What’s an “investor” anyways?

UPDATE: At Jack’s kind request, another version of this blog post was published on his very widely read Avoidable Contact Forever substack on April 29, 2025. It’s entitled A Gearhead’s Guide To Passing For An “Investor” (archived) and with 110 comments and counting, comes recommended!

On a video call with the good Rabbi Zoharⁱ this week, he mined my “pragmatic”ⁱⁱ subconscious for user feedback on his upcoming Lightning Inspiration platform. The demo was great fun, especially the opportunity to “talk through” my thinking as I completed the intro Myers-Briggs-esque analysis. The 30 intro questions sometimes intentionally contradicted each other, but the resulting categorisation was clear-eyed enough to see through the user’s vacillations and into the core of their beings, setting them up to engage with the greatest philosophers of the Western cannon (or at least LLMs of them). The net result is a curated intellectual journey, one that looks to come in a sharply-dressed package. I wish it the greatest success.

But towards the end of our call, Rabbi Zohar was kind enough, if perhaps also mistaken enough, to ask me to provide feedback with my “investor” hat on. The thing is, I might’ve made a few savvy bets in my day, but turning $1 into $2 isn’t anymore my profession much less my passion than was lending out loonies at 100% daily interest rate to my retarded classmates in grade school so that they could buy a pop from the vending machine and indulge their weakling wills.ⁱⁱⁱ Au contraire, “investing” is just something I happen to have pursued when I either:

a) saw a clearly investible surface area with underpriced options^iv
b) got very excited about some new technology and early market development
c) saw a blue ocean with liquid on-ramps and off-ramps
d) saw an opportunity to “prove” something
e) some combination of the above

That’s it. That’s all. Which of course doesn’t happen every day! Indeed, it happens exceedingly rarely (thank goodness) and leaves the other 99.999% of my days for, in no particular order, raising a family, building my manufacturing business, renovating houses and studios, travelling the world, smoking cigars, golf, poker, bicycling, auto racing, studying history, anthropology, philosophy, religion, architecture, fine art, design, geopolitics, technology, and oh yes writing this blog on at least a weekly basis for the past 17 years. The overwhelming majority of these passions and pursuits, it needn’t even be said, are clearly quite independent from my “net worth” at present, and equally well represented my interests 15 years ago when I was living on ramen, and would likely continue to represent my interests at any point in the future should I find myself back in “ramen-mode” once more. Maybe I’m just being optimistic, but I’d like to think that I’d be the same recalcitrant asshole online (and the same slightly “acoustic” peacock of a gentleman IRL) regardless of zeroes in bank accounts. And reading the Contravex archives from 2008-2017 is indicative of pretty much exactly this, as the alert reader will already have noted.

So, am I an “investor”?^v Perhaps… but only to the extent that, say, Thales of Miletus was an “investor.” And who was Thales? I don’t have to tell Rabbi Zohar, who is eminently more knowledge on the subject of the western cannon’s greatest philosophers and their lives that I could ever hope to be, but for those of you who aren’t so well read, Thales was an Ancient Greek philosopher who lived from 624–546 BC and of whom we know a few insightful stories thanks to Plato’s Theaetetus and Aristotle’s Politics, namely that Thales was a geometrician, astronomer, and generally polymathic philosopher who spent most of his days with his head in the clouds (being mocked by laypeople for his absent-minded detachment) who intermixed his “impractical” musings with quick outbursts of very practical and applied knowledge, such as when he monopolistically leased all his city’s olive oil presses right before an unusually large harvest he’d correctly foreseen but no one else had, which he then turned into a small fortune, as well as when he helped King Croesus of Lydia during a military campaign against the Persians to cross the Halys River by digging an upstream canal to divert part of the river’s flow, thus permitting Croesus’ army to advance through shallower waters.

Does this description sound like someone who reads boring ass SEC filings all day (à la Buffett), hypes up pre-profit shiny toys (à la Andreessen Horowitz), sucks the last drops of marrow from defunct businesses (à la Paul Singer), or who deprives real world engineering firms of America’s finest intellect and ambition in order to build micro-cent mirages of liquidity (à la Citadel)? And yet all of these are “investors” in their own right, quite serious ones at that, and are really much better examples of the category than schmucks like Thales (or Pete).

So if we want to be more granular, as I think we should if we want to learn anything today, we ought to divide “investors” into professional vs. retail and then divide each of those into clear-eyed sub-categories. As we’ll see, there are (at least) 5 sub-categories of each with non-overlapping strengths, means, and abilities. Without further ado, the Top 5 “professional investor” types:

And top 5 “retail investor” types:

There are still, of course, plenty of cracks and crannies beyond even these ten sub-categorisations (and versions of entrepreneurialism that combine several of the above), but if you aspire to join the ranks of any of them, ultimately the trick is to know which kind of investor you are, to seek mastery in that sub-category by aligning your personal temperament, capital base, and edge, all while refusing the siren call to wander outside of that domain. You can also hopefully now see the breadth and depth of the “investor” category, and be clearer-eyed about asking for guidance from the right people in the right sub-category. Not that any of us who’ve “made it” mind the compliment, it always feels good to be considered highly, but our advice is much more useful when we’re actually within our domain of expertise, and don’t have to stretch for understandings in domains we have few theories about and even less experience in.

So as far as investment advice from your truly… dca into bitcoin? Or gold if that’s too techy/complicated? But that’s just lazy generic advice for 99.9% of people and for all I know my dear reader is in the 0.1% that has some edge and inclination to do even better than 50++% / year compounding over the next decade. Why not? Let’s see what you got.

Hope that makes sense. See you next week.

1. Long-time readers of Contravex will no doubt recognize Rabbi Zohar Atkins’ name. I’m sure I’ve quoted him in at least a dozen different articles over the past few years. He possesses a truly great mind, and has entertained and enlightened me almost certainly more than he realises since I started following his work. So if you don’t follow him on X or Substack, you really should. His podcast archives also come very highly recommended and we eagerly await a reboot of his audio offerings in the future. He really shines in that format. ↩
2. Apparently I’m a “pragmatic harmonizer” and I gotta say… if the glove fits!

   

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3. The irony of course being that I was the only yid at the performing & visual arts junior high I attended, and had never even heard of “shylock,” but I guess some things are just… inherited. ↩
4. Unlike, say, AI where I still don’t see an obvious industry-dominating bet that’s accessible to hinterland retail investors like myself. ↩
5. This article therefore follows in the vein set by What’s a “collector” anyways? and What’s an “institution” anyways? and What’s a “fairy tale” anyways? It’s almost a tradition to ask these kinds of questions at this point. And rightly so! Without clear language, how can we have clear thinking and clear goals and subsequent growth? ↩