One single, must have financial skill is the lack of FOMO, says Morgan Housel

Morgan Housel

The one financial skill that people need to have is the lack of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), without which one can't do well financially, renowned author Morgan Housel said on March 7, at the Moneycontrol Global Wealth Summit 2025 in Mumbai.

"One cannot do well if they are susceptible to FOMO," said Housel, author of New York Times' Bestseller 'The Psychology of Money,' and 'Same As Ever'. His books have sold over eight million copies and have been translated into more than 60 languages.

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"If there is one single financial skill that you have to have - an absolute prerequisite to doing well over time - it's a lack of FOMO. You cannot do well financially over time, you're susceptible to FOMO. It's impossible. So many different financial skills, at the base of the pyramid, if you cannot get rid of FOMO, you have to give up investing," he said.

Housel further explained that FOMO is outsourcing your analysis to someone else's emotions. "You are looking at somebody else, some other asset class and saying they are doing better than I did. You you can't outrun that train.," he said.

According to Housel, one way to avoid FOMO is to self-realise what one can't do.

“You have to understand what you're good at and what you're not. If you can't describe what you are not good at, it's going be very hard to do well as an investor. In investing, where a lot of people are very well educated, a lot of big IQs, very smart people in the industry, those are the people who are least likely to admit or to be able to explain what they are incapable of doing.

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Housel believes that the best investors of the world are the ones who will list a hundred things that they can't do, and they stay away from them.

“One way to avoid FOMO, is you can watch somebody getting rich in crypto or commodities. And you would say, I don't know anything about those industries. I'm going to stay a hundred miles away,” he said.