Here is Dan Solin’s brilliant explanation of how dangerous timing the market is (without inside trading, which I imagine takes a lot of the guesswork out of stock-picking to beat the market - unfortunately, the government frowns upon this, so I hear):
The odds of flipping a coin and getting a head is obviously 1 out of 2. The odds of getting four heads in a row is 1 out of 16. If you flipped three times and got three heads, what are the odds of getting a fourth head? The answer is still 1 out of 2. Past performance of the coin toss does not affect future probability.
The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals
This is a brilliant quote. It’s logical, inarguable, and best of all, provable. Look, you can write up a list of the things that may affect the outcome of a toin coss. In fact you could come up with an almost inexhaustible list - but still, you will never predict the outcome with any kind of accuracy. This is truth! Actuarial and statistical tables cannot determine the outcome for an individual - so why would you think any number of factors, modifiers, and further bits of information could allow you to ‘beat the odds’ at picking stocks. This is my argument with playing poker for a living - no matter how much you work to defeat the random factors in the game, they are never eliminated - therefore loss is inevitable.
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Smartest investment book you'll ever need?
Even Ramit Sethi, the newest hottest personal finance guru agrees about this book (The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals.) - he says “this is one of my favorite investing books.” On his blog, I Will teach You How To Be Rich h dissects the book and comes to the conclusion that it is smart, concise, and doesn’t come with any fertilizer to grow the author’s stature. As in, no bullshit. Works for me!
So why do I say the book is only one sentence long?
“In a Smart Investment portfolio, you hold investments in a group of funds that, in turn, have investments in all the securities (stocks or bonds) in a particular index.”
Yup, that’s it. Of course, there are a couple hundred pages afterward explaining the nuts and bolts of how you are going to implement this:
This is from a treatise of the book that further distills the rest of the book (emphasis is mine):
Solin recommends that investors follow Four Steps
1. Determine your asset allocation based upon your personal parameters (Note: author provides a multi-page asset allocation questionnaire to determine a specific score for each individual’s circumstances and risk tolerance).
2. Open an account with Fidelity Investments, Vanguard or T. Rowe Price.
3. Set up your portfolio among three specific no-load, low internal expense index funds in any of the three fund families representing the total U.S. stock market, international market, and U.S. bond market, or purchase three specific similar in composition ETFs.
4. Rebalance the portfolio twice a year.
It’s common-sense advice - particularly when Solin says that you do not need advisors, managers, etc to invest for you - if you’re investing an American family average (my investment fund is obviously much lower than some, but sadly, much higher than many), all they are are extra fees paid to ‘churn’ your investments, making it look like they are trying to make you extra money just by flipping around your portfolio. I’ll talk more on this in a later post, and share an experience a friend of mine had. Furthermore, I have lots more to say about this particular book, which I just happened to pick up from the library not because I knew anything about it or had heard anything about it, but because it was short. Lucky me!
I’m reading a new book about beginner investor strategy, and how to start investing: The Smartest Investment Book You’ll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals. So far I like the tone and tiblre of the book - basically it’s saying that trying to time the markets or beat the markets by picking stocks is a fool’s game and a waste of money. It goes on to point out something that I knew before I even started learning about investing - people you pay to manage your stock portfolio do not have your best interests at heart. Now, before I get angry emails (or tweets - I’m on twitter too as the LateInvestor - are you? Add me if you’re into investing - I won’t auto-follow/auto-dm auto-reply or spam you with links to e-books - I am a real person, not a marketroid) from money manager’s, please know that it’s nothing personal. Just a fact of life that if you get paid to make trades for people and try and beat the market, then you will make lots of trades in hopes of beating the market. I suppose if it pans out, you could make some cash - but the law of averages would say the odds of that happening are pretty low, I suspect. I just assumed everyone would be as naturally conservative and suspicious as I am - I want to get hands on with my investment portfolio, right from the beginning, not just offshore it to some guy with 1 thousand other small time investors he lumps together and moves around like monopoly pieces.
I find it interesting that Ramit Sethi from http://IWillTeachYOuToBeRich.com/blog/ so prominently mentions that the first thing he does with his monthly paychecks is
1) Automatically deposit into his 401k fund
2) Deposit money into his Roth IRA fund.
Based on what I’ve read from Ramit, this is a guy that really knows his stuff when it comes to personal finance and personal investing. So when, in his post Automating your money — especially entrepreneurs and freelancers , I see him so strongly advocating automatic contributions to Roth IRA funds, it makes me even more inclined to make my beginning investments into a Roth IRA. I still haven’t actually made any investments yet, that should come by the end of this week. I’m not 100% confident inn my understanding of what all is involved in learning how to invest, and as a beginner investor (and a late investor of course), I want to be totally comfortable with what little money I can afford to invest.
Vanguard, which according to Investing Online For Dummies
, is the world’s largest Index mutual fund. I’m not in the book far enough to know what that actually means, but they do reference this site, and it’s creator, John Bogle several tmes in the first few chapters of Investing Online For Dummies.
On the Vanguard website, they do something that I wish more sites and online brokerages would do - they offer a widget that lets you change values and see results in terms of dollars. In this case, it’s a sliding widget that shows potential savings by investing in the Vanguard mutual fund. It’s marketing, usre, and may not be entirely accurate - but it just goes to show they understand their market - the hands-on personal investor. Or in mycase, someone whos hesitant about any investment, and wants something tangible and hands-on to let me use their site without actually signing up or even inputting my contact information. Just thought I would mention this - something to learn from if you’re a bsuiness owner with a website.
As usual, I am totally surprised by how little I really know about finances: for example, the Roth IRA. I asked my wife if she had heard of it, and she said yes, like ‘duh, of course I havem haven’t you?’ Pretty sad, but if you aren’t familiar with the Roth IRA either, Investing Online For Dummies describes the concept pretty well - here’s why it totally seems like a no-brainer:
The Roth IRA provides no deduction for contributions, but instead provides a benefit that isn’t available for traditional retirement accounts: if you meet certain requirements, all earnings are tax free when you or your beneficiary withdraw them. Other benefits include avoiding the early distribution penalty on certain withdrawals, and eliminating the need to take minimum distributions after age 70½.
Based on what I’ve read so far, this should be one of the first things I pick up. An IRA will have to bolster my small 401K, unless I cash out my 401K to roll it into something better. Not sure yet about that, so I guess just going to hang fire on that.
Next chapter is about choosing an online broker, so I’m pretty excited to see what they have to say about that.
Investing Online for Dummies - This is where I chose to start
Day 1 I’m starting out with NO prior knowledge of investing, and almost no financial knowledge at all. As I said, I started my research at the library:
The book I’m going to start with is ‘Investing Online For Dummies’ . I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘for Dummies’ line for learning computer programming, but I figured that since my ‘cup is empty’, something so popular geared toward a rank amateur such as myself would at least give me the basics to build on.
I can say I’ve already learned a couple little things about beginning investing, and 1 big thing for the beginner investor from it. It’s not a terrible read, it’s a little dry, which is to be expected, but more importantly is the big thing about beginner investing that I learned right off the bat. There are 2 kinds of investors - which type of investor you are will determine how much money you make. That’s about the simplest I can put it. Red the rest of this post to find out which type of investor I am, and which kind you are. This is dead simple and this basic beginner investor step could seriously determine your investing for the rest of your life.
Hi, my name is Jeff. I am a 36 year old software developer living in Las Vegas NV. I am married, and I have 2 children , 1 boy and 1 girl (twins). I know nothing about investing money. I have led a sheltered life, in a way. I have never really had, or had to have had, more than a shallow understanding of money or finances. Not because I had money, hell no! I never had any real money. I have always lived paycheck to paycheck. Sometimes I had enough, most times I didn’t. It sucks. Like many people, I grew up without a lot of money; my mother was a single mother, raising twins herself, and while we weren’t destitute, we certainly lived below the poverty line for most of my childhood. And, like almost everyone, I want to be rich! Not Bill gates rich (though I certainly wouldn’t turn it down), but rich enough to retire while still young enough to enjoy retirement, rich enough to pay for my kid’s college, have enough money to work for myself doing what I really want to do, instead of for someone else. Welcome to the story of how I got rich.
Hi, my name is Jeff. I am a 36 year old software developer living in Las Vegas NV. I am married, with 2 children. I know nothing about investing money. 
