examples of this. In fact, in both countries there have been several recent massive initiatives. In the United States, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) is a federal commitment to revitalize roads, bridges, rail networks, broadband access, power grids, EV charging infrastructure, and water systems. This was amplified by the 2022 CHIPS & Science Act, which deployed $39 billion in public funds to catalyze over $200 billion in private semiconductor investments from industry leaders like Intel, TSMC, and Samsung. That has had add on effects as institutions like the National Science Foundation, which has already disbursed 2,455 grants attracting $8.15 billion in private capital by the Act’s second anniversary.
Germany (finally IMHO) mirrors this ambition through its €500 billion infrastructure and green-energy fund (2025–2036). The big strategic decision came earlier this year when Germany strategically decoupled from its strict debt limits to accelerate reinvestment after years of underinvestment. It was a bit complicated getting it passed, but it was formally approved by the Bundestag’s upper house, and the package allocates €100 billion specifically for climate initiatives and signals a historic policy shift—effectively adopting a “whatever it takes” approach to national renewal. Complementing public efforts, 61 leading German and international firms have pledged €631 billion through 2028 under the “Made for Germany” alliance, targeting infrastructure modernization, digital transformation, and R&D.
All of the initiatives I have highlighted above are policy pieces designed to impact the Gross Fixed Capital Formation part of GDP. The reasons that most policy work is on GFCF is that policy can directly impact it. Inventory Investment is mostly a private business affair, and residential investment is impacted by local laws, as well as being a credit driven industry and also private.
A Better Metric?
GDP isn’t really a good metric of growth. At least not in my view. The World Bank though has published some great work on a different metric. First, according to the World Bank, As natural resources become scarcer and reach critical levels due to climate change and biodiversity loss, the growth potential of an economy and its resilience to shocks will be adversely affected.3 Yet GDP does not measure such sustainability concerns. Sir Partha Dasgupta likened this to a soccer team that only measures success as goals for and ignores goals against.”You can read the report here.
How Does CWON work?
Most of the assets covered in CWON—such as factories, intellectual property, urban land, and roads (produced capital); fossil fuel, mineral, and metal reserves (nonrenewable natural capital); agricultural land, forests, and fish stocks (renewable natural capital); and net foreign assets—are within the SNA asset boundary. Others, like renewable energy assets, will be included in the SNA starting in 2025
Whether economic progress is sustainable can be measured by how real wealth per capita is changing, as this represents changes in future production (and ultimately consumption) opportunities. Wealth in this context encompasses the value of all the assets of a nation that support economic production, such as its factories and roads (produced capital); forests, fish stocks, and fossil fuel reserves (natural capital); labor force (human capital); and net foreign assets. As long as real wealth per capita does not decline, future generations will have at least the same opportunities as the current generation, suggesting that development may be sustainable.
Macro investment builds the stage, but the curtain only rises with actors. While vital for foundational capacity, GDP-centric policies often overlook whether this capital truly enhances long-term human prosperity or merely inflates short-term metrics. The World Bank’s focus on comprehensive wealth hints at a deeper truth: sustainable growth requires investing not just in steel and silicon, but in the resilience of the systems—and people—they—and people—they serve. This makes a lot of sense to me, and provides a more accurate picture of what I would want if I was trying to figure out if a country was growing. Basically, are the people better off this year? This sets the context for the true drivers: micro-level entrepreneurs.
Microeconomic Investments
Of the three categories, microeconomic investment is by far the most impressive and my favorite. It gets to the heart of an entrepreneur, which is building a greart product and then expanding the production of the product. I think this certainly has the most outsized effect on the most people in the world. Macroeconomics feels like an indirect attempt at investment. But microeconomic investing seems like something I could do, in fact, it’s something I want to do, and get really good at!
What is it? As I outlined earlier, microeconomic investments expand production through capex, R&D or or development. It’s how companies and entrepreneurs change the world. Its how a couple people in a garage become the greatest tech company ever made. It’s how ideas become institutions.
Microeconomic investments are investments that grow production . It can get a bit wishy-washy in valuation sometimes, when people say that they have made investments in organizational capital, or discipline, or human capital. But those are all convincing investments, albeit hard to measure, when put to the test. Below I have outlined some types of investment at companies.
| Firm | Type of Investment | Description | Strategic Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | CapEx + Organizational Capital | Investment in global fulfillment centers, robotics, last-mile logistics | Dominance in e-commerce; unmatched delivery speed and cost efficiency |
| Apple | R&D + CapEx | Development of custom silicon (A/M-series chips), tight hardware/software stack | Product performance edge; vertical control; margin preservation |
| Toyota | Organizational Capital + Human Capital | Toyota Production System (lean, kaizen, JIT, workforce training) | Global efficiency benchmark; durable cost and quality leadership |
| Costco | Human Capital + Operational Discipline | High wages, employee retention, minimal SKU strategy, low markups | Loyalty, low turnover, pricing power, cost efficiency |
| R&D + Human Capital + Organizational Capital | Investment in AI researchers, internal dev tools (Borg, Spanner, TensorFlow) | Hyper-scalable innovation; efficient large-scale engineering |
Microeconomic investments remain the purest engine of human progress—where vision meets execution, and capital transforms into tangible value. This is the realm where entrepreneurs like Bezos, Jobs, or the Costco founders didn’t just allocate resources; they rewrote rules, built legacies, and lifted entire industries. Toyota’s kaizen uplifts suppliers; Costco’s wages anchor communities. What impresses me most is the agency here: you’re not just betting on growth; you’re responsible for it. Whether through R&D breakthroughs, operational mastery, or cult-like company cultures (as our table shows), these investments demand courage, creativity, and skin in the game. And yes, the rewards mirror the stakes—the world’s greatest wealth builders mastered this art because they built things that didn’t exist before.
But let’s pivot honestly: not everyone can (or wants to) launch an Amazon or design silicon in a lab. Most of us engage with capitalism’s growth story more accessibly—through financial investments. That becomes the art of backing these builders without wielding the hammer yourself.
Financial Investments
Financial investments are investments that are most available to regular people like you and me. They include a wide range of options, from buying a meme stock on robinhood to owning shares in a Botswanan diamond mine. Financial investments can be easy to access, or extremely hard, but the goal of each financial investment is to secure some sort of future cash flow, whether that is through interest, dividends, captial gains or maybe even strategic control.
An important difference between financial investments and microeconomic investments is that in financial investments you are betting on someone else. You think that the business or the stock or the mine is going to make you money, but you are not doing anything besides giving the money. That becomes a very different skill set and attitude when you think about it. It’s why great investors diversify, and microeconomic investors don’t. It is a completely different profile between the two. Here is a table summarizing the key differences.
| Dimension | Microeconomic Investment | Financial Investment |
|---|---|---|
| Control | Direct (firm-internal decisions) | Indirect (minority or diversified holdings) |
| Productivity impact | Builds productive capacity | Captures returns from others’ productivity |
| Time horizon | Medium-to-long term (operations) | Any: from seconds (HFT) to decades (VC/infra) |
| Leverage | Generally low, unless financialized | Frequently used (margin, structured products) |
| Measurement | ROI, NPV, IRR, learning curves | Alpha, beta, Sharpe ratio, drawdowns |
I think it’s rare for a person to be good at both of these skills. Most people are bad at both. The great investors of the world are pretty famous people. People like Warren Buffet and Ray Dalio are regularly covered in the press. In fact, the press covers financial investments far more than they cover micro and macro economic investments. That’s because financial investments move much faster, and there’s more to report on. A company investing in a process that will improve ROI in 10 years is less exciting than a billionaire buying into a company to try change management.
Financial investments offer the most democratic gateway into the engine of capitalism – putting the power of participation directly into the hands of regular people. Whether it’s a few dollars on a trading app or a stake in a distant venture, the core promise remains the same: securing future cash flow by trusting others to build value. This fundamental shift – from being the builder to being the backer – defines the financial investor’s reality.
That math assignment in 1999 opened my eyes to more than just stock tickers, it revealed to me the cycles of boom and bust, of castles made of sand, and of our greed. It started me on a journey where value wasn’t really based on anything besides possibility. It was an incredibly optimistic time, when we had decoupled sanity from investing. Lot’s has changed since then, and I think I am a far more cautious investor because of it. That in itself is worth exploring. But the assignment did catalyze an interest in investment, and how it expresses our believes and shapes the world. I have always wanted to be good at investing; however, the best investments I’ve ever made have bee passive. I encourage anyone who asks me to do that. But as something bigger, as something of a challenge, I want to try develop a skill set that helps me invest in individuals and firms. This blog will in part be an exploration of that. I will draw from investments and reports like the World Banks, which question whether we are on the right path, and I’ll develop profiles and mental models of the best investors out there. I am looking forward to this as a journey. A journey of writing that takes me deeper as I write.
I recently archived all the blog posts on this site, going back all the way to 2014. This represents a new start for me, and I don’t expect anyone to read it. It’s a personal journey. One of learning through writing.