JOHN ISHEE

I share 2–3 stocks worth watching every week along with market insights and investment research. Want to see what we're watching? Click the link 👇 stockso.live/97hspa to connect with me and learn more.

I’ve put together a free stock investing guide for beginners. Here’s what’s inside: • How stock investing works • How to research your first stock, step by step • My stock watchlist and why each company made the list • How to size a position and manage risk • A simple way to plan when to enter and exit a trade I can’t send the files here, but you can DM me “X” and I’ll send you an invite. Or join through the link in my bio.

I’m 72. I started with $420,000 more than 40 years ago, and my assets are now worth over $100 million. Here are the 8 rules I use. Save them for the next time one of your stocks makes a big move. ① Before I buy, I write down what I expect the business to do and what would prove me wrong. Two sentences usually do it. ② Down 5%, I check the news and the rest of the sector. If they all fell together and nothing changed at the company, I usually leave it alone. ③ Down 15%, I reread the latest earnings report. Did customers pull back? Did margins shrink? I want an answer before I put another dollar in. ④ Down 25%, I ask myself how much I’d buy today if I owned zero shares. If my answer is zero, I can live with my original cost basis. ⑤ Up 5%, I let it sit. If I bought it for three years, one good afternoon doesn’t change much. ⑥ Up 15%, I check whether my earnings estimate has moved too. I’m happy to hold a stock at a price where I wouldn’t buy more. ⑦ Up 25% or 35%, I look at how much of my account that one stock now represents. If a reversal would make me lose sleep, I trim enough to sleep. ⑧ On a short-term trade, I keep the planned loss at my stop to 1% of my account or less. If the trade needs a wider stop, I buy fewer shares.

$1 million in $VOO or $1 million in $CHPY? One shows about $10,600 in annual distributions. The other shows $497,500. Which would you rather own? Here’s how 15 ETFs stack up using their trailing 12-month payouts and the latest available U.S. prices through Nov. 11, 2026. The quotes were taken at different times, so the dollar amounts are approximate. $VOO · 1.06% · $10,600 $VIG · 1.45% · $14,500 $SCHD · 2.94% · $29,400 $DIVO · 6.40% · $64,000 $BALI · 7.89% · $78,900 $TDVI · 8.01% · $80,100 $GPIX · 8.37% · $83,700 $TYLG · 9.09% · $90,900 $OVL · 9.59% · $95,900 $GPIQ · 10.67% · $106,700 $JEPQ · 12.14% · $121,400 $QQQI · 14.69% · $146,900 $SPUC · 15.80% · $158,000 $AMZP · 18.74% · $187,400 $CHPY · 49.75% · $497,500 That $497,500 is the number that made me look twice. It’s what a $1M position at the quoted price would pay if the past year’s distributions repeated. Payouts can change, and some funds can distribute part of your capital back to you. I’d also want to know what my shares were worth after those payments. @grok Pick one to hold for five years. Which ticker gets your $1M, and why?

I share 2–3 stocks worth watching every week, along with market insights and investment research. Want to see what we're watching? Click the link stockso.live/97hspa to connect with me and learn more.

Buffett's first investment has nothing to do with the market. It is communication. He tells students that while they are learning complicated formulas, they are overlooking the skill with the biggest payoff. Learn to communicate better, in writing and in person, and your value rises by at least 50%. Without it, the best idea in the room does nothing. His image for it is a man winking at a girl in the dark. Nothing happens. The good news is that it can be learned. Buffett took a Dale Carnegie course himself, and he still jokes that he should have taken a longer one. Why this one? Because nobody can take it from you. Follow me for more investing insights.

Six rules for picking stocks, attributed to Warren Buffett. He does not use them. There is no forward P/E in his process. There is no PEG ratio. He has said plainly that forecasts tell you a great deal about the forecaster and nothing about the future, and both of those metrics are forecasts. What he actually says he looks for is four things: a business he can understand, a durable competitive advantage, honest and able management, and a sensible price. Notice what is missing. No screen, no threshold, no ratio below 25. The checklist is easy to share and easy to disprove.

Stocks, gold, and Bitcoin can ignore each other for days. Then one CPI print drops and suddenly they’re all trading the same news. Before the 8:30 a.m. ET release, I wrote down the two numbers the market was expecting: • Headline CPI: up 0.3% month over month • Core CPI: up 0.2% month over month From there, I wanted to see how Treasury yields and the dollar reacted, and whether the moves in gold, Nasdaq futures, and BTC held up after the first few minutes. A hotter reading can push rate expectations higher, but some of that may already be priced in. That’s why I like to give the market a few minutes before deciding whether there’s a trade worth taking. Link in bio. Click and send to get the full list. #CPI #TradFi #USStocks #BTC

Yeah, this one sneaks up on you. You make some money, leave it in the account, then see another trade you like. Before you know it, you’ve put it all back in. Seen a lot of people do this when they’re starting out. They had a good trade, but never set any of the profits aside. A few weeks later, most of it’s gone, and it’s back to “I’ll be more disciplined next time.”

Why do great investors live so long? 🏆 Buffett is 96, Soros is 96, and both are still alive. Irving Kahn lived to 109, Roy Neuberger to 107, Munger to 99, Fisher to 96, Templeton to 95… The eight masters who have passed away lived to an average age of 97.6, about 20 years longer than men of their generation. Three reasons: 1️⃣ An investor’s temperament is a longevity temperament: emotionally stable, patient and disciplined, not chasing rallies or panicking in sell-offs. That’s less self-inflicted stress over decades. 2️⃣ Wealth is a health buffer: freedom with your time, less stress, better access to healthcare. 3️⃣ Survivorship bias: greatness takes forty years of compounding to prove. If you don’t live long enough, you’ll never live to be called a “master.” You have to live long enough first to have a chance at greatness. For ordinary people, health is your principal, and longevity itself is a form of investment skill. I’m 72, going on 73. I hope I make it to 100 and get to count myself among the great investors someday.

Newton understood gravity. FOMO still wiped out a third of his fortune.

Invest $1,000 a month in China’s CSI 300 or the S&P 500 starting in 2005, and the early years tell a very different story. Through 2012, the S&P 500 looked like the wrong choice. It’s easy to pick the winner looking back. Much harder to keep buying while it spends years trailing the alternative.

Pre-market is quiet, but the setup is not. Futures mixed. CPI at 8:30 AM ET. $NVDA still digesting the Jensen Huang investigation. I’m not rushing the open. Same rules as always: • Keep planned loss at 1% or less • No chasing the first green candles • Cash is still a position What are you watching into the open? Link in bio. Click and send to get the full list.

Top of the Democratic agenda on day 1 needs to be a pause on advanced AI development, regulation of this out of control industry, and a ban on artificial superintelligence.

A $5 trillion company with no clear Plan B. That’s the real conversation around $NVDA right now. Jensen Huang isn’t just the CEO. For years, the market has treated him as the product. The vision, the execution, the relationships, the ability to keep the entire AI supply chain moving at full speed. A large part of the premium in the stock is a personality premium. Now the board has opened an investigation tied to his personal life and reported foreign intelligence concerns. Huang has already acknowledged the affair. This raises a simple question most people have avoided: What happens to the valuation if the key person risk is no longer theoretical? • How much of the current multiple is actually priced for “Jensen stays and keeps delivering”? • Does the board have a credible succession plan that the market has ever been shown? • If leadership uncertainty lasts more than a few weeks, does the stock deserve a lower multiple even if the business remains strong? Great companies can survive founder risk. The market just usually demands a discount until the succession is proven. I’m not saying the business is broken. I’m saying a $5T company that has been treated as inseparable from one person should have that risk re-examined when headlines hit the founder directly. How are you thinking about key person risk in $NVDA after today’s news? Is it already in the price, or still under-appreciated? (Daily risk notes and positioning in my free WhatsApp group. Link in bio.)

A few weeks before he died, Charlie Munger was asked about the richest man in the world. He said he didn’t really consider Elon Musk that rich. In the clip, the 99-year-old explains it simply: “I don’t regard Elon Musk as truly that rich because I don’t think it’s sure that everything he’s working on can work.” He thought a fortune that size almost always has a lot of luck in it. Musk picked the right things to double down on, then kept borrowing against them. “He’s used leverage so much that he’s doubled down right to the edge of extinction, maybe two or three times.” Munger’s own approach was straightforward: “I never bet against him and I never bet with him.” He said the rest of his life worked better treating Musk as if he didn’t exist. I still prefer that kind of discipline over trying to guess who wins the next big narrative.

A lot of people treat Buffett like some kind of financial savant who can scan a balance sheet and instantly know what something’s worth. But the more I’ve looked into what he actually did during the 2008 crisis, the more it seems like his real edge wasn’t IQ. It was temperament. He’s said a hundred times that you don’t need a genius level brain to invest well. You just need the right disposition. That sounds like classic Buffett humblebragging until you sit with it. Everybody knows you’re supposed to read the filings. Everybody knows you should make your own call. Everybody knows you shouldn’t panic just because the market is melting down. The problem is there’s a massive gap between knowing that and actually doing it. Human nature wants to act. It wants to feel involved. It’s extremely hard to sit there while Lehman and AIG are calling, the market’s getting worse by the day, and everyone else is scrambling, and still just open the 10-K, go through it page by page, mark up the red flags, and then calmly say no. Most people in that environment get hit from both sides: their own emotions and the pressure coming from everyone around them. Even if you know the rational move is to stay disciplined, watching other people rush in while you do nothing creates a feeling of isolation that’s tough to handle. For regular people, staying clear headed in a real crisis usually means fighting your own instincts the whole time. What makes Buffett different is that for him, it probably doesn’t even feel like discipline. Turning down Lehman and AIG doesn’t register as missing out. The fact that everyone else is moving doesn’t create anxiety. He’s just the kind of person who wants to finish the document before he decides. That state matches his natural wiring. This gets at something most people overlook in investing: psychological cost. If the approach you’re using keeps fighting your actual personality, it doesn’t matter how logically sound it is. You won’t stick with it. You’ll be in constant internal friction, and eventually something will give. That’s why temperament is a real gift. If you’re trying to learn from Buffett, don’t just copy the visible moves, reading the filings, making the notes, saying no. Figure out your own baseline. If you’re naturally reactive and you try to force yourself to stay detached during a crisis the way he does, you’ll probably crack the first time things actually get ugly. If you’re naturally cautious but you start chasing whatever everyone else is buying just to keep up, the stress will keep you up at night. The people who last usually aren’t the ones who look the most like Buffett. They’re the ones who found a way of operating that doesn’t constantly fight who they are.