#101 | 7 Disney Quotes That Make You a Better Investor

While doing a deep dive into The Walt Disney Company, we stumbled upon something unexpected: Disney characters have been dispensing timeless financial wisdom for decades.

In this episode, we break down seven classic Disney lines and explore what they can teach us about market psychology, risk management, and the power of long-term compounding.

It'll be a magical, somewhat nostalgic episode. 🌟

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A couple weeks ago, we went deep on the Walt Disney Company. What started as a Cartoon Mouse in the 1920s is now one of the largest media companies on the planet. Five theme parks, over 50 hotels, eight cruise ships, an entire ecosystem built around characters and IP. But going through that deep dive, we noticed something else. Completely by accident, have been handing out investing advice for decades. So today we're doing something different. 7 Disney quotes and what they actually teach us about being or becoming better investors. Enjoy! Let's start with Remy.

SPEAKER_04 0:58

Yes, to my life, but the only thing predictable about life is its unpredictability.

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That's Remy from Ratatuye. And it's a line worth sitting on, because no investor can predict the future. People will try to convince you otherwise. Every year, sometimes every day. But like every Disney film that's just fiction. Take Michael Burry. He called the 2008 crash, and his fund returned over 138% in just a single year. And it's tempting to look at that and think, this man can predict the future. But he can't. Nobody can. If you get 10 million people predicting every World Cup match, someone ends up with a perfect scorecard. That doesn't make them a genius, it just makes them lucky. It's the law of large numbers at work and it's not foresight. And what Remy is really telling us is to prepare for the unpredictable, not to try and forecast it. So go in expecting the unexpected and keep your emotions in check. Next up, Eeyore. The nicest thing about the rain is that it stops eventually. That's about as optimistic as Eeyore ever gets, and it's a good one. Markets can go down for years at a time. It hasn't happened in a while, but it will, again, eventually, and the worst thing you can do in that situation is sell. Panic sell. Time in the market beats timing the market. And it's one of those lines that sounds very cliche, and it sort of is cliche, but if you look at the data, it holds up. Let's go to the next Disney quote: Stitch.

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Who are you? This is my family. I found it all on my own. It's little and broken. But still good. Yeah. Still good.

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What happens after the rain stops falling on the market? Your positions get dragged down with everything else. Sometimes down 90% or more. During the dot-com crash, Amazon's stock collapsed, even as its fundamentals kept moving in the right direction. Jeff Bezos said it himself. Separate the stock price from the business. Stitch is making the same point, but in just fewer words. Beaten down doesn't mean broken. Some of the best opportunities show up looking exactly like that. A little broken, but still good. But there is a catch to that lesson, which brings us to our next Disney quote, Mufasa.

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Simba, I'm very disappointed in you.

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I know.

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You could have been killed. You deliberately disobeyed me. And what's worse, you put Nala in danger.

SPEAKER_05 4:13

I was just trying to be brave like you.

SPEAKER_03 4:16

I'm only brave when I have to be. Simba. Being brave doesn't mean you go looking for trouble.

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But you're not scared of anything.

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I'm only brave when I have to be. Being brave doesn't mean you go looking for trouble. Simba Mufasa says this to Simba before the hyena territory scene in The Lion King, and it applies just as well to your portfolio. Not every cheap, beaten-down company is a stitch situation. Picture a company with a good product, but a balance sheet loaded with debt, interest rate spikes, so the stock falls, the interest expense climbs, and now the pressure internally compounds. That's the moment to ask yourself, is buying here being brave and smart? Or is this a company that can actually go bankrupt? Sometimes the right move isn't to play the hero, it's just to walk away from the trouble entirely, which is what Mufasa actually meant. Let's go to the merchant of Aladdin next.

SPEAKER_02 5:32

Wait, don't go! I can see that you are only interested in the exceptionally rare. I think then you will be most rewarded to consider this. Do not be fooled by his commonplace appearance. Like so many things, it is not what is outside, but what is inside that counts.

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Like so many things, it is not what is outside but what is inside that counts. Merchants exist to make things look more valuable than they are. Most companies do as well. Investor relations departments also do exactly the same thing. Tattoo Chef is a good case study here. It went public via a spec in 2020, plant-based frozen foods, and the investor deck was beautiful. It said words like vertically integrated, strategic advantages, a good mode, all the right words, all the right shine, everything a good quality investor was looking for. Then the company filed for bankruptcy in just three years, in 2023. Every dollar that went into the strength of that story, gone. Morgan Household puts it well. The best story wins, not the best idea, not the most rational idea, or the most factual idea. Whoever tells the story that gets people nodding along wins. And our advice hasn't changed on this one. Study the financials first. Some of us would go further and say skip the investor presentation entirely. Next up, finding Nemo. Or rather, Dory is next.

SPEAKER_05 7:25

Hey, Mr. Grumpy Gills. When life gets you down, you know what you gotta do.

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I don't want to know what you gotta do.

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Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. What do we do? We swim, swim.

SPEAKER_04 7:39

Dory no singing. Do I love to swim in Dory when you want to swim you want to swing? See, I'm gonna get stuck now with that song. Now it's in my head. Sorry.

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What do we do? We swim, swim, swim. It sounds almost too simple, but Dory is describing compounding. Time is the single most important variable in your equation. And the only way to capture it is to stay invested, to keep swimming, continuously, not on and off. iShares has the data on this. Stay fully invested over a 20-year stretch, and you end up with 58% more than an investor who misses just the 5 best performing days in the same period. 5 days out of 20 years. That's the cost of trying to time it. Next quote Rafiki from The Lion King again.

SPEAKER_04 8:48

Ow! Jesus, what was that for? It doesn't matter! It's in the past! Yeah, but it still hurts. Oh yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it or learn from it. Ah, you see?

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One of the most valuable things you can do as an investor is look honestly at your own track record, at your own decision making. Most people don't beat the market over the long run. It's a fact, not an insult. If you go back through your own results and see structural underperformance, you shouldn't look away from it. You should learn from it. Sometimes the fix is generally simple. A couple of low-cost ETFs might do more for your returns than another decade of stock picking. It's not a fun thing to admit, it's painful, but the payoff comes later. We have a useful tool for this on the TDI terminal where you can actually monitor and lock all your decisions and come back to it later to see how you did. Let's close this episode off with a quote from Toy Story from Buzz Lightier. What's important now is we stay together. It's hard to hold on to every piece of investing wisdom on your own all the time. It's not a flaw, it's just how it works. Being around other, serious, like-minded investors compounds the learning the same way time compounds the returns. That's the whole idea behind building the Dutch investors. A community that learns with and from each other. Build around an honest, repeatable process rather than hot tips or timing calls. If any of these seven lessons landed for you, that's exactly the kind of thinking we're trying to build. Episode by episode, deep dive by deep dive. And if you're interested, we would love to have you along for the ride. Check out thedutchinvestors.com for more information, and we'll see you in the next episode. And like always, stay curious, keep learning, and happy investing!