Nov 11, 2012

This episode covers a lot of questions I faced getting started in investing as a private investor and my own experience in tackling these questions:

• Why invest (i.e. why not just leave your money in a bank)?
• Who is going to manage your investments, an external manager or yourself?
• Are you going to be an active investor (e.g. analysing individual securities for value and trading more often) or a passive investor (e.g. using index funds and trading less often)?
• Which asset classes are you going to invest in (e.g. stocks, bonds, precious metals, cash)? How will you allocate and balance assets in your portfolio?
• Which individual securities are you going to select within each asset class (e.g if you decide to buy bonds, which individual bonds will you choose)?
• When should you start investing, within the context of your overall personal financial planning?
• When should you buy or sell individual assets? Will you try to time the market or will you automatically rebalance a portfolio based on an asset allocation strategy?
• Where should you invest? Should you have geographic diversification and if so, what kind?

You can also get more information about the concept of the permanent portfolio discussed in this episode in Harry Browne's book "Fail-Safe Investing" and in many of the previous Voluntary Life podcast episodes on investing.

As always regarding investment, do your own research. I am not an advisor and this isn't advice of any kind, it's just my own opinions based on my experience.