Warren Buffett was born in 1930 and became a child of the Great Depression. Today he’s worth in excess of $75 billion.

George Soros was born the same year and became a child of the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and WWII. According to Forbes, he’s worth nearly $10 billion.

Carl Icahn was born in 1936. He was once so broke he had to sell his car to feed himself. Forbes says he’s worth around $20 billion today.

It all started with nothing. All wound up billionaires. All did it by investing.

At first glance, they don’t seem to have much in common… Buffett buys stocks and whole companies and says his favorite holding period for investments is “forever.” Soros became a billionaire by making huge leveraged trades in stocks and currencies. Icahn buys controlling stakes in public companies and badgers management to sell assets, buy back shares and do anything to realize hidden value.

But they do have some traits in common, a few core investing ideas that helped make them billionaires. Like every great secret of life, this one is hiding in plain sight. These three self-made billionaire investors…

• 1) Don’t diversify

Consider what is likely your greatest source of wealth generation: your career. You probably haven’t diversified at all in your career. Even if you tried many different careers, you were never doing several of them at once. And, even if you do more than one job, it’s highly likely you spend the great majority of your time at just one of them and that just one provides the great majority of your income.

Why should investing be any different?

For many years, Buffett had most of Berkshire Hathaway’s money in just four stocks: American Express, Coca-Cola, Wells Fargo, and Gillette. Today, most of Berkshire Hathaway’s money is still in just four stocks: Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, IBM, and American Express.

• 2) Avoid risk

When Carl Icahn bought Tappan shares, he was paying around $7.50 each. But he knew by looking at the balance sheet that the company was clearly worth $20 if it were broken up. That’s a 62% discount to fair value, a very safe bet.

After Tappan, Icahn targeted a real estate investment trust called Baird and Warner. At the time he found it, the stock was trading for $7.89. Its book value was $14. That’s a 44% discount to book value, and a generous margin of safety.

Soros manages risk differently than Icahn and Buffett. He says the first thing he’s looking to do is survive, and he’s known to beat a hasty retreat when he’s wrong. He keeps loss potential in mind before trading. When he shorted $10 billion of British pounds in 1992, he first calculated that his worst-case loss scenario was about 4%.

• 3) Don’t care what anyone else thinks

Wall Street wouldn’t buy shares of the Washington Post when Buffett started buying it in February 1973. That’s true, even though most Wall Street analysts acknowledged that this was a $400 million company selling for $80 million. They were too scared because the overall market had been falling for some time.

Soros talks to lots of people to get a feel for where a market is going. But he never talks about what he’s buying or selling. He just does it.

Carl Icahn doesn’t need Wall Street, because he has his own research team. Icahn’s people comb through thousands of listed companies to find the ones that are right for Icahn’s corporate raider style. Icahn has to have his own research team. If he bought research from Wall Street, the whole world would figure out what he was doing, and it would become difficult to buy shares cheaply.

Think for yourself, avoid risk, and don’t attempt to diversify into a bunch of investments you don’t understand.

If you really want to get rich in stocks, those three rules are your foundation.

Mining cryptocoins is an arms race that rewards early adopters. You might have heard of Bitcoin, the first decentralized cryptocurrency that was released in early 2009. Similar digital currencies have crept into the worldwide market since then, including a spin-off from Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash. You can get in on the cryptocurrency rush if you take the time to learn the basics properly.

Hover Shortcodes

You can use great shortcodes for comparison between: 

. Or . All can be used in posts and pages in numerous ways. You can use many other cryptocurrencies and normal currencies for . You absolutely need a strong appetite for reading and constant learning, as there are ongoing technology changes and new techniques for optimizing coin mining results.

Which Alt-Coins Should Be Mined?

If you had started mining Bitcoins back in 2009, you could have earned thousands of dollars by now. At the same time, there are plenty of ways you could have lost money, too. Bitcoins are not a good choice for beginning miners who work on a small scale. The current up-front investment and maintenance costs, not to mention the sheer mathematical difficulty of the process, just doesn’t make it profitable for consumer-level hardware. Now, Bitcoin mining is reserved for large-scale operations only.

How Cryptocoin Mining Works

Let’s focus on mining ‘scrypt’ coins, namely Litecoins, Dogecoins, or Feathercoins. The whole focus of mining is to accomplish three things:

• Provide bookkeeping services to the coin network. Mining is essentially 24/7 computer accounting called ‘verifying transactions’.
• Get paid a small reward for your accounting services by receiving fractions of coins every couple of days.
• Keep your personal costs down, including electricity and hardware.

As a hobby venture, yes, cryptocoin mining can generate a small income of perhaps a dollar or two per day. In particular, the digital currencies mentioned above are very accessible for regular people to mine, and a person can recoup $1000 in hardware costs in about 18-24 months.

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Best known as the immutable database that runs underneath cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum, blockchain is poised to play a critical role in every industry imaginable as businesses seek ways to cash in on the distributed ledger technology’s promise of enabling a “trustless” consensus to validate transactions.

Earnings in the past year

Smart miners need to keep electricity costs to under $0.11 per kilowatt-hour; mining with 4 GPU video cards can net you around $8.00 to $10.00 per day (depending upon the cryptocurrency you choose), or around $250-$300 per month.

Chart shows our earnings in the past year.

Financial transactions are typically guaranteed by a trusted third party (such as PayPal) and blockchain can be used to automate that process, reducing overall costs by cutting out the middleman with autonomous smart contracts acting as trusted intermediaries between parties on the network.

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