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What does it take to be a great value investor?

What do Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Ted Weschler all have in common?

They have all benefited from time. The earlier you start investing, the longer you have to compound that money.

You don’t have to be in the latest hot stock. Heck, you can just buy the stock indexes.

Saving in Retirement Accounts

Ted Weschler, one of Buffett’s two Berkshire Hathaway lieutenants, was in the news in 2021 because it was leaked that as of 2018, he had $264 million in his Roth IRA.

He talked with Allan Sloan of the Washington Post this summer about how he did it. The biggest factor was that he started saving into his 401k in his first job with WR Grace straight out of college in 1983.

By 2018, he had been invested for 35 years.

Yes, he’s a great investor so he was able to compound that money. He rolled over his original 401k in 1990 into an IRA and had more investment choices available.

But that $70,384 roll-over, would still have been $1.6 million by 2018 if it had simply been invested in the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO - Free Report).

Investing Isn’t Complicated

You don’t need to buy the “next” Amazon to be a successful investor.

Starting young gives you a huge leg up.

In addition to the S&P 500 index, you could buy the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF (VTI - Free Report) and own 4025 stocks.

Want to avoid the large caps? There’s the Vanguard Mid-Cap ETF (VO - Free Report) and Small-Cap ETF (VB - Free Report).

If you want only small cap value stocks, which has historically been one of the best performing asset classes, there’s the Vanguard Small Cap Value ETF (VBR - Free Report).

It’s so easy to simply buy the indexes, that Tracey owns shares of VOO and VB in her own personal portfolio.