Cash.-Interview with Celine Nadolny, financial blogger and “Miss Germany 2022” finalist, about her experiences and strategies in investing.
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Ms. Nadolny, your first major investment – do you remember?
Nadolny: Despite my young age, I have to go back a long way. I read my first book in the finance genre more than eight years ago and was blown away by the idea that my money could work for me. As a 16-year-old schoolgirl, however, I didn’t have any great ambitions to invest in real estate, I wasn’t familiar with index funds and wasn’t allowed to open my own securities account. So I asked my father to open one for me and gave him 1,000 euros of hard-earned money from my summer job to invest in Siemens shares. To this day I keep the shares in my portfolio – if only because of their symbolic character – and have made a nice return on them.
What are you investing in today and why?
Nadolny: Today I invest exclusively in a global portfolio using ETFs. Interestingly, this very point is incomprehensible to many. Because people think, because I have read almost 600 non-fiction books, many of which were financial books, that I have now found the magic investment strategy or at least have to act actively. But it is exactly the opposite. Because the more high-quality sources one internalizes in the area of finance, the more obvious it becomes that – completely contrary to the rest of life – passivity and no activity is rewarded on the capital markets. The number of studies and above all their quality show that market timing and stock picking make little sense.
Are you basically more of a risk-taking or a security-oriented type of investor?
Nadolny: Basically, there are good and bad risks. There are those that you can take, others that you should even take and others that are completely unnecessary – especially on the capital market. In my experience, young people in particular are very receptive to bad risks, because bad risks are usually associated with incredible promises of returns. But they’re just promises. On closer inspection, good risks always go hand in hand with at least proportionally increasing returns. Bad risks, on the other hand, hardly bring any further expected returns with higher risk. For me, it always comes down to the risk-return ratio.
You explained in the “Bild” newspaper: “I’ll be a millionaire by the age of 35 at the latest”. How do you intend to do this?
Nadolny: Exactly this statement was viewed very critically by many people. On the one hand because they probably saved the term millionaire with negative connotations and on the other hand because old age can seem presumptuous for people who have already passed it. However, if things continue like this, I will have made it even sooner. However, it is extremely important to me that it is not about the stamp of a millionaire, not even about the money itself, because for me that is only a means to an end, in order to be able to live a life of independence. I will achieve this through a mixture of thrift, clever investments and, above all, my entrepreneurial activities, which I build around my passion for good non-fiction books and finance.
The questions were asked by Kim Brodtmann, Cash.
Celine Nadolny’s blog can be found here: https://bookoffinance.de
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