Good reads from around the Web.
I enjoyed the rundown by the anonymous author of Retirement Investing Today of all the things he got wrong when he first planned his journey towards financial independence.
From his (underestimated) capacity to save to (overestimated) annual charges, the first Excel spreadsheet he produced was full of errors.
Don’t you love it when people admit their mistakes? Their credibility instantly soars in my eyes.
Anyway, there’s one landmine that RIT sidestepped, and that has made all the difference.
In his words [1]:
Looking back I made a lot of errors in those early 2007 days.
With so many errors did I actually get anything right, I hear you ask?
Given I’m less than a year from financial independence as I write this post, I think I got one thing very right.
I started.
Bravo, RIT.
And happy Easter everyone.
From the blogs
Making good use of the things that we find…
Passive investing
- Smart Beta Crash Coming? – A Wealth of Common Sense [2]
- The problem with average – The Irrelevant Investor [3]
- Why do we bother? – The Evidence Based Investor [4]
- Expected returns [Canadian but relevant] – Canadian Couch Potato [5]
Active investing
- Looking differently at Morrisons – The Value Perspective [6]
- Berkshire Hathaway is safe and cheap – Base Hit Investing [7]
- Cutting losses with Fisher’s three sell rules – Investing Caffeine [8]
- The S&P 500 still looks expensive – UK Value Investor [9]
- Weird portfolios have more potential – The Investor’s Field Guide [10]
Other articles
- Billionaire nerds make the world better – Mr Money Mustache [11]
- Pocket money rate cuts – Principles and Interest [12]
- How to avoid the short-termism problem – Pragmatic Capitalism [13]
- Uncertainty in retirement plans [US but relevant] – C.I.R.Y. [14]
- Would you regret retiring abroad? – SexHealthMoneyDeath [15]
- Where the wealth was all along – Raptitude [16]
- “Freedom to” is what retirement is about – Simple Living in Suffolk [17]
Product of the week: The tax-free Rent A Room allowance rises to £7,500 from April. Experts in the Financial Times [18] [search result] say that’s increasing the appeal of Rent A Room mortgages, such as the one offered by Bath Building Society [19].
Mainstream media money
Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view these enable you to click through to read the piece without being a paid subscriber of that site.1 [20]
Passive investing
- Swedroe: Don’t bother timing the return premiums – ETF.com [21]
- 86% of active fund managers under-perform [Search result] – FT [22]
- Index funds and the curse of benchmarks – Morningstar [23]
- Bogle warns you won’t make much from US assets – MarketWatch [24]
- [Beware] talk of crash in $3 trillion ETF industry – Interactive Investor [25]
Active investing
- Donald Trump lost money in 18 of his 21 hedge funds – ThisIsMoney [26]
- Time to invest in agriculture? – Telegraph [27]
- Structural illiquidity in today’s bond market – Business Insider [28]
A word from a broker
- Value versus growth investing – TD Direct [29]
- Dividends: Winners and losers – Hargreaves Lansdown [30]
Other stuff worth reading
- Boomers vs Gen Y: House buying in 1982 vs 2016 – Telegraph [31]
- Young drivers love black box car insurance – Guardian [32]
- Affordable housing crisis engulfs all cities in Southern England – Guardian [33]
- How pension savers have fared, post-freedoms – Guardian [34]
- Boat racers typically want to work in finance – Bloomberg [35]
- How bubbles spread like a zombie virus – Bloomberg [36]
- Present bias in spending – Scientific American [37]
- The glory of compound interest – USA Today [38]
Book of the week: As the Governor of the Bank of England during the financial crisis, Meryvn King would have an interesting story to tell. However from the interviews I’ve seen with him over the past few days, I’m not sure what to expect from his new book, The End of Alchemy [39]
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- Note some articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”. [↩ [44]]