
Ash HN: Suggestions for Good Resources for Investing - harshamv22
I would love to understand economics and build knowledge around investing. Please suggest some good resources around economics and investing (stocks, companies etc.)
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shoo
A reasonably sound place to start for investing as an individual is the
Bogleheads wiki:
[https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Main_Page)
The general Bogleheads approach isn't to try to estimate value of individual
stocks or sectors of the economy, basic idea is passive investment: buy & hold
index funds to get diversified exposure to market returns, then minimise costs
by avoiding funds with high management fees. Bernstein's
[http://www.efficientfrontier.com/](http://www.efficientfrontier.com/) is good
reading, from perspective of individual investor.

If on the other hand you want to learn about how to estimate value of
companies (this will probably will not have a good return on time or money
invested for an individual compared to low effort passive investment approach)
one place to start reading is
[http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/)
& [http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/](http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/)

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imakwana
+1. Bogleheads Wiki is a goldmine of sound investing principles and personal
finance. Also highly recommend their books reading list:
[https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_r...](https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Books:_recommendations_and_reviews)

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gndclouds
I have found
[Wealthfront]([https://blog.wealthfront.com](https://blog.wealthfront.com)) to
have a lot of good resources on their blog. And Robinhood has a nice section
on [intro to
economics]([https://learn.robinhood.com](https://learn.robinhood.com)) which
is public.

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cpach
You might want to have a look at this thread posted a few weeks ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23052066)

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giantg2
I was going to say, we covered this recently.

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sloaken
Easy mode - Buy a ETF that represents the S&P 500.

Mode I plan to use with my kids - I have just picked up a great book, I have
read the first 3 chapters. 'Warren Buffett's 3 Favorite Books: A guide to The
Intelligent Investor, Security Analysis, and The Wealth of Nations'

The author is trying to condense the 3 books into an easy to read book. So far
I find it wonderful.

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kratom_sandwich
Get your hands on the CFA course material or for an introductory text read
"Corporate Finance" by Berk and DeMarzo

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logicslave
Buy and hold

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kosmischemusik
Most actively managed funds do not beat the index. For the average investor
who doesn't have more than a couple of hours every week to figure out their
investment strategy, just invest in indices. If you're in the US - the Nasdaq
Composite or S&P 500. If you're in India, the Nifty 50 or Nifty 100. You can
do this through ETFs.

However, it is not recommended you invest only in equity. Market crashes can
result in your wealth eroding by 30-50% as seen recently and back in 2008.
While it does recover in the long run, it is impossible to say how long a bear
market will last which means your money will be locked in for quite some time.
Further, your returns may not outperform inflation in a shorter time-frame.
Also, if you have an emergency, the money is no longer liquid.

It is highly advisable to diversify your investment across asset classes.
Having gold & fixed income (debt) in your portfolio will help protect during
adverse market conditions and grow at a modest rate during bull markets. An
example is this product which is available to investors in India:
[https://www.smallcase.com/smallcase/SCAW_0001](https://www.smallcase.com/smallcase/SCAW_0001).
It is only an example to show you how asset allocation helps protect against
market volatility/crashes.

I would highly recommend you read about portfolio construction using the core-
satellite methodology.
[https://www.vanguard.co.uk/documents/adv/literature/client_m...](https://www.vanguard.co.uk/documents/adv/literature/client_material/core-
satellite-investing-guide.pdf)

It would be wise to create an emergency fund for anywhere between 6-12 months
as a separate thing.

Once you're more confident, start exploring niche indices; there are many
ETFs. For example, the Bessemer Emerging Cloud Index has performed extremely
well since March. An astute investor would have realized that people locked-in
and working remotely would result in an increase in productivity apps, video
content consumption etc. These rely on cloud platforms for hosting and
delivery. One would have invested in it and made some pretty good returns. An
investment on March 1st would be up 21% compared with 4% in Nasdaq Composite.

But this requires you to keep an eye on what's happening in the world and
being able to interpret it. There aren't shortcuts to this.

But to get started with, you can start learning about the basics of business &
economics. This might help:
[https://learn.tickertape.in/](https://learn.tickertape.in/)

A very comprehensive resource for learning about investing can be found here:
[https://zerodha.com/varsity/](https://zerodha.com/varsity/) (there's a lot of
modules on trading, ignore if you don't want to trade. Do modules 1, 3 & 11).

Happy learning :).

