Best Place to Invest Money Right Now

Believe it or not, "where should I invest right now" is one of the most searched phrases on Google. DIY investors are looking. So are professionals, quietly researching on behalf of their clients.

Everyone across the globe, Americans especially, want the same thing: a quick, easy answer. Tell me what to do, and I'll pay for it. So the plethora of search results and Facebook ads rolls in. We run a quick check of the Trustpilot reviews, sign up for the free trial, and get invited into the secret WhatsApp group.

Every time you knock on the "where's the best place to invest right now" door, ten out of ten times a salesman answers. Oh, hello there — funny you should ask, because I have the perfect investment for you.

Then comes the flood: Facebook, YouTube, CNBC. IRR this and that, the secret stock Elon Musk and Goldman Sachs supposedly know about that you don't — and somehow the person selling the commercial knows too.

Private LPs, real estate syndicates, oil exploration plays, penny stocks, more penny stocks, ads that lean on "Elon Musk said" and "Goldman Sachs said".

We tend to downplay the fact that there are bad actors out there, and we assume that if an investment is available to the public, it can't be a scam thinking that someone would have shut it down by now. That's not true. Investment scams show up everywhere, even in companies that carried top buy ratings from firms like Goldman Sachs. Goldman was still reiterating its rating on Enron in October 2001, weeks before the company collapsed into the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time.

So the goal isn't just return on capital. It's return of capital.

Over Stimulation

The data input is off the charts right now — unprecedented in this digital, AI age. Which is exactly why equanimity matters more than it used to. Buffett has the best analogy for the patience this requires: he treats investment opportunities like pitches. The pitcher can throw Microsoft at him at X per share, Amazon at X per share, all day long, and he doesn't have to swing.

The question, I'd argue, isn't really "what's the best place to invest right now." It's who you are, what do you like, and what are you actually trying to accomplish.

Maybe you need to park cash for three to six months. Maybe you need the best risk adjusted return you can get over six years to pay for Susie's first year of college. Of you need exponential growth for retirement in thirty years. Buried in those three sentences are the real inputs: appropriate risk, needed growth, volatility threshold, liquidity needs, and a benchmark to measure against.

Once you've identified the goal, we recall Peter Lynch's advice, invest in what you know. Where's your edge? If you understand real estate, invest in real estate. If you understand precious metals, invest in that. What will keep you engaged enough to endure the volatility? What strategy and vehicle will actually get you to your goal, and if you don't know what that goal is, that's where you start.

You have to discover yourself as an investor first. It's easy to replay the opportunity to buy bitcoin at .0001 Dollar per coin but when it hit $2,000 per coin would you have held or sold? Many factors go into just choosing a good investment because you're going to be fully involved emotionally in that investment for it's entirety. 

A few questions worth sitting with:

What do I actually like?

What do my friends call me for advice on? Where's my edge?

What do I default to when I'm exhausted and not thinking clearly?

How much liquidity do I need — three months, six months, a year?

If I couldn't touch this money for five years, would I still make this investment?

Cash is King

Because cash is what you actually want. Not a return figure — cash you can spend. When we build a client's portfolio, we're ultimately solving for cash needs: what they'll need to pay for, when, how much, and what might get in the way. So let's set aside the cookie-cutter language of the investing world — standard deviation, beta, and the rest — because what people actually want is simpler than that. They want stuff, and the means to get it.

Here's an offer: for your initial investment of $25,000, I'll give you a coffee and a breakfast sandwich every day for a year, from Starbucks. Would you take it?

Maybe you don't like coffee, or Starbucks, or you'd rather have something else entirely. That's the point — it starts to break up the conditioned notion of "what's my ROI," because what you're really chasing is consumption of things you like. And if it's not immediate consumption, it's about growing your money for consumption — or hoarding — later.

What we actually want is value. A coffee and a breakfast sandwich runs about $10. At seven days a week, that's roughly $70 a week, about $3,640 a year — a 14.6% imputed return on your $25,000. Not bad.

One afternoon at the grocery store, I bought a large salad from the salad bar. The cashier, a young woman in the Gen Z bracket, told me I could've gotten two Chipotle bowls for what I'd just paid. I told her I knew, but I'd already had Chipotle earlier that day and felt too embarrassed to go back. She told me never to feel embarrassed about eating Chipotle more than once a day.

It got my wheels spinning: how many Chipotle bowls does a share of the stock actually cost? Right now, you can buy a share of Chipotle (CMG, around $34) for about three burrito bowls. Basic economics — nothing new — but how often do we actually stop and think about it that way?

One share of Starbucks (SBUX, around $106) costs roughly ten cups of coldbrew and a breakfast sandwich. So if you're going to forgo ten of those today, what do you get in return? The hope is something like fifteen of them within five years. But inflation pushes the dollar cost of each cup up too — so in a good scenario, you're essentially preserving your purchasing power to buy the same coffee and sandwich in the future, plus a bit more.

Gold to S&P Ratio

On a more institutional level and further from my food-based reasoning: gold makes a useful benchmark. Comparing the S&P 500 to the price of gold is a clean way to break the conditioned habit of looking at stock prices in isolation.

In 1990, gold averaged about $383 an ounce and the S&P 500 sat around 340 — meaning it took roughly 0.9 ounces of gold to buy the entire index. Today, with gold near $4,280 an ounce and the S&P near 7,724, that ratio is about 1.8. In other words, even after gold's furious run over the past few years, the S&P has actually gained ground against it since 1990. It now takes about twice as much gold to buy the index as it did back then. So has value increase or has the currency devalued? 

Looking at things this way de-romanticizes high returns. It strips out the dreamy fantasies of vacations, sports cars, and toys, and brings you back down to something closer to practical, survival-level value.

Do what you like.

I have a good friend who works on some of our rental properties. He despises banks and doesn't trust the stock market. He takes his money and buys jewelry, gold, and silver bullion instead — and he's done very well, not just in his business, but in his investments. Is it smart?

The pros would say it's not wise to be that concentrated in one asset class. But it's what he likes, what brings him joy, and what he genuinely understands. He's allocated a share to each of his kids, and he's excited to teach them about it one day. I know plenty of people who've quietly stacked gold and silver for years you only find out about it once it becomes fashionable again, because for them it was never about the trend. It lined up with their own principles.

Some people are the same way about real estate, and nothing else. That's fine too.

Try this exercise for yourself: build a pros-and-cons list, by asset class. What are the real risks and rewards? How much time, energy — emotional energy — will it take to hold this through a downturn? 

No, Seriously, where should I invest? 

So, to answer the original question: where is the best place to invest right now?

Whatever will return your capital, with a return that keeps up with inflation at minimum, with the risk properly accounted for and statistically in regards to value investing that tends to mean whatever is currently unpopular and out of favor. 

High quality assets priced at a discount. 

The risk worth naming is the value trap. Not every underperforming asset turns around. Something with a depressed price because of a cyclical rough patch or temporary bad sentiment tends to revert to its mean over time. Something suffering from a structural problem, outdated technology, or an obsolete business model may never come back at all. Knowing the difference is most of the job.

So take Lynch's advice: buy what you know. Take Buffett's: do what turns you on, and stay inside your circle of competence. Keep it simple. And once you find out what you like and meets your criteria, take Munger's: SOYA Sit On Your Ass investing approach.

It doesn't take a genius to be a good investor. It takes patience, and the courage to go against the crowd and pull the trigger on something unpopular and underperforming. And sometimes the honest answer is simpler still — park the cash, let the swirl of desire and euphoria subside, and revisit the pursuit when your head is clear.