Reddit reviews A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing

You should read A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

The main takeaway is that nobody can consistently beat the market and you will likely come out behind if you try. Instead, you should invest in the entire market and go along for the ride. And diversification lowers risk.

VTSAX is an index fund for the entire US stock market so it's very diversified.

VTIAX is the complimentary fund for the rest of the world outside the US stock market.

Both are actually components of the Vanguard Target Retirement funds (along with their US and International Bond funds)

Rather than use a Target Retiement fund, I follow the "lazy portfolio" concept of self-managed investing for retirement...
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Lazy_portfolios

Specifically, the three-fund lazy portfolio...
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Three-fund_portfolio
...which includes VTSAX, VTIAX, and VBTLX as the three funds.

Another reason people sometimes prefer VTSAX over Target Retirement funds is when the fund is held in a taxable brokerage account. Target Retirement funds include bonds and bonds aren't considered "tax-efficient" investments so it's not optimal to hold them in a taxable account. It's better to hold bonds in a traditional 401k or traditional IRA.

More info...
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Tax-efficient_fund_placement

1. The first half that you talk about is well known now, but that's because of Ben Graham. Don't forget, the original edition of the intelligent investor was published in 1949 nearly 70 years ago. Those ideas were revolutionary at the time. For someone who hasn't been reading about investing or done a lot of research those are also invaluable lessons to learn which is why the book is recommended so often.
   
2. If you're looking for some more detailed security analysis I think Graham's other book security analysis will cover what you're looking for. I haven't read it personally so I don't know for sure, but from what I've heard secondhand I think it covers it.
   
3. My own personal thought on the Intelligent Investor is that it's a good general book about the market and can teach you a lot. However, Graham is not the most engaging writer and reading through his book is a slog to say the least. I think there are other more recent books that teach the basics without being difficult to read. A Random Walk Down Wallstreet is one I've personally read that's good. I'm currently skimming through Heads I win, Tails I win and so far it covers the psychology of investing pretty well while also quoting from The Intelligent Investor directly. I've heard that The little book that (still) beats the markets is also good but I haven't read it personally.
   
4. One final thought is that some of the ideas presented in the first half aren't necessarily so obvious to most people. If they were, you would never get valuations into the triple digit (or infinite!) P/E ratios like AMZN, NFLX, TSLA, etc.
   
   Edit corrected the years to nearly 70 from nearly 60. Did anyone else know it's 2016 and not 2006?

Your rent is really quite high, but it's Vancouver so I get it.

One thing that looks possibly missing is budgeting for longer term or infrequent regular expenses. This might be things like:

1. Saving up to buy gifts for people at Christmas. Or just saving up because you know you will spend more at restaurants around the holidays.
   
   
2. Saving up for yearly vacations.
   
   
3. Any regular bills that are yearly rather than monthly. For me this is my rental insurance, but it sounds like you have this covered. A lot of people have yearly car registration fees as well, but I think you don't own a car? Either way, make sure you budget for any expenses like this so you aren't blindsided in January when you get a large bill that you didn't plan for.
   
   
4. Clothing purchases? Maybe this is falling under "personal enjoyment" for you, but clothes wear out.. You're going to need to replace them.
   
   
5. When you get a new cellphone every 4 years or whatever, do you buy a cheaper one on contract so there is no up front cost? Otherwise, you should budget monthly savings for this. And similar regular long-term purchases (Computer?).
   
   
   Perhaps not high on your list, but if it's your thing, setting some monthly budget for charitable donations is a good idea. Alternatively, just have a budgeted "flex" category that can include this, so that you aren't off-budget for random purchases ( within reason ).
   
   Move-out expenses: I've got about a $1000 bill for IKEA furniture in the 1 bedroom place I live in now. This did not include a bed ( additional ~$800). You can certainly do this cheaper (kijiji etc.), but budgeting $2000 or so would be a comfortable start. It sounds like you have the savings to do so. You'll want a good set of cookware, cutlery, plates, and kitchen knives as well, which could set you back a couple hundred, depending on quality and sales.
   
   Retirement savings: Typical suggestion is 10-20% of your pre-tax income. Since you have a defined benefit pension, you could aim for the low end, if you expect to stay in this position long enough to get full value out of the pension. $600 / month would not be a bad starting point. At 7% yearly growth, starting from zero, this would get you to savings of 1.5 million at age 65. 4% withdrawal rate gives a retirement income of $63,000 a year which inflation adjusts to about $30,000. Disregarding the DB pension, if you include CPP of ~$7000 / year, this would give you enough in retirement to more than cover your current expenses.
   
   For your current savings, you should keep an emergency fund of about 3 - 6 months income in a regular savings account that is easy to access. This is to cover you if something unexpected happens like you lose your job, or have to take extended time off to help a family member, or have some unexpected bills. As somebody who owns neither a car nor a house, your "unexpected bills" are likely to be less frequent and smaller, so you could aim for the lower range of this. I would keep at least $20,000 for an emergency fund though.
   
   For the rest of it, you need to decide what your long term goals are. If you intend to buy a car in near future (5 years), then you should keep an appropriate amount of money in a savings account, or other guaranteed instruments (such as GICs). GICs often (sometimes?) pay more interest than savings accounts, but have specific maturity dates. If you pull the money out before then, you forfeit all / some of the interest (depending on the terms of the particular GIC). If you think you will buy a car in 3 years, don't buy a GIC with a 5 year maturity date. If you intend to buy a house in the future, basically the same story. Keep the appropriate down-payment savings in a savings account or GIC so that there is no chance of losing it before you need it. Stock market investments are great in the long term, but for short term savings there is too much fluctuation, and you could be underwater when you need the money.
   
   If a car, house, or other large purchase (Planned big vacation, wedding, etc?) is not coming in the near future, then you should invest the rest for retirement. I recommend you pick up the book "A random walk down wall street" for more information about how you should be investing for retirement. The short version is to get a low-fee online brokerage account (I use TD direct investing), buy ETF index funds, and just hold them. No day-trading or "I think this will go down tomorrow, I'm going to sell and buy it back then!".
   
   

Realize that you always need to be learning and taking in new information. You will never "master" the market, nobody else has mastered it either, so take others' opinions with a grain of salt.


As much as people joke around here it can be a good way to spur new thought. If someone says the market will crash in 3 days? Why? Do you agree? If so, why? What data can you come up with to support that? (Etc, etc). Your goal should be to become knowledgeable enough to look at the economic landscape and come up with a personal opinion about what will happen next.

Once you have an informed hypothesis on what will occur then you make investments based on those convictions.

• Reading list:
  
  
• Intelligent Investor
  
  
• Security Analysis
  
  
• Random Walk
  
  Web resources:
  
  http://markets.wsj.com/
  
  http://www.bloomberg.com/markets/stocks/futures
  
  https://www.tradingview.com/
  
  http://seekingalpha.com/
  
  WSB Cheatsheet = www.3xetf.com
  
  
  

> OP needs to seek out a trained financial adviser.

Don't. Financial advisers are mostly just salesmen, and most sell shitty products with high fees. It's impossible to navigate which ones are good and which ones aren't unless you know finance yourself, in which case, you will no longer need a financial adviser and can invest yourself for the lowest fees (use Vanguard for the lowest fees).

It's really not all that complicated to invest if you play the game of diversification and just try to get the average market return. Trying to beat the market is another game (a game which we who are interested in bitcoin are playing) and takes another level of sophistication.

Just read these two books and you'll know all you need to know to invest your own money well for the lowest fees. That is if you're playing the simple diversify-and-get-average-market-return game.

The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between

A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing

I highly recommend A Random Walk down Wall Street as a resource to learn about, and the best way to invest in, the stock market.

A Ramdom Walk Down Wall Street

You'll hear this a thousand times but read A Random Walk Down Wall Street. It has a good overview of America's market history, specifically the last decade. Make sure you buy a revised version.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393352242/ref=dp_ob_neva_mobile

Some people may suggest Intelligent Investor and Securities Analysis but I found them very dated.

Also here is the r/personalfinance reading list:

https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/readinglist

You owe it to yourself to understand what you are actually buying when you "invest in the market." A Random Walk Down Wall Street cannot be recommended highly enough. Check out the newest edition from your local library.

I'm kind of in the same boat. The folks at /r/personalfinance suggested A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which I'm about 20 pages into. It gets updated every so often, so the info should be pretty current. Seems pretty good so far.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-down-Wall-Street/dp/0393352242/ref=dp_ob_title_bk

Se queres ganhos a curto prazo compra antes raspadinhas.

A longo prazo A Random Walk Down Wall Street

https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0393352242/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?ie=UTF8&refRID=5TTKGAJF1M8TNC11TN79

So to buy A Random Walk Down Wall Street in bulk, these bastards are charging 17.16 a copy, around $5 more than what it would cost individually on friggin' Amazon.

[Something something EMH is crap]

https://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Definitive-Investing-Essentials/dp/0060555661/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491278610&sr=8-1&keywords=the+intelligent+investor

https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-down-Wall-Street/dp/0393352242/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1491278661&sr=8-1&keywords=random+walk+down+wall+street

Another which had a great impact on me was Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street...

The Richest Man in Babylon

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Wow. Ok, two things:

1. The article you are referencing is from 1996. This amazing review of exchange rate predictability by the leading scholar on the subject was published in 2013; and one of its key findings is that the success of different predictors in the FX markets changes over time, without any ability to forecast which one will be most (or at all) successful at any time. FX is literally the hardest thing in economics to forecast.
   
   
2. You clear haven’t read or have willfully forgotten A Random Walk Down Wall Street, which does a beautiful deep dive into the meaninglessness of “technical analysis”.

Alors j'allais gueuler contre le PEL mais tu l'as déjà fait.
As-tu une limites basse sur ce compte? Un virement minimum attendu? Le seul intérêt du PEL pourrais être l'accès à des taux intéressants à long terme, donc à garder si tu peux conserver le minimum d'argent dessus.
A priori pas de frais pour le fermer, j'avais fermé le mien pour des raisons similaires. Mais il faut que tu vérifies avec ta banque.

Il faut que tu sois conscient que l'AV t'expose à du risque (pas beaucoup mais quand même). Donc de mon point de vue il ne faut pas trop en mettre dessus.

Vu les sommes en jeux, ça ne sert pas à grand chose de diversifier.
Ce qu'il faut c'est maximiser l'intérêt composé.
Cad choisir le meilleur support et mettre de côté régulièrement en repérant le meilleur moment pour faire tes virements et ne pas pourrir ton rendement de la quinzaine.

Quel est le rendement de ton livret jeune? C'est probablement le plus intéressant. Tu devrais avoir 8k dessus.

Et sinon oubli la bourse en direct, c'est de la merde.
Intérêts composés, intérêts composés, intérêts composés.
Je te conseille de lire ceci (existe en français mais la version anglaise est plus à jour):
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393352242/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0/168-7907036-0075604?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=43GZXMPXXRH3SNG814JX

I agree with the above comments, but you might additionally consider:

• Either VOO ETF (if you’re more conservative ~10%/yr) or VGT ETF (~20%/yr). Both are diversified and just don’t panic on downturns and wait.
  
• Read A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393352242/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_yfrEDbN600ENZ (which explains why ETFs work)
  
• If you have an ESPP do that, and then sell after a year
  
• Don’t buy individual stocks. They are too risky and they can really drag your long-term savings plan.

Yeah completely understandable, it's not too complicated, but from an outsiders perspective can look daunting. I can't really recommend any specific financial advisors, but if you have the time to do some reading I can recommend a few things that will help you out. A Random Walk down Wall Street and The Intelligent Investor are great, easy to read introductions to value investing, while this post on /r/AusFinance gives some pretty straightforward and practical advice.

While its not the advice you're looking for right now, do consider it as it may help save you thousands of dollars in the long run.

Random Walk Down Wall Street

https://www.amazon.com/Random-Walk-down-Wall-Street/dp/0393352242

maybe give "a random walk down wallstreet" a read. It's written in a way that you can fairly understand it without a background in econ.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street. This book should be required reading in high school. It's super simple, doesn't overly complicate investing, and is the one thing people just don't talk about enough. We should all have a certain amount of financial literacy.

Listen to this:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/01/23/688018907/episode-688-brilliant-vs-boring

Read this:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393352242/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_9PSjDbKQQF2MQ

Interest rates have been mostly dropping over the last 30 years, for whatever reason. That means the "risk free" rate of return has been dropping, to near 0. Which means the return on newly-bought competing investments should also drop very low. Which means stock prices paid by newcomers should rise very high. Which is what's happened.

Now, if interest rates were to rise dramatically, I think we'd have a crash, like we did in October 1987. The old classic book, A Random Walk Down Wallstreet explains my reasoning, using 1987 as an example.

I would keep maybe 5k in cash as an emergency fund. With the 10k left I'd recommend a low cost stock mutual fund or ETF. Vanguard has good ones. VTSMX is the total stock fund, although that is weighted more towards large companies. If you want to focus on smaller companies, you could go with the small cap growth fund, VSGAX.

For books, A Random Walk Down Wall Street would be a good place to start.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393352242/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1521043399&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=a+random+walk+down+wall+street&dpPl=1&dpID=51SyHrmTdTL&ref=plSrch

I highly suggest Burton Malkiel's Burton Malkiel's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" to any non-technical (and, frankly, even technical) persons seeking a general understanding of economics and finance. It is easy to read and touches on 95% of the key terms that would be covered in an interview.

Anything more in depth than this would likely require more time than you seem to have.

Edit: a word.

This question has been a lot answered a lot — you should check the sidebar.

That said, the boring but generally good advice is to first save up an emergency fund large enough pay for three months of your life with no other income during that period before you start investing. A lot of people say 10k is a good round number for that fund, but it'll obviously vary from person to person.

Once you have that, you should check out Robinhood. It gets a lot of flak on reddit because it gives people who might have no idea what they are doing a lot of power to blow all their money on penny stocks and emotion. While most other brokerages will charge you $8 - $10 for every trade, Robinhood charges nothing. That saves you a lot, especially if you're starting out with a relatively low portfolio value, but it also means you have to hold your emotions in check on your own, since commission fees won't be there to do it for you.

Vanguard offers a great variety of ETFs, many of which are available on Robinhood. You should check out that list.

I'd also advise you read at least one book. I really like A Random Walk Down Wall Street. I'll spoil the ending for you: It's really hard to beat the market. But it's not so hard to match it.

I've been reading https://smile.amazon.com/Random-Walk-down-Wall-Street/dp/0393352242 lately and it hammers home how often bubbles and investor lust for quick and easy profits happen in history. It's like we never learn. :-( Hell I'm no better, having been caught up in the Bitcoin craze losing a couple hundred to panic selling.

Here is a random article I found about stock simulators.

How do you like to learn things? There are tons of books, podcasts and blogs about investing. Here are some popular ones or ones that I have read and used

• Books
  
  • The intelligent Investor
    
  • A Random Walk Down Wall Street
    
  • Your Money Your Life
    
  • The Richest Man in Babylon
    
  • I Will Teach You to be Rich
    
    
• Blogs
  
  • Stock Series
    
  • Mr Money Mustache
    
  • Mad FIentist
    
  • dozens of others, Google is your friend
    
    
• Podcasts
  
  • Money Tree Podcast -- pretty poor production quality but good general stuff.
    
  • There are tons of others, Google it.
    
    Warren Buffett famously/supposedly read every book in the financial section at the library by age 12--I think the important thing to take from that is you are still young and have tons of free time and aside from starting to invest as soon as you can (you can usually start as soon as you have earned income) you should be investing in yourself...getting good grades, figuring out what you want to do after high school, trying out businesses, learning marketable skills (e.g., coding, good writing skills, good interpersonal skills, good organizational skills, etc).
    
    Good Luck!

A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing

Bogle On Mutual Funds: New Perspectives For The Intelligent Investor

This video is a good TL;DR despite the clickbait title.

The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing is a really good, practical book on investing.

A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing is a pretty thorough takedown of stock analysis and picking.

I would advise you to learn more about the history of the stock market, and how difficult it is to beat the market. Books like A Random Walk Down Wall Street will give you a great history of the market.

I personally have a hard and fast rule of never putting more than 10% in a single stock. I'd recommend putting the majority in a retirement account in an S&P 500 index fund, and then using whatever money you're completely OK with losing entirely as a trading account you can go crazy in. :)

Check this book out .. definitely helped me a lot starting out!!

A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393352242/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_-7sNyb3CDVQKD

Curioso, acabei de o ler há umas duas semanas :P

Para além das sugestões dadas, sugiro também que leias a "continuação" do Rich Dad Poor Dad, o CASHFLOW Quadrant. Estou a lê-lo atualmente e se gostaste do RDPD, também vais gostar.

Um livro que eu também vou ler em breve é o A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Já o comprei, já vi muita gente referir-se a ele como obrigatório para qualquer pessoa que pretenda investir na bolsa.

O conceito de fundos e de acções aplica-se em Portugal tal como em qualquer outro país. E mesmo que não se aplicasse ou os aches demasiado instáveis por cá, nada te impede de investires na bolsa ou em fundos de outros países. O PSI 20 seguiu sempre as tendências do Dow Jones nos últimos 25 anos, de acordo com este gráfico, à exceção dos últimos 5 anos. Muito provavelmente por causa da austeridade / instabilidade nos bancos, diria eu. Mas a economia funciona de igual forma em qualquer lado, a tendência é sempre subir. Pode é demorar mais nalguns casos.

Só por curiosidade, começaste-te a interessar pelo tópico por alguma razão ou com algum objetivo em específico? Podes também procurar blogs de pessoas que tenham objetivos semelhantes, ou que já os tenham inclusive atingido. Costumam ser leituras bastante interessantes. Posso-te sugerir alguns se o teu objetivo for atingir independência financeira o mais rapido possível :P

Sorry for the picky correction, but it's A Random Walk Down Wall Street, amazon link here - and it's a great book, really changed my opinions on investing too