Investors in cryptocurrencies have achieved wildly different results. Some have become billionaires, some have gone bankrupt, some have just managed to tread water with middling portfolio results. I could (and maybe will) write many posts about what separates the performance of the very successful from the very unsuccessful. Today, I want to explore something more directly related to investment performance than you might think: the need to be entertained by your investments.

Just about every investment can provide endless fodder for holding your interest, but crypto is in a league of its own. There are numerous NFT collectors who own pixelated jpegs worth more than a very nice 3-bedroom-2-bath in a very nice neighborhood. The list of investment options reads more like Buzzfeed than an investment menu: Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, PotCoin, Coinye, Fuzzballs, Spankchain, and more. But perhaps the most engaging fact about crypto is the volatility. Holding investments in the cryptocurrency space is like riding a rollercoaster, half the time your stomach feels queasy and half the time your brain is on fire with dopamine. Sometimes the two coincide and you get can’t-look-away action in a space where you have real money staked on the outcome. This means that even the slightest lull in volatility bores cryptoinvestors to the point where some would rather lose money than endure a bit of ennui.

Because of the engaging and volatile nature of cryptocurrencies, many investors in the space learn the wrong lesson: they believe they be entertained by their investments while trading their way to profits. The assumption that your investment exists to entertain you is an invitation to trade as a way of getting some action. Boy is it a mistake. You see 98.4% of day traders are lose money in any given year. Seriously:

For this column, I leave aside the question of why day traders are so overwhelmingly likely to lose money and flame out. For this column, I’m interested in how people actually make money investing for themselves. Sure there a bunch of hedge fund billionaires who have gotten rich taking a cut (esp. a very large cut) of other people’s money. I’m not interested in them. I’m interested in billionaires who made money on their own, with their own money, and then lived happily ever after. Thus, I give you my favorite: Herbie Wertheim.

Herbie is a billionaire even though he grew up poor, regarded as a dunce at his school, and had to enlist in the Navy to avoid punishment for truant crime. Herbie did not invent Bitcoin, found Tesla, sell a million albums, or knock out George Foreman. Although not as hard as any of those things, Herbie did do something I consider very difficult. And, he did it nonstop for decades. Herbie engaged in “a lifetime of prudent do-it-yourself buy-and-hold investing.” He basically bought stock in innovative companies as soon as he identified them (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.) and then did … nothing. Nothing at all for decades. Herbie now owns a long list of very, very nice things that entertain him. Still no hint that he expects his investments to entertain him at all. Forbes has a write-up of Herbie that just drips with wisdom.

I remember reading then r/Bitcoin subreddit in 2013 and then the r/Ethtrader subreddit shortly after the Ethereum genesis block. What struck me is that people felt the need to trade bitcoin at $300 and ether at $2. Everyone felt they were late to a party in which the first guests scooped up bitcoin for less than a dollar. Many people decided to trade their way to profits. Few of them lasted. Some of them, however, decided to buy and hold. Mostly these were people I call true believers. They believed in the projects with a zeal bordering on religion. I followed as many as I could over the years. As far as I have been able to glean over the years, every one of them made life-changing amounts of money. Kinda like Herbie.