Ask HN: How to start learning about investments?

The story of “Bob”, the world’s worst market timer, only buying at the peaks:

* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2014/02/worlds-worst-market...

Don't try to figure out when the dip will occur, just sitting with cash on the sidelines in the meantime. Buying a little every month is generally the best strategy most of us should use:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/even-god-couldnt-beat-dollar-co...

> I will be stuck there 10 years just to recover my money and another 10 years to make some returns.

For the US at least, things generally don't take too long to recover (Great Depression notwithstanding):

* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2020/03/how-long-does-it-ta...

* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2021/07/how-long-does-it-ta...

If you're saving for retirement, then you actually want it to go down (occasionally): that means your monthly contribution can buy more for that month. Then once you're near retirement you move your portfolio to something more a conservative leaning so the swings don't effect you as much.

> Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. How to manage money, invest it, and make business decisions are typically considered to involve a lot of mathematical calculations, where data and formulae tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world, people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In the psychology of money, the author shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important matters.

* https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/41881472-the-psycholo...

Money is a 'tool' that you should use in your life to accomplish particular goals. Interview with the author:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSaRb-iFwPA

* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/128

Another good book on "non-financial investing":

> From why we should place more value on social and human capital, we look into why financial planning has a profound impact on how you manage your investments. We touch on direct indexing, the relationship between money and happiness, and the unexpected yet incredible perspectives that came from giving advisors a license to tell their stories.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wxTVjHLqwM

* https://rationalreminder.ca/podcast/126

* https://www.amazon.com/How-Invest-My-Money-Finance/dp/085719...

The 15-30% is if you're being very aggressive (but not reckless) with leverage. You wouldn't get that much in Wealthfront's default portfolio, or a target-date mutual fund, for example. That's also on average over time; some years will return much more than 30%, and some will lose money, and, of course, past performance can't guarantee future results. Broad market conditions could shift enough to invalidate any strategy. But you can do better than index funds. Compare PSLDX to SPY over the same period: https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&t...

Notice that they both had ~50% drawdowns, bottoming around 2009, but PSLDX was not that much worse, and grew faster afterwards. SPY also had a slightly worse worst year. PSLDX had significantly more volatility, but the returns more than made up for it, giving it a better Sharpe ratio than SPY. So not only are the absolute risks comparable, but the higher Sharpe means that if you leverage PSLDX down to SPY's volatility (by keeping a 17% cash balance), the drawdown was smaller and the return is still higher than SPY at ~15% instead of ~11%.

If you’re talking IRA, we’ll you could have only put in $6k. Market dumps and the following year you can put in another $6k at a much lower price per share.