ETF Portfolio Update: August 2025
Sit-on-your-ass-investing
What’s the best investing style according to Charlie Munger?
Sit-on-your-ass-investing.
Let’s add to our ETF Portfolio today.
Dead Investors
Investing is one of the few areas in life where trying hard often reduces your results.
The best investors often do… nothing.
Charlie Munger calls it sit-on-your-ass-investing.
The crazy thing? Numerous studies have proven this point.
1. The Fidelity Study
Fidelity once studied which investors performed the best on their platform.
Two kinds of investors stood out:
People who forgot they even had an account
Dead people
Seriously.
The secret of these investors? They didn’t panic. They didn’t trade. They didn’t try to time the market.
They just did nothing.
2. Return of the average investor
Every year, J.P. Morgan crunches the numbers on how investors perform.
And every year, the story is the same: investors underperform the market by a wide margin.
Over 20 years:
The S&P 500 returned 9.5% per year
The average investor achieved a return of 3.6% per year
That’s a 5.9% difference. Per year!
The average investor takes all the risks from the stock market but doesn’t get rewarded for it.
The reason?
People try to be smart. Buying high, selling low, chasing performance, and reacting emotionally.
The biggest threat to your investing results is yourself.
As Warren Buffett said:
3. Missing the best days
What if you missed the best 5, 10, 30, and 50 trading days between 1980 and 2020?
If you missed the 50 best trading days, almost all your profits would have been lost.
The key lesson? Time in the market beats timing the market.
4. The Biggest Mistake
The biggest mistake you can make as an investor? Selling their winners too soon.
It would’ve often been better for them to do nothing.
Just imagine you sold Apple or Amazon twenty years ago.
The best solution for lazy investors?
Investing in Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs)
ETF Strategy
Using a disciplined ETF investing approach can protect you from yourself.
Why? Because it requires minimal management.
You just buy an ETF every single month and do nothing.
Warren Buffett even said the following in his shareholder letter in 2013:
"When I die, my wife should put 90% in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund. And 10% in short-term government bonds.”Buffett recently changed plans and is donating almost all his money to charity. But his original point still stands.
Now let’s dive into our ETF Portfolio.
ETF Portfolio
Our ETF Portfolio is a great mix of ETFs that should be able to outperform in the long term.
We use multiple factors that tend to do well:
👑 Quality - Only invest in companies that have already won (GOAT)
📏 Size - The smaller the better (EWSP & IUSN)
🚀 Multifactor - Quality, size, value & momentum (IBCZ)
🌏 Emerging Markets - Small exposure to Emerging Markets via EMIM
Let’s now dive into the ETF Portfolio itself.
You have 24/7 access to the ETF Portfolio here: