Imagine if you will the only available investment opportunity is to invest in shares of sandal manufacturers. You are presented with two options. Option 1 is to take a long-term buy and hold position in a fund which holds interests in the top 100 sandal manufacturers in the world. Option 2 is to constantly buy […]
Category: Investing 101
What makes things go up and down
Even in a pre-covid-19 world, my brother would always ask me why the market (and more relevantly) individual stocks would often defecate themselves. He did not say ‘defecate’. ‘Defecate’ is very much a euphemism here. Everyone’s talking about large dips or rallies in the market these days but if you distance yourself from the market […]
Negative and positive gearing
Negative and positive gearing are very popular topics, especially when we talk about residential investment. Generally speaking, if your investment is negatively geared, then from a finance perspective you’ve likely made a poor investment decision. It’s only from a tax perspective that you may actually derive some benefits. However it’s very important to understand that […]
Microinvesting
The average pair of birkenstocks retails at around $120 (I think). Let me forward a value proposition. You could go all out on a pair of sandals so aesthetically offensive they inspired a not-so-humble smashed avo enthusiast to start a blog. You could roam around the inner-western suburbs of Sydney wielding a $7 crappuccino and […]
Why saving is getting you nowhere
Let’s say you made a declaration to cut down on your routine smashed avo shenanigans because some rich prick told you that delicious green mush is the real reason you can’t afford to own real estate (#okboomer) and you’ve instead opted to set aside more of your fortnightly wages into a savings account to buy […]
Dollar cost averaging
In an earlier article, Accumulating assets, we discussed our award-winning, ingenious get rich quick plan – buy low, sell less-low. Well, much like Patrick J. Adams in the hit legal drama which made lawyers seem cool (admittedly only to other lawyers), I’m a fraud. Yes, obviously it would be ideal to buy any asset at […]
Socially responsible investing
My endgame in life is and always will be to do my bit to help leave this world a little bit better off than how I found it. So far, I’ve done an awful job of that. If you’re reading this from any OECD country, chances are that you have too. To say that we […]
Diversification and ETFs
Imagine you own 10 eggs. You paid $1 for each of those eggs. You read online about an egg seller who will collate your eggs into a basket and go door to door and sell each egg for $2. We’ll call this egg seller the market darling. You deposit all 10 eggs with the market […]
Accumulating assets
One of the best pieces of advice I ever received early in my career was that if I wanted to be wealthy, I needed to focus less on growing my income and more on accumulating assets. In most OECD countries, this is true from both a finance and a tax perspective. Assets grow faster than […]
The time value of money
Albert Einstein once said that “compound interest is the most powerful force in the universe”. Probably. Who knows. The renowned physicist is attributed with saying all sorts of things. But wherever that quote comes from, it’s not wrong. In this article, I hope to explain to you that understanding the time value of money and […]
