Personal Finance

Actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher says investing "is like planting seeds; nurture them, and they will grow into something remarkable"

Marc Guberti

Published: March 1, 2025 9:15 am

Ashton Kutcher first got into the spotlight as a famous actor, but he’s now become a successful investor. Kutcher has been investing since 2009 and made early investments in Skype and Airbnb. He co-founded A-Grade Investments, which invests in startups long before their IPOs. He even has stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Stability AI. 

He also offers great advice for investors, including this brilliant metaphor. He said, “[investing] is like planting seeds; nurture them, and they will grow into something remarkable.”

Here’s what this great insight means for investors.

Don’t Try to Time the Stock Market

Timing the stock market is one of the worst ways to approach investing. It’s hard to time price fluctuations to find meaningful entry and exit points for long-term profits. Furthermore, it takes a lot of time to attempt to time the stock market. You can spend hours looking at charts and end up losing money at the same time.

Instead of timing the stock market, you should focus on spending more time in the stock market. Kutcher’s investments in Skype and Airbnb were great with foresight, but he had to endure the volatility of these startups before realizing his bigreturns. However, Skype and Airbnb are major success stories, not all investments pan out. However, timing the stock market can cause you to exit investments that continue to soar in the long run.

Only Buy Companies That You Want to Hold for Five Years

Waiting for investment seeds to grow into something spectacular requires long-term investing. Seeds don’t grow into trees after a few weeks. It takes multiple years for the power of compounding to generate meaningful long-term gains. 

While market volatility can cause some investors to panic, it’s easier to stay the course if you buy companies that you believe in. Investors should only initiate positions in growth stocks that they feel confident about holding for the next five years. 

Using this parameter can help investors avoid flashy stocks that capture headlines today and collapse after a few years. Buying companies with this mentality can also help you sleep better at night when the stock market closes.

Give Yourself Long-Term Investing Goals

You can’t set long-term goals around your long-term returns since that can lead to riskier investments. However, you can set goals around how much you contribute to your portfolio each month.

Boosting your portfolio contributions is one of the best ways to grow your portfolio. This sounds obvious, but some people are more focused on finding an investment that might gain 100% than looking for ways to increase their portfolio contribution by 10% each year. Putting more money into the stock market allows investors to make less risky investments to achieve their financial goals. 

It also goes back to Kutcher’s saying about how a seed can turn into something remarkable. It’s great to plant one seed, but what if you could plant numerous seeds that turn into remarkable things? Investing more money makes that possible, and you can only increase your portfolio contributions by increasing your income or minimizing your expenses. It doesn’t take much time to reduce costs before you can’t reduce them anymore, so it’s good to prioritize income growth after you establish a budget.