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21 January 2025
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Everyone including investors needs to evolve to get better. Here are five steps to improve your investment toolkit, including thinking probabilistically, running your own race, and measuring yourself objectively.
Faced with confusing complexity which often fails to improve investment outcomes, a former managing director set himself the task of writing a one-page introduction to investing for his 18-year-old grandkids.
Many new investors make common mistakes while learning about markets. Losses are inevitable. Newbies should read more and develop a long-term focus while avoiding big mistakes and not aiming to be brilliant.
From a financial view, most earnings calls and stock picks are a waste of time. For most people, their investing would be better served in an index fund. So why bother with it? The best reason is because you enjoy it.
The Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger partnership is the stuff of legends, but even Charlie admits it is coming to an end ("I'm nearly dead"). He is one of the few people in investing prepared to say what he thinks.
In this second part on the reader responses with advice to younger people, we have selected a dozen highlights, but there are so many quality contributions that a full list of comments is also attached.
From the hundreds of survey responses, here is a selection of 100 tips, with others to come next week. There are consistent and new themes based on decades of experience making mistakes and enjoying successes.
Many of our readers possess decades of investment experience. Let's share your lessons with those starting out, or is this time different, and your Living Years have left you 'prisoner to what you hold dear'?
'Sophisticated' investors can be offered securities without the usual disclosure requirements given to everyday investors, but far more people now qualify than was ever intended. Many are far from sophisticated.
Favourite quotations from famous people on markets, investing, processes, noise, pessimism, self perception and life balance. These lessons carry across investment cycles and lifetimes.
To mark our 200th edition, we asked investors and market experts for the top two investing insights they would give to their 20-year-old selves if they could go back in time.
Last year, I wrote an article suggesting returns from ASX stocks would trample those from housing over the next decade. One year later, this is an update on how that forecast is going and what's changed since.
The housing market was subdued in 2024, and pessimism abounds as we start the new year. 2025 is likely to be a tale of two halves, with interest rate cuts fuelling a resurgence in buyer demand in the second half of the year.
The renowned investor has penned his first investor letter for 2025 and it’s a ripper. He runs through what bubbles are, which ones he’s experienced, and whether today’s markets qualify as the third major bubble of this century.
This examines the performance of key asset classes and sub-sectors in 2024 and over longer timeframes, and the lessons that can be drawn for constructing an investment portfolio for the next decade.
Key lessons include expensive stocks can always get more expensive, Bitcoin is our tulip mania, follow the smart money, the young are coming with pitchforks on housing, and the importance of staying invested.
Check out the most-read Firstlinks articles from 2024. From '16 ASX stocks to buy and hold forever', to 'The best strategy to build income for life', and 'Where baby boomer wealth will end up', there's something for all.