From the category archives:

5 must read posts

An Ivy League portfolio could be a a good home for your money

I read a good article recently on how to construct an Ivy League fund using exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

The original article was for American investors. Here’s how British readers can do the same thing.

But why would you want an Ivy League style fund?

Well, the endowment funds of Ivy League universities like Yale and Harvard have historically achieved excellent returns, with less volatility than an index tracker.

Their success is partly because of special opportunities we can’t easily replicate, such as access to good hedge funds.

But they’ve also done well because of asset allocation, which we can copy with ETFs.

[click to continue…]

This is a guest post from Tim who authors the Psy-Fi blog, an excellent take on psychology and finance.

Making money from stocks is easy enough if we can defeat the main enemy – ourselves. There’s no getting around the fact that us humans are subject to lots of biases and psychological quirks that combine to destroy our investing returns.

The first line of defence against this is to recognise the problem.

[click to continue…]

Why a little passive income from a side project is worth a lot more than you think

February 13, 2009

It’s very easy to become disheartened when you first set up a side project with the aim of earning some passive income.
You might well only make a few pounds or dollars a day, even after weeks or months of work to get your passive income stream up-and-running. Most passive income projects fail to make even [...]

16 comments

Seven surprising things you may not know about Warren Buffett

December 4, 2008

I have just finished the The Snowball, the first biography Warren Buffett has cooperated with. It’s full of surprises, such as how Buffett had three leading ladies for two decades, and how his 1960s home was an accidental outpost of the counterculture.
But I’m more interested in how Buffett made his money. And while there’s few [...]

9 comments

The one number to beat if you want to retire early

February 15, 2008

There are no true short cuts in investing, but I believe there are some subtle benefits in targeting income when making your investment plans.

5 comments