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Investing

To get up to speed and learn the basics of sane and mindful investing the best sources are JL Collins, John Bogle, Mr. Money Mustache, and the likes of them.

Notes

If you invest $6000 at the beginning of each year (the equivalent of $500 per month, but placed at the beginning of the year to facilitate calculations), and start at age 55, assuming 4% annualized nominal return, your balance at age 65 will be about $75,000. If you start at age 40, you will end up with about $260,000. And if you start at age 25 your balance at age 65 will be about $593,000.

Portfolio diversification efficient frontier

Terms

  • Total Expense Ratio (TER) - costs associated with managing and operating an investment fund, calculated as TER = fund costs / fund assets
  • Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) - ETF is an investment fund that explicitly tracks an index, commodity, sector, or an asset. Investors can buy and sell ETFs just like normal stocks – which makes them easy to invest in. ETFs usually track basket of commodities and have low expense ratio.
  • Index - is a hypothetical portfolio of investment holdings that represents a segment of the financial market. The index value is mostly based on the prices of underlying holdings but can also depend on revenue-weighting, fundamental-weighting, etc. Weighting is used to adjust impact of individual assets on the index value.
  • Efficient Frontier, also here
  • Dollar Cost Averaging is an investment strategy that aims to reduce the impact of volatility on large purchases of financial assets such as equities by dividing the total sum to be invested in the market (e.g., $100,000) into equal amounts put into the market at regular intervals (e.g., $2,000 per week over 50 weeks).

Resources

Places to invest at

Index Funds

Vanguard vs. iShares

Vanguard has only two accumulative funds (i.e. dividend yield is reinvested) compared to iShares. Accumulative funds are better for tax optimization.