Happy Holidays
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year We’ll be back in January with more content. Until then, please use the forums or the Facebook page to ask questions or post comments.
Investment Strategies: Trading
You probably aren’t as good as you think you are Trading (also known as day trading) is where you buy shares or assets and try to sell them for a profit in the short-term. The idea is to make a certain amount of money off many different trades. It requires a lot of time and […]
Other asset classes
Other asset classes are not as important So far we have covered cash, property, shares, and bonds. These four will probably make up the bulk of your portfolio. There are other things of value you can own, including patents and copyrighted works, art, private businesses, jewelry, precious metals, futures contracts, and many others, but they […]
Bonds
Bonds are pieces of debt When a government, company, or similar organization wants to raise money, one way they can do it is by issuing bonds. Basically they borrow money from people, promise to pay them back at some point, and pay interest in the meantime. Bonds tend to be more stable than shares and […]
Saving part 2
Saving money is like brushing your teeth On Saturday we had a poll about saving, and I was pleasantly surprised by the results. I guess people who are reading a blog about retirement are probably a special subset of society, but it seems you are doing much better than most people at saving. The results […]
How much are you saving?
Something for the weekend I was going to write a post explaining bonds today, but decided to do something a little less boring instead! I just read an interesting blog post that mentions in passing that most people don’t save 10, 15, or 20% of their income. How about you? How much are you saving? […]
Shares
Shares are much simpler than they first appear Shares are basically pieces of a business. When you buy a share, you become a part owner of the issuing company. Shares may entitle you to a share of the profits of a company (dividends) or give you voting rights. There are two main ways you can […]
Property
Investing in property in Japan doesn’t make sense to me Property can be a good investment because it allows you to use leverage (use other people’s money) and because it is often treated favourably by the tax code. Unfortunately property in Japan is somewhat unique and I don’t think it makes sense to invest in […]
Cash
What is it good for? Quite a lot, actually. Everyone understands cash. Today we’re going to talk about its role in an investment portfolio though. Cash is basically any money that you have instant access to. It includes money in bank current accounts, savings accounts, under the mattress, etc. The benefits of cash Generally doesn’t […]
Asset types and diversification
You know that saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? It’s particularly important for investing, and is known as diversification. The basic idea is that we can’t predict the future, so we don’t know which investments will do well and which will do badly. If you have all or most of your money […]