Investing In 52 Minutes

I learned how to invest for you. Well, I have been investing for pretty much the past decade. But these days, I feel like there's a lot of economical turmoil. Plus, I just turned 30. So, I figured now is a good time for me to do a little revamp of my investment strategy. So, I decided to refresh my knowledge by taking this course called Investing for Beginners, the complete course. I took 108 pages of notes. So, here is the cliffnotes version. And as per usual, there will be little quizzes throughout this video, so please pay attention. Okay, so this course is divided into 11 different sections. The first two sections set up the foundations of the course, which is big three of investing and investment portfolio setup. Then the rest of the course focuses on deep diving into different asset classes. Starting off with mutual funds, ETFs and robo advisors, stock market investing, bonds, cash, cryptocurrency, real estate investing, both real estate and also indirect ways of real estate as well, and speculative investing including things like NFTts, commodities, and art. And finally, ending with rebalancing and next steps. Oh, by the way, mandatory disclaimer before I get started. I am not a financial adviser. I am literally just an internet person also trying to learn how to invest better. So, not financial advice. Okay. All right. Let's go. A portion of this video is sponsored by HubSpot. The first secret ingredient of successful investing is time. And it is a magical secret ingredient for a few

different reasons. The number one reason why people don't invest money is out of fear. Fear that they're going to lose their hard-earned money. And yes, it is a very valid fear because it happens to a lot of people. Say you invested $100,000 in March of 2008. Then the stock market continued to crash and by March of 2009, you would have lost over 48% of your money, leaving you with only $52,000 of your $100,000 left. This is like one of people's biggest fears, right? Like one of my biggest fears as well. And a lot of people would have like panic sold and literally ended up with these losses. But if you had understood the secret ingredient of time, you would have actually done the opposite. you would have had just kept holding on and slowly but surely the stock market would have started climbing back up again. In fact, if you held on for another 10 years, by 2018 your $100,000 would have become $252,000. That's an $152% increase and you literally did not have to do anything except let time do its thing. When it comes to investments, yes, it is true. Time does heal all wounds. Time also allows for the magic of compounding. For example, if you invested $100 and the return on your investment was 10% every year, the year after you would have gotten $110, then the year after that $121 and a year after that $133. The curve is exponential. That is why people keep telling you to invest early. In general, the longer your time horizon is, the better it is for you to increase your earnings and decrease your risk. Now, the second secret ingredient of

successful investing is diversification. There is this saying called don't put all your eggs in one basket and our instructor Steve very much abides by this. He explains that it's good to diversify your investments in different asset classes. By the way, asset classes just means that different types of investments. For example, stocks, bonds, crypto, real estate. These are all different types of asset classes. And we're going to be going in detail for each of these later in the video. But for now, the key to understand here is that you do want to diversify by investing in different asset classes. Because even if one of your investments is like absolutely tanking, you do have the rest of your investments there that can help cushion that blow. And within each asset class as well, you want to be investing in different things, too. Here's an example of a diversified portfolio. You have 50% of your money in stocks, 25% in bonds, and 25% in cryptocurrency. And in each of these asset classes, you're also investing in different things. Like in bonds, you're investing in treasury bonds and corporate bonds. Like different types of stocks, different types of bonds, and different cryptocurrencies. This is just a simple example and there are lots of ways of diversifying your portfolio. And the final secret ingredient of good investing is liquidity which is the ability of quickly getting your money

like your cash out. So why is the speed of getting your money out important? Why is liquidity important? Well, knock on what this doesn't happen but say unfortunately you lose your job suddenly. If you have liquidity, like you can get your money out, you would feel terrible because you lost your job, but you would feel a little bit better because you know you have enough cash to cover your daily expenses and it gives you a little bit of time to find another job. If you didn't have this liquidity though, you would be in really big trouble because you'd be like scrambling. You don't have cash that you can easily use to cover your expenses. How are you going to cover your expenses? You might have to start selling like your house and your stocks at really bad prices to try to cover your expenses. Not a good situation to be in. Unfortunately, life is unpredictable and there's going to be cases in which you need to use that cash quickly. So, when you are investing, you need to keep that in mind because different investment types have different levels of liquidity. And just a general recommendation is that you should always have enough cash to cover 3 to 6 months of your expenses just in case you need that money. And this is called an emergency fund. All right, moving on to the next section called investment portfolio setup.

In this section, Steve introduces one more concept that is really important for you to understand before you can even think about investing. And that is the concept of risk. When you invest, risk is the potential of losing money. And different asset classes and different types of investments also have different levels of risk. Here is a little illustration that showcases different asset types in relation to risk. All the way from the least amount of risk, which is cash, to the highest speculative investments. It is really important for you to determine the amount of risk that you can tolerate because the biggest reason why people actually lose money is because they miscalculated their ability to tolerate risk and just like panic sell when their investments start going down. Remember the concept of time? You need to be able to let time do its thing. So you may be thinking, "Oh, so why don't I just invest in the least risky things possible so I don't have to worry about losing my money. " Alas, unfortunately, the world does not work that way. You see on the other side of risk is reward. As Uncle Ben says, with great power comes great responsibility. Similarly, with great risk comes great reward and vice versa. Something like crypto, for example, is a very high risk type of investment. It's like super volatile up and down, but there's also very high reward. That's why you hear people who become like crypto billionaires overnight, right? But there are also people who like literally lose their entire life savings and everything and just like end up homeless unfortunately because they invested in crypto. High risk, high reward. On the other hand, you have something like cash which is really safe. So it's really low risk. But if you just like put your cash into the bank, the return that you can get on it is like 0. 5%. So that is very low reward. So yeah, you need to actually figure out what is the amount of risk that I can tolerate and the corresponding reward for it. With that being said though, there are ways for you to decrease the amount of overall risk that you're exposing yourself to. And that actually goes back to our three ingredients. Time diversification and liquidity. If you want to reduce your risk while maintaining your reward, what you want to do is first increase your time horizon. So even when there are fluctuations, you can just wait it out. You also want to increase diversification. So even when some of your investments are doing poorly, you have other investments that are cushioning the overall portfolio. And you want to increase liquidity. This means that even if something happens in your life and you need money, you wouldn't be forced to take your investments out. All right, let's now see some different types of investment portfolios and the rationale for why they are the way they are. To keep things really simple, we're going to focus primarily on two different asset classes. Stocks, which represent a higher risk, higher reward kind of investment, and bonds, which represent a lower risk and lower reward kind of investment. Say you are very young, like you're in your early to mid20s and you just started your first job. You have a lot of time on your side. your time horizon is very long and you can tolerate a lot of risk as well because you're just like a single person and worst case scenario you could always move back to your parents basement. So a sample portfolio for you could be like 80% stocks and 20% bonds because stocks make up the majority of your investment portfolio. There's going to be more fluctuations, but in the long run you're also going to be growing your money faster based on historical data. Your average annual return will be like around 9%. By the way, if you want to be even more risky than this, you might be thinking, oh, like I'll just increase more of the amount of stocks, right? Like maybe I'll just go like 100% stocks, but actually that doesn't actually increase your return that much in proportion to the amount of risk that you'll be taking because remember the secret ingredient of diversification. You don't want to be investing just in stocks. So what you can do instead is maybe invest like 70% in stocks, 20% in bonds, and then that extra 10% you can invest in a different type of asset class that is more risky like maybe crypto and more speculative type of investments. Or on the other hand, if you feel like the stock market is going a little bit too crazy these days and you're having a hard time stomaching it, what you can do is change like 10% of your stock portfolio into cash and just hold on to that cash. This will increase your liquidity because cash is the most liquid kind of asset and also decrease your risk. Now, as time goes on and now you're in your early 30s. You're in a different life stage now. You're considering buying a house, settling down, getting married, having children. At this point in your life, your risk tolerance is probably lower. You value more stability. So, you might want to think about the distribution of your investments. Instead of having like a 8020 mix of stocks and bonds, changing that to maybe more 6040, 60% stocks and 40% bonds. Yes, this will decrease your average annual returns to maybe around a bit over 8%, but the fluctuations of your wealth also decreases. And finally, say you're approaching retirement age, you're in your 50s, approaching 60. At this point, your time horizon for your investments is getting shorter and shorter while your risk tolerance is getting lower. Because as you're approaching retirement, your plan is to live entirely just off your investments. So you can't afford to have like massive fluctuations in that investment cuz you don't have a paycheck that's going to be coming in anymore. So at this point, you might adjust your portfolio so that it's more 20% stocks and 80% bonds. Your annual returns is going to be substantially lower, but the fluctuations in your wealth is also much lower, too. You have a much higher level of stability. Of course, this is just a really simple example of how your portfolio may change depending on your risk tolerance and different factors as well. People generally also invest in many different asset classes like real estate, like owning a home, cryptocurrencies, speculative things like commodities like gold for example. A lot of different things that you can invest in too. But I think this example is a really great way to showcase how to build up your investment portfolio and how it is that you can tweak it depending on different factors too. For me, for example, I'm not in my 20s anymore. So I realized that my risk tolerance is actually going to be decreasing. So I'm actually adjusting my portfolio now as we speak. Let me know in the comments what does your sample portfolio look like and what's the rationale behind it. I am curious. All right. Final thing in this section before we can dive deep into different asset classes is exactly how you should be holding these investments. Like when we say we're investing in stocks or bonds, like what does that actually mean? Steve explains that there are three major ways that you can hold on to your investments. The first one is individually. Let's take Tesla stock for example, right? Like you want to own Tesla stock. Well, the most straightforward way for you to own Tesla stock is to simply go buy one share of Tesla stock. Owning it individually just by like boop, yay, now you own one stock. But another way that you can own Tesla stock is actually by investing in what is called a mutual fund. For example, a large cap growth fund. You will understand what that means in the mutual fund section of the video, but basically a mutual fund will allow you to invest in a lot of different things. And one of the things that you may be investing in is Tesla stock. And finally, there is something called an exchangeraded fund or an ETF. An ETF is very similar to a mutual fund and it also allows you to invest in a variety of different things including part of it in Tesla stock. So that is the third way that you can own Tesla stock. And how exactly do you actually go buy these individual stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs, you may ask? You can do that through online brokerages like Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, Interactive Broker, TDM Trade. Here are just some popular examples. If you want it super simple, you can also use apps like Stash, Weeble, Wealth Simple, and Robin Hood. And finally, many banks will also have investment accounts too, like HSBC, City Bank, Deutsch Bank, places like that. So, there's a lot of ways that you can buy these investments. If you really like don't know where to do this, just simply Google where like Chachbt your country, like your location, plus like how to invest, and it would give you a lot of different options. For me, for example, because I'm based in Hong Kong right now, but I also have like assets in different places, I use interactive brokers. All right, wonderful. You now have the foundations for informed successful investing. We will now move on to the next section and deep dive into different assets that you can invest in and figure out if it's something that you want to invest in or not. Starting off with mutual funds, I'm actually going to group together mutual funds, ETFs, and robo investing because they're all kind of like relatively similar. The big concept for all of them here is the idea of easy diversification.

A mutual fund is when there is a pool of investors that are sharing both the risk and the reward by buying a lot of different types of companies and different assets. There are a lot of different types of mutual funds like those that are primarily on stocks, focused on bonds, international worldwide ones, specific regions, specific sectors like energy. So many different types. This one called Fidelity International Index Fund, FSPSX, for example, covers major non- US markets. This one, the Schwab Total Stock Market Index Fund, SWTSX, tracks the entire US stock market. And this one, the Fidelity Select Technology Portfolio, FSPTX, is focused on investing in the tech sector. Pretty much like whatever combination like type of investing you want to do, you can probably find a mutual fund to do that. When it comes to mutual funds, there are two general categories called active versus index funds. An active fund is when there's an actual manager that is choosing the different things that you're investing in. You're basically betting on the fund manager to manage your money properly for you. An example of this would be like the Vanguard healthcare fund where you have a fund manager that's investing in different healthcare things. Active funds tend to be more expensive because you actually have to go pay someone to be actively managing your fund for you. On the other hand, you have something called index funds. These are a much lower cost option because an index fund simply tracks some type of index. For example, an index fund that tracks the S& P 500 would simply be tracking the 500 top US companies. So, it's just like this passive tracking that doesn't involve someone actually like managing things manually. There's like pros and cons of both of these. Like with active funds, you do have to pay more money, but you're also investing in a person and just kind of like trusting that person, which might make you feel better than just like, you know, passively investing and just letting it market do its thing. But at the same time, it has been shown that many fund managers don't even perform as well as their benchmark index. So by actively managing a fund, you actually don't make as much money or even like lose money compared to if you just like passively invested in an index where it's also a lot cheaper. The key when you're trying to pick a mutual fund is to look at the blend of different things that fund is invested in. It could be like combination of bonds and stocks and cryptos and different commodities. You also do want to be aware of the expenses. With mutual funds, there are like a lot of little costs that can really eat up your potential profits. There's something called a load or like a sales charge. Sometimes when you invest money in or take it back out, you need to pay a percentage of that. There's expense ratio, which is like operating expenses that they might charge you, miscellaneous charges like custodial fees or like hidden costs. There's also something called like a redemption fee potentially if you try to sell your mutual fund in a short period of time. So yeah, it's like, you know, a few percent here, a few percent there, but it really does add up in the end. You want to be very careful of that. Steve gives the tip that if you're looking for a mutual fund, try to choose one that has no load fees and an expense ratio that is less than 1%. You can actually use this screening criteria, by the way, if you want to screen for different mutual funds you are interested in investing in. And I will show you how to do this using Yahoo Finance in just a little bit. But first, I want to cover ETFs.

ETFs. ETFs or exchange traded funds are really similar to mutual funds actually. They're also holding a basket of underlying assets of like stocks, bonds, cryptos, things like that with also a focus on diversification. They do tend to be simpler in that they usually just passively track an index of an entire market sector. And because of this, it is also cheaper and doesn't have as much cost associated with it. You can buy and sell ETFs as a stock. So, it's very liquid and easy to manage. Can't do that, by the way, for a mutual fund. It's thoughtlessly just on the stock exchange. you have to buy into the mutual fund. Plus, a lot of mutual funds would have a minimum amount required for you to invest in before you can even get into that mutual fund. For most beginners, we tend to usually go for ETFs rather than mutual funds because it's lower cost, simpler, there's no like limitations for how much you need to invest and you can just like trade it like a stock. But there are of course reasons why you might want to get into mutual funds too. Um because mutual funds, there's more like types of different mutual funds, more diversity in that. So if you want something that's more actively managed, something that's more specific, you need to go look at mutual funds. And a lot of retirement accounts like 401ks for example only allow you to invest in mutual funds and not in ETFs. So TLDDR if you want diversification more liquidity and you just want to keep things simple and not have to worry about like a lot of cost probably just go with ETFs. Finally in this section there is robo investing. This is when you really really don't feel like having the hassle of even like buying things yourself like buying and selling things yourself and you want to be like super convenient. You can literally take a quiz with some of these robo investing companies and it will determine like what it is that you're looking for, the kind of risk tolerance that you have and it will just invest on things for you like invest in ETFs usually for you. And when tax season comes, it would like readjust things to deal with the taxes and just like automatically do a lot of stuff. The pro of this is that it's really simple and it's better to do this rather than like not do any investing at all because you're lazy, which is by the way like why I like robo investors that much because I'm lazy. But the con of course is that you don't have that much control and you do have limited choices. Plus, you do need to pay an additional cost, usually around like 0. 25% extra for the robo investing fee, which is like not that much, but you know, still there. And this is on top of the commissions that you're paying uh when you are trading ETFs because when you trade ETFs, you still need to pay a commission for that transaction to happen. So, yeah, I personally quite like robo investing. There's a part of my portfolio that is in robo investing. It automatically invests for me every month and then I just know that at the very minimum, these basics are being taken care of. If you're based in the US, a couple popular robo investing companies would be like Wealthfront and Betterment. But even if you're not based in the US, really easy just Google where like Chachi PT your specific country and like robo investing and there's going to be options for you. Okay, let me now show you how to use a screener to find mutual funds and ETFs that you might

want to be investing in, as well as some of Steve's tips for how to actually evaluate these mutual funds and ETFs. All right. So, here we have uh the Yahoo Finance Mutual Fund screener and you can put in some filters that you may want. For example, you can come here looking at the populars. There's region, exchange, morning star performance ratings, market data, performance ratios, a lot of things, right? So, we're going to do some simple stuff. For example, let's look at the Morning Star performance rating overall. So, this is the rating that Morning Star ranks how good it is in terms of performance. So, let's do like three, four, and five. And then maybe let's look at some of the market data. Maybe sector. We'll pick out a few sectors that we like as well. Let's see. Maybe like I like healthcare, utilities, energy, industrials, technology, for example. Right. And there's other ones that you can do, but we'll just start off with this. Then we can click apply. And we see that we have a bunch of mutual funds that are here. Great. So after looking through some of these, you might decide that you're interested in this one called the Janice Henderson European Focus the HF DX. Okay. So we can have some information about this. We can see his morning star rating is risk uh net assets. We know the categories that these are European stocks. We can also see that the expense ratio is a little bit high here. It's at 1. 1%. So this probably means that it's an actively managed fund. Since this is pretty high, we usually want to go below 1%. We need to understand why it's so high. Is this something that we actually like? Of course, we can also see the returns that we have here. So, 3 months, 1 year, 5 years, etc. If you want to have more detail, you can actually look at the fund itself. It's usually listed on their website. And in this case, it's the European Focus Fund. So, we can actually get more information about this after we've screened for it. Uh, for example, we know that the here's the fund inception date. Total amount of assets is over here. the gross annual expense ratio so it's 1. 31 and net annual expense ratio is 1. 1%. So again let's try to investigate is this actually worth it. Uh we can see yes that it is indeed a actively managed fund because we have portfolio managers. So if you like you can actually look into who Robert is and who Mark is and see if we actually like these people or not before you want to invest in it. And then another thing that you can see over here this is called the equity style box. Um this is quite helpful. So I am on comet right now. So what I can actually do assuming that I don't know what an equity style box means is I can say explain um equity style box axis or HF edx right okay so it says that a vertical axis box is broken into small mid and large so we can see that this is large so large cap um it's classified in the large row which means that on average its holdings are the largest companies in its universe and the portfolio is dominated by large cap European stocks. And on the horizontal axis we have value and growth. So value mixed and growth. This one sits on the growth column indicating a tilt towards companies with higher growth characteristics. Example faster expected earnings or sale growth rather than cheaper deep value names. Okay. So we can see from this equity style box that this is going to be classified as large cap growth. So, of course, another thing that we want to look at is actually the performance. Is it actually worth it or not? So, what Steve recommends in the course is looking at the three-year and the five-year comparison. And we can see that compared to the index. So, remember we talked about an indexes that just passively track something. U in this case, the European index, we can see that this European focus fund has outperformed its index in the 3-year and in the 5year. So, that is good. Um we can also see like in general it has been performing relatively well and yeah I guess well. Cool. Good to know. We can also come to the portfolio to look at what is it that this mutual fund actually holds. Uh we can see that percentage of fund you know these are the top holdings. Uh we can see that there's 42 companies that are being held as opposed to the index which is 402. So this is actually quite concentrated um in terms of the companies that are being picked here market capitalization etc etc. Uh here we can also see what sectors and we can see that in comparison to its index we do have a larger proportion of industrials and of financials but overall it's like relatively similar. Oh okay I guess like here we have healthcare uh we have less of healthcare. So yeah so we can see the distribution of the type of companies inside the fund. region, it's Europe. Makes sense. It's a European fund, mostly in Europe. And we can see over here the annual expenses. So, here are the fees. So, management fees, other fees, total gross expenses, waiverss, total net expenses, 1. 1%. So, it doesn't have a load fee, which is good. So, Steve says don't try to look for things with a load fee. And you usually want to look for something with an expense ratio that's less than 1% unless it's justified. So, in this case, it's 1. 1%, it is higher than that. Um, so you can make that call whether you think the performance that it has is justified for having this kind of expense ratio. Of course, there's like a lot more information that you can dive into. I'm not going to go into too much detail about now. And there's also documents that you can dig into that gives you way more informations as well if you are interested in this fund. But overall, this is how it is that you can use a mutual fund screener to look for a fund and then dive a little bit into the fund to decide if you like it or not. And with some quick little starter tips from Steve on how to evaluate mutual funds. Now, if we want to screen for ETFs, it's really similar. Something like Yahoo Finance also has a free ETF screener. You can use other stuff as well. The filters are also really similar. For example, here maybe you want to look at the performance rating. We want to do three, four, and five. Uh, since it is an ETF, it's going to be tracking an index fund. So, we want something that's more passive. We want the expense ratio to be a lot lower. So, let's say below 0. 1%. Let's apply this and let's see what we've got. we apply this and then maybe for example you click on this and you're interested. So it's Vanguard's S& P 500 ETF so it tracks the top 500 companies. So yeah, you can also go through a lot of this information to decide if this is something that you like or not. So ETFs do trade on the market like the way that stocks do. So I will be going into a little bit more detail later in the video when I talk about stocks and I'll explain things like P ratio yield and things like beta. So stay tuned for that. But yes, this is how you screen for an ETF. All right, quiz time. Please answer the questions displayed on screen to make sure you are retaining all of

this information and put it into the comments. Yay. All right, let us now move on to stocks. After you've gotten a general idea of which stock, ETF, or

mutual fund you're interested in investing in, you probably want to dig a little bit deeper into the research, which is where Perplexity becomes really useful. To make the research so much easier, I highly recommend checking out HubSpot's free quick start guide to Perplexity for research. It walks you through how to use Perplexity's search features, its superpower, and a bunch of lesserk known tricks, plus tons of handy tips and examples, too. I love that the resource even provides quick start prompts that you can copy and use straight away, like this industry analysis prompt for digging into sectors like maybe renewable energy or tech if you're interested in investing in these sectors. So, if you want to level up your research with AI, definitely check out this free Hubson research on perplexity. You can grab it at this link over here, also linked in description. Thank you so much HubSpot for sponsoring this portion of the video. Now, back to the video. When you're buying a stock, you're buying a tiny piece of a company. And there are over 50,000 listed companies that you can buy some stocks of worldwide. For example, here is Meta, the NASDAQ ticker symbol, where it's usually referred to on the stock market as META, Meta. And we can see how much it costs to buy a stock of Meta. And you can see the change in price of the stock over different periods of time. For example, a 5year period of time. So, say if you bought 10 meta stock in mid like 2022ish at around $200, that would be like $2,000 worth. Now, it's worth around $650 or 2. 25 times the amount of money. So, if you sell it now, you would sell it for $6,500 and you would make about $4,500 in profit, a little bit less because of fees and stuff. And this is one way that people make money. They buy a stock at a certain price and then sell the stock at a higher price. It's called price appreciation. There is actually one more way that you can make money using stocks. Hint for anybody out there who is a little bit more familiar with stocks. What is the difference between stocks like Meta, Amazon or Shopify versus stocks like Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola and Johnson and Johnson? Put it in the comments if you know. All right, here's the answer. So companies like Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola and Johnson Johnson, they also pay what are called dividends. This is when if you hold a stock from these companies, you will get a reward as a money simply for holding that stock. It's not a lot of money. It's a small amount of it. Coca-Cola, for example, pays an annual yield of 2. 8 89% and they would pay this out quarterly. Usually the dividend is around 1 to 4% per year. Generally speaking, more traditional stable companies would pay out dividends. While for more high growth companies like Amazon, Meta or Shopify, they don't pay you dividends. Just the price appreciation alone is enough for many people to buy these stocks. So yes, whenever you're looking at a stock, whether you want to invest in it or not, pay attention to how its price fluctuates over time and also if it pays dividends or not. Stocks in general is the preferred way for many people to make returns in a long run. It's also very liquid because a lot of people invest in the stock market. So, you can take that money out easily if you want to. However, there are disadvantages as well. Stocks tend to be higher risk in comparison to something like cash or bonds. It is more volatile and there is the potential that if a company goes bankrupt and if you're invested in that company, you would probably lose most of that money, if not all of that money. And the way that stocks usually fit into a portfolio is by representing an investment type that is higher risk and also higher reward. And it's for people who generally have longer time horizons. Remember those sample portfolios that we showed earlier? The proportion of stocks is usually representative of how much risk a person can take. And also remember that you can invest in stocks in three different ways. The first one is an individual stock. The second one is as part of a mutual fund. And the third one as part of an ETF. Okay. Now, I'm going to show you how to screen for a stock, which is very similar to how we screen for ETFs and mutual funds earlier. And I'll also give you the tips that Steve shares on how to get started evaluating a stock, deciding if you want to buy it or not. Cool. Now, let's screen for some stocks. Again, go on equity filters. Uh, let's see. Let's see. There is a lot that you can screen for. Like, there's so many different things that you can screen for here. Let's start off simple. Let's go to market data and look at sector. Say we are interested in healthcare, financial services, energy, industrials, and technology. Let's go with that. Let's also look at the market cap like how big it is. Let's just look for like really big companies. So over 10 billion. And let's see what we got here. Let's also just add a region, United States. And let us pick something to look at. What about Fizer? So we can switch this to maybe one year and we can see some of the information about Fizer. So Steve gives us some tips on how to get started looking at stocks. So the first thing he says that we can take a look at is the beta over here. The beta is a measurement of risk. So if you have a beta of 1. 0, it means the riskiness matches the entire stock market. While if it's less than one, it means that there it is less volatile. So less risky. And if it's more than 1. 0, it means that it is more risky. So in this case, it's 42. So, it's considered less risky, like less volatile. Another thing that you can look at is the dividend. And we see the four dividend and yield is at 1. 72 and 6. 65%. This means that you'll get paid 1. 72% for every share that you own. And the annual rate, the annual yield is going to be 6. 65%. So, cool. This is a stock that does pay dividends. Something that you can consider here is like say if you just have that cash over there in a savings account where you're putting into something else. Uh how does that compare in terms of the percentage you would get compared to the 6. 65% that you would get as a dividend. And the final thing that Steve says that you can start looking into is the PE ratio over here is 15. 03. This PE ratio called price to earnings ratio is a valuation metric that compares a company's stock price to its earnings per shares. For the general market it's around 16 to 17. In this case, it's at 15, which can mean that this is an undervalued stock. So, yeah, there's a lot of other things that you can look at as well. Like, for example, what is EPS? Um, I'm probably if I don't know what that is, I'd probably just look it up. Like, what does EPS TTM for PF saying like earnings per share measures how much profit is attributed to each share of a common stock, etc., etc. Anyways, yeah, so you can definitely dive a lot deeper into this as well, but these are a few things that can help you get started deciding if you want to buy a stock or not. Okay, there is a lot more detail that you can go into here. There are so many different types of stocks. Those that have less risk, those that have more risk. Steve has like an entire course dedicated to just stocks. I think it was like over 10 hours long, which I also took. So, if you are interested in stocks, really recommend you dive deeper into it and maybe take that course and just like explore more yourself. All right, next up is bonds. Bonds are the other very common asset

that most people have in their portfolios. A bond is like a loan that you give to a company or a government. So after you loan them the money, they would pay back that loan. They promise they're going to pay back that loan and also give you some money on top of that as interest. A lot of governments, for example, would issue bonds. Like say you have the US federal government, they want to build more roads or something like that. They would issue bonds in order to fund raise and get that money. And you can buy one of those bonds and loan them that money. And at the end of the loan when a bond reaches maturity, you would get the principal like the initial amount of money back. But during that process, you would also be receiving monthly payments in the form of dividends. This is like the interest rate that you're getting paid for lending that money to them because you're not going to lend that money to government just for free, right? You can make money from bonds by collecting that interest payment. And also, you can resell that bond as well if the price of the bond increases, for example. You don't actually have to hold the bond until it reaches maturity. you can resell it um at different times to other people and you can make the money like the difference in between. The advantage of buying bonds is that it tends to be safer than buying stocks. It also gives you these like reoccurring interest payments that people who are like retired especially really like because you're getting like a payout um like a set payout every single month. It is also considered a safe haven in that sometimes the stock market is like going nuts and then if you have some extra cash you don't want to just like keep it in cash because that interest is only like 5% while for bonds it's around like 5 to 7% which is pretty good not as good as a stock market that's usually around like 9 to 10% but it's definitely better than just keeping cash lying around. Of course there are also disadvantages in addition to the fact that it doesn't pay as well as a stock usually does. Specifically, bonds are sensitive to interest rate, meaning that if interest rate increases, the value of your bond usually decreases. Also, another risk is credit or default risk. Since bonds are basically debt, if the institution that issued the bond declares bankruptcy, then you would be screwed because they would just not pay back that loan. This risk really varies depending on what kind of bonds that you're buying. Like, if you're buying bonds from the US government, the risk of the US government collapsing is really low. So, that risk is really low. But if you're buying something like some sketchy corporate bonds from sketchy companies, then that risk is a lot higher. — Destabilize a multinational by manipulating stocks but easy. — Of course, you know, riskreward kind of situation. If you want to go for lowrisk stuff, then you're going to have also like lower returns. Here's a little illustration that showcases the different levels of risk and return for different types of bonds. An example of a very popular type of bond that people buy are called T bills or Treasury bills. These are US government bonds that mature in less than one year. So they're considered really safe because the maturity period is only one year while other bonds can go up to like 5 years or 10 years. And it's like from the US government. So the likelihood of the government collapsing is also really small. So really safe kind of investment. And similarly with different asset types you can also invest in bonds in three different ways. First one individually or you can do as part of mutual funds or ETFs. All right. I'm going to show you now how to screen and evaluate for bonds that you might be interested in buying as well as some of Steve's tips for how to get started evaluating bonds. Let's now screen from some bonds. Specifically, I might be interested in holding bonds through a mutual fund. So, we'll go on the mutual fund screener. Go to market data funds by category and we can just type in like bonds. So, these are all the different types of bonds that are here. Uh let's see. Maybe I'll do intermediate term and short-term and world bond. Yeah, sure. Let's do that. Apply some of the ratios. Uh let us do maybe like. 5% to 1% expense ratio. And on the ratings, so let's have a lower risk score of like maybe 1 2 and 3 something like that. Cool. So after doing some additional screenings maybe we end up looking at this bond called the Fidelity Total Bond Fund and we are interested in looking into it. So we can see that the beta here is at 0. 96. So it's slightly less risky than the market. We can see the yield and the expense ratio is45%. Go on their website to get a little bit more information about this bond fund. So what I like to do is I just go on common assistant and just ask it to tell me a little bit about the key characteristics about the bond fund. So you can see it's an actively managed diversified core plus bond fund that seeks high current income by investing across US investment grade high yield and emerging market debt with interest rate managed relative to the Bloomberg US aggregate bond index and some basic profiles out of it. So reading through this and then double checking some of the details here I get a decent understanding of what is going on. Cool. So it looks like it has outperformed its primary benchmark the aggregate bond index for most standard periods here. And looking at the three-year, 1-year, 3year, and 5year that does seem to be the case as well. Yeah, a lot more that you can look into. If you don't understand what any terms mean, definitely look into these terms before you make a decision whether you want to buy this bond fund or not. And that is how you screen for a bond focused mutual fund. Time for our next little quiz. Please answer the questions on screen to help you retain this information. Very important investing information. All right. Next section is cash. Cold hard cash.

cash. This section is very brief in the course. I guess like Steve is not really into cash. No, I'm kidding. I don't know. I'm sure he's into cash. No assumptions here. But basically, cash is like at the very left of this chart of risk. It's very, very low risk, but also very, very low return. In fact, it's oftentimes negative return because if you keep money just in cash and you're getting like 0. 5% while inflation is at like 3 to 4%, you're actually losing that money over time. But anyways, it is still good to have some cash around because cash represents liquidity. Remember, in case something bad happens or you're going to something good happens like you get married or something, then you have that money available. And sometimes, you know, the stock market's going crazy, so you don't want to be putting your money into the stock market right now. The different ways that you can make money. So the first one is that you can just like hide it under your mattress. Probably don't do that because you get zero interest rate and somebody might go into your house and steal your money. The second way of doing this is just you can put it into a high yield saving account. It's called high yield but it's really like 0. 5% uh return. So really quite low as well. And finally there are these things called GIC's which are time deposits. So you can put a sum of money and lock it up for a certain period of time in exchange for a certain interest rate. Usually you can't use that money for like a year or two years or 5 years or something like that. For that you can maybe get up to like 3 to 4% which is all right. You can keep up with inflation in most cases but you're not really like making money. So keep some cash but do invest in other things as well. Now moving on to the next section crypto.

crypto. Cryptocurrency is a digital version of money where the transactions are all done online. Most of you guys have probably heard of crypto at this point. The most popular ones are Bitcoin and Ethereum. So Steve does go into some detail about how cryptos work and how it works on the blockchain, things like that, but it's pretty brief, so I'm going to skip that section because if you really want to dive into crypto, you want to have a much better understanding of this. Anyway, so I recommend that you check out some resources explaining how crypto works and how the blockchain works. Now, from an investing angle though, we do need to understand that there are a lot of different cryptocurrencies, like over 4,000 cryptocurrencies that you can pick from. Most of them are really like not traded that much, but still you can if you want to. And they're all traded on the cryptocurrency exchange in the form of pairs of currencies. For example, it could be Bitcoin/USD, euro/ether, or Ether/ Bitcoin. The way that you trade this is by looking at the conversion between a cryptocurrency and something else like the US dollar. You trade them in pairs like the comparison of two different currencies which by the way is the same as how people trade forex like foreign exchange between different currencies like USD to Japanese yen and things like that. So in pairs when it comes to how you should be viewing cryptocurrencies them as pretty volatile high-risk highreward kind of investments. Crypto is also not the most liquid kind of asset. Like if you're trading Bitcoin or Ethereum, which are the two most popular cryptocurrencies, it is pretty liquid and you can like make the trades relatively easily. But if you're trading some like I don't know like Dogecoin or something, it's not very liquid and you could potentially not be able to like buy and sell that easily. You can see what I mean by volatile. Like look at this graph of Bitcoin for example. There is so many ups and downs and this is how crypto billionaires are made and also how crypto homeless people are made too. — Spare change ma'am. — So yes, quite risky asset class. One thing to point out if you do want to trade crypto though is there is this concept called a stable coin. Tether is for example is a stable coin that is pegged to the market value of US dollars. So stable coins are pegged to the market value of what is called a fiat currency which is like your normal currencies like USD, Canadian dollars, Australian dollars, Japanese yen, you know, like normal currencies that we usually use. And the reason why there's such things as these stable coins is because the crypto volatility is like go nuts sometimes, right? And then you don't want to like be investing in your cryptos. So you could be just taking that out and putting it as a stable coin cuz you know that's going to be stable. And when the time is right, you might go in again or you might go out again. So stable coins are adding stability back into the crypto market. It's also a very practical thing because most of us you're not earning money in like cryptos, right? We're USD. But if you want to trade crypto, you have to convert your money into crypto. So what people generally do is take their USD and convert that into a stable coin like Tether and then use that to then trade different cryptos. And if you want to cash out, since most of our world also doesn't run on crypto, you can use a stable coin like Tether to then convert it back into USD and then hopefully behave a billionaire and you can go buy like a yacht or something. So if you do want to be investing in crypto, it is a little bit different than investing in things like stocks or bonds. You can invest in individual cryptos and you can do this by maintaining your own wallet or you can do it through a stock broker like Robin Hood or E Toro. A lot of stock brokers these days also allow you to trade crypto directly. But generally speaking, if you're looking at mutual funds or ETFs, they may say that they're like crypto mutual funds or crypto ETFs, but most likely they're not actually directly investing in crypto. They're just investing in companies that are related to crypto. So, keep that in mind. Also, another way that you can buy crypto, which is pretty cool, is that if you use something like PayPal, you can actually directly convert your money through PayPal into crypto. So, is crypto right for you? Because crypto is probably not right for everybody. It could be right for you if you're interested in something with very high volatility, like you're okay stomaching that risk, and if you have longer time horizons, because time heals all wounds in case there is a wound. If you can, try to start small and build experience over time. Next up is real estate investing. This is one that I'm particularly

interested in. Though real estate is defined as land and anything permanently attached to it, including buildings, natural resources like waters and minerals and other man-made structures like roads or fences. Usually for most people we refer to real estate, you're referring to houses or like commercial buildings, vendors, and land. Real estate is one of those things where it could be an investment or it could just be because you need to buy a house to live in. But if we're thinking about it from an investment perspective, like we want to be making money from this, usually it's in the form of collecting rent and price appreciations. Usually the way that people invest in real estate is that they would put down a down payment, like a percentage of the total amount of the house. Like say you have a $300,000 house and you're putting down $30,000. That's like a 10% down payment. And then you would take out a mortgage, a loan to cover the rest of the amount. And you'll pay that loan back slowly, monthly, um, for a long period of time, usually like 20, 30 years. But you're not just kind of like paying that and then just, you know, waiting for 30 years to make money. Generally, what people also do is that they would actually rent out that property to a tenant and you' be collecting rent in the meantime. And you don't actually need to like fully pay off that house. If it's such that the house value, if you bought at like 300,000 and it appreciates to like 500,000, we're like a million dollars, you can actually sell that house without covering the rest of the mortgage. you're just like selling the whole thing and then you can make money in between like as the difference. So you're generally making money from rent and from price appreciation. Some other things that people do would be like flip houses when they would take a property and then they would kind of like fix it up, make it nice and then they would sell it at a higher value. So people make money through that as well. So some of the advantages that you get from investing in real estate. The first one is that because you have that leverage, you're just putting a down payment and you're collecting rent. So you don't actually have to put that much money down and you're basically able to get something now. And if you're renting it out and you're doing your math right, the amount of rent that you're collecting could also be enough to cover your monthly mortgage payments. So, you're essentially getting the house for free after your initial down payment. If you're really good, you might be getting the house for free plus a little extra, too. You also do get some tax advantages when you have rental properties. That's another advantage. And just in general, like some people just like houses, you know, it's called real estate because it's real, unlike other investments like stocks and bonds that you cannot touch. You can't actually go and touch your house. be like, "My house, it is mine. Yay. " I think that's pretty valid reason. That's why I like real estate. Anyways, there are also disadvantages. The major disadvantage is liquidity issues. Houses are probably one of like the most inlquid assets because if you want to get your money out of a property, it takes like months if not years to be able to list the property and actually go through the whole like sales and transactions depending on like how good the market is doing and things like that. So, it's very it's quite difficult for you to get that money out. Also, when you're purchasing real estate, you were kind of hoping that the price is going to appreciate, right? Which, you know, fingers crossed that's going to happen, but sometimes it also doesn't appreciate. It might depreciate. So, that's also a risk, a very expensive risk that you potentially have. There's also like issues with tenants if you're doing rental properties. Like some tenants are not very great. They're kind of shitty tenants. They don't pay you on time. They destroy everything, you know, things like that. And finally, you also have like responsibilities like property taxes and fees and insurance and like having to fix up things. So there's more active involvement. So if these things do annoy you and it's like putting you off investing in real estate, the good news is that there is a way to invest in real estate without having to deal with these real problems and that is through what is called a REIT, a real estate investment trust. These trusts, you can buy them as mutual funds or ETFs on the stock market and they allow you to buy real estate without the hassle of actually dealing with the real estate. For example, you can buy a REIT that's an investment into a bunch of hospitals or a type of REI that only invests in office buildings or ones that only invest in a certain region if you like a specific region. And it's nice cuz you don't have to manage it. It's very liquid because it's traded on a stock exchange like a stock. It's low cost to buy, so you don't need to put down like $30,000. You can just buy like a small share of it. And the biggest reason why people like these is that they have really great dividend payouts. the payout that you get just from holding the REIT. In terms of how it is that REITs should be fitting into your portfolio, whether they're right for you, you can think about REITs more like stocks rather than bonds. So, they are higher risk and will fluctuate in price, but they do pay out pretty good dividends if you're interested in that regular income. Something to look into if you're interested in real estate. All right, time for our next little quiz. Please answer the questions displayed on the screen now in the comments. All

right, now let us talk about the category of investments that is way on the side of high-risk high reward and that is the speculative category. Speculative investments are very

high-risisk, highreward. It's like all or nothing. I can put my money down and I will either become a billionaire or I could become homeless. No, that type of thing. Also, some speculative investments are kind of like bridging on whether it's actually an investment or you just really like something like art for example. we might just really like a piece of art, not as an investment. So, there's that as well. Anyways, it's characterized by high risk, high reward. Uh there's usually a lot of price fluctuations and potentially there may be issues with liquidity as well. An example that Steve puts into this class is precious metals, which I'm actually a little surprised by because I consider precious metals like I mean, I like precious metals. So, I invest in a person. I didn't realize it was so speculative. So, you know, apparently it's speculative. So, it's like buying gold and silver, right? And you can buy gold and silver like physically go or you could buy it as like part of a mutual fund, ETF, you know, we talked about that previously. And people usually buy precious metals as a way to hedge against the stock market because whenever the stock market is going down and going nuts, usually the price of gold and precious metal increases. Like for example, during the great recession of 2008 2009, if you were invested in precious metals, you would be doing really well while everybody else is crying. But on a long-term basis, they don't generally have the best returns. Then there are other types of commodities. stuff like oil and beans and corn and salt. There are people and companies who are very interested in the price fluctuations of these things because they're like manufacturers and processors that are like selling corn and things like that. So, they care about that a lot. But there's also like people outside of these like food people that would invest in different types of commodities. They're sort of like speculating, ooh, is like coffee bean prices going to go up or down? And that might depend on a lot of factors like the weather or like wars, you know, a lot of different things. to invest in commodities, there tends to be a lot of variables that need to go into this and it is pretty advanced. You got to do like a lot of research. So Steve's recommendation is that if you are going to be investing in commodities to definitely do your research and actually understand the commodity that you're investing in. If you're going to invest in coffee beans, you better be an expert about coffee beans probably. And then finally, there are collectibles like physical art that you can buy as well as digital art like NFTs, non-f fungeible tokens. So here are some examples of NFTs. These were especially popular a few years back. It's basically just like digital artwork. And surprisingly, people pay a lot of money for this kind of thing. Like this little CryptoKitty, for example, someone bought it for over $100,000. And this tweet by Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square, sold his first tweet as an NFT for over $2. 9 million. Yeah, people buy that kind of stuff. Yes, you can also invest in this type of thing if you're going to buy it. And hopefully, something like this, then when you sell it, there's going to be people who are willing to buy it from you or you just don't care. You know, again, it's collectibles. Sometimes you just like it and it's not really an investment, you just like it. So yeah, speculative investing. Who is it right for? Uh it's right for people who are very risky. They love risk. And Steve's recommendation is that if you're going to invest in these, try to start really small, have a good understanding of it before you're making any big moves. And do your research. Unlike his advice for stocks and bonds where he really recommends like more diversity the better. With speculative things, he actually recommends that you dive really deep into that thing before you start investing. Like if you're going to invest commodity investors and traders for example really specialize in like one or two specific domains. Like people who trade oil are really into oil and people who trade corn are only really into corn. So yay. That is all our asset classes. We got through it. Yay. Now we only have one section left. So let's power through it. This final section focuses on the concept of rebalancing. You're coming in with an investment

strategy, right? And you are investing based upon your investment strategy. Like your 70% stocks, 20% bonds, 10% NFTTS, 10% cryptos, you know, whatever, something like that. But as time goes on, this ratio is going to start changing because some of your investments are going to be doing better than others. Hopefully, they're all doing well, but you know, some of them are going to do better than others. And then that ratio is going to start shifting. So you might want to rebalance or some other reasons would include say your appetite for risk itself has changed like for me because I'm getting older alas my risk appetite would be decreasing so I might want to rebalance as well. You may also want to rebalance when you're getting closer to your goal like if your goal is to retirement and you're getting really close to retirement you want to maybe start investing more into bonds and more stable investments as opposed to more risky things like stocks. Anyways, whatever the reason is, you may want to consider rebalancing once in a while to put things the way that you want them to be. And you can do this by simply like say selling off some stocks if you have too much stocks and they're over represented in your portfolio or like buying some bonds and things like that. Some people do it on a quarterly basis, maybe even monthly, but that's like extra paranoid. So, you know, most people do it on like a quarterly or a yearly basis. The process of doing this is first look at your target portfolio, your asset allocation for your risk profile. And step number two is to determine the variance of your asset class. Then you want to determine how big is the variance by asset class. Like how much off target are we here? Say we're aiming for 60% stocks and we're at 70%, so there's that 10% variance. And step three is to rebalance. If you have that 10% variance, you would sell off that 10% and maybe go invest that amount in something else. You can also consider putting new money into your investment portfolio without having to sell anything as well. A lot of people do this, by the way, automatically of just putting a portion of their paycheck every month into their investments. And that's it. You're done rebalancing. All right, we're also done with the course. Congratulations. Yes, as promised, here is the final little assessment which I will now put on screen. So, please answer these questions so you retain all

of that information that we just went through. We went through a lot of information, very important investing information and put your answers into the comments. Thank you so much for watching until the end of this video. Let me know in the comments what your investment strategies are. Are any of you guys like me kind of re-evaluating things and revamping their investment strategies? If so, let me know why as well. I am curious to know. And I will see you guys in the next video or live stream.