For Luiz Barsi Being rich was not a goal, but a consequence of his determination “to never be poor again.” At 84 years old, this Brazilian is one of the wealthiest in the country thanks to exceptional success on the stock market.
Known as “the Warren Buffett Brazilian“Due to his influence in the Sao Paulo stock market, Barsi created from nothing an estate of US$4 billion reais (about US$800 million), according to an estimate by the Forbes magazine, with a method that teaches as his legacy.
However, he continues to work daily out of “vice” and because “the wheel can’t stop“This man with glasses and white hair told AFP in a room in his offices in the center of Brazil’s largest metropolis.
“If the wheel stops, I go back to being who I was,” said the multimillionaireone of the largest individual investors in the most important stock market in Latin America.
The life story of Luiz Barsi
Born in Sao Paulo, he was the only child of a marriage of descendants of European immigrants.
He lost his father when he was one year old and struggled with his mother to survive, living in a collective residence in the working class neighborhood of Bras.
Later, “returning there was a constant reminder that I desperately needed to improve my life,” Barsi says in his autobiography published in 2022.
He sold candy at the movies, shined shoes and was a cadet in a company without neglecting their studies, until training in Law and Economics and Accounting.
Dressed in a striped polo shirt, pants and black hat, his image does not reflect the wealth he began to amass since stocks were bought and sold loudly in the late 1960s.
How he started earning his money
Barsi maintained that a good investor must “control his ego” and shows an austere lifestyle.
He began more than five decades ago to look for “new ways to make money, with little to invest”, while working as a company auditor, separated from his first wife and with four children to support (he would later have another daughter in a second marriage).
Currently, he earns around one million reais a day (about US$200,000) in dividends distributed by the companies in which he is a shareholderaccording to his daughter Louise, present at the interview.
He achieved it with “discipline” and “few mistakes”, as well as time: “No one gets rich overnight,” said the investor.
Barsi considers himself “a small owner” of companies such as the Klabin paper company or the Santander bank, among some of which he is a shareholder.
Barsi’s investment advice
In those words he summarizes a philosophy that, he noted, contrasts with that of a large part of the almost five million investors individuals that operate on the São Paulo Stock Exchange.
“The majority are speculators who turned the stock market into a securities casino,” trying to profit in the short term, he said.
The formula that Barsi teaches through a educational platform (“Shares guarantee the future”), co-founded by Louise, consists of forming a portfolio with a large number of shares of companies acquired at low prices in “perennial” sectors, such as energy, banks or pulp.
And the main thing: these must guarantee a monthly profit in dividends, explains Barsi, who despises options such as fixed income, whose return he considers scarce, or cryptocurrencies, which he defined as a “fantasy.”
The method allowed him to generally emerge successfully from the ups and downs of the Brazilian economy since 1970. “My success was trusting the market and not governments”he claimed.
He even rejected invitations to participate in politics: ““I like the money, not the charges.”Barsi stressed.
Source: Ambito
