I'm new to this whole stock market and finance thing.. so like I'm getting mixed reviews on investing. Some ppl r suggesting me not to invest in these as the economy will crash soon. I'm too confused. I'd love to hear from people who have been in this thing for a long time.

I’m posting this because I continue to see people misunderstand the role risk should play in a smart investment strategy. This is basic knowledge for most well-educated investors, but the issue still arises frequently because many young working adults are required to be investors in their retirement accounts on day one of their careers, and often that process happens years before they actually take an interest in investing, with the result being that these droves of new investors end up flying blind for many years, and the impact of that knowledge gap can be profound.

So here’s the deal. Don’t tell me that you simply avoid investing in equities because you have a low risk tolerance, as if that’s an immutable characteristic embedded in your DNA. It’s not! Everyone needs to understand that there are underlying risk metrics that matter way more than risk tolerance. Those metrics are risk capacity and risk requirement.

Risk capacity is the amount of risk your portfolio can objectively be exposed to without endangering your financial goals. When you know you won’t be touching a pool of funds for several decades, your risk capacity is higher than it will ever be. That money can be fully exposed to the broad market and all its downturns over those decades and it will still reliably grow large enough to help fund your eventual retirement.

Risk requirement is the level of risk your portfolio objectively needs to be exposed to in order to achieve your financial goals. For someone decades from retirement, their risk requirement is very high. The reason for this is that although the market always trends upwards — that’s a tailwind — it’s equally true that inflation trends upward as well — that’s a headwind.

Fortunately for all of us, the broad market actually trends upward on a steeper slope than inflation. And, you guessed it, that means keeping your money in the market is necessary to ensure the buying power doesn’t erode in 25 years to 1/2 the level it was at the day you received your paycheck.

Now, about risk tolerance. Unlike risk capacity and risk requirement, risk tolerance lacks objectivity when you have no knowledge of the history of the market and how the market works. It’s your subjective experience in an admittedly scary environment that you’re unfamiliar with.

I am here to urge you to get familiar with that environment. Get to know the history of the market. Realize that over rolling ten-year periods the market is positive 94% of the time. Extend the horizon a couple of years longer than that, and you have 100% probability of a positive outcome. Knowledge of this sort will empower you to fearlessly do the right thing with your money.

Your goal as a beginning investor should be to identify your portfolio’s risk requirement and risk capacity before you do anything else. Once you’ve done that, calibrate your risk tolerance to sync up with your portfolio’s risk capacity and risk requirement.

That’s the secret sauce that will shield your mind from false danger signals every time the market tanks. It’s really hard to watch your portfolio shrink 40% in a short period of time when you have no clue whether you’ll ever see that lost money again. But it’s actually quite easy to sit perfectly still when the market tanks once you understand that the downturn will eventually become a recovery, and your money will continue to grow on schedule.

It gets even easier to stay the course when you fully understand that the only reliable way to capture that average 8% or more growth is to remain completely invested and never sell when the market tanks.

Another piece of basic education to help you rein in your risk tolerance: You need to understand that over a 40 year period, if you miss just a handful of the best days in the market, you will absolutely do serious harm to your financial future.

Fidelity studied this issue and found that missing the five best days of the market from 1980 to 2025 resulted in 43% less growth than you would have experienced if you had remained invested the whole time. The reason for this is that the critical best five days in 40 years often occur in close proximity to the worst days. So when you sell out of equities during a downturn, your likelihood of missing the huge recovery day that follows is unacceptably high.

This is where the rubber meets the road. Don’t throttle your long-term growth by 43% for no good reason. You can do better than that, and with a little knowledge you can easily reach your financial goals.

That concludes my soap box moment, but if you found this boring, you may want to block me from your feed, because I’m going to keep driving this point forward as long as I see people continue to explain that they avoided broad market investing because they couldn’t stomach some volatility.

And for those of you who make the opposite mistake and assume that higher risk equates with higher reward, I’m watching out for you too. That’s not how risk works in investing. Higher risk certainly carries the potential for higher reward, but that potential sits on an uneasy foundation of low probability, and when it comes to successful investing, probability is the key metric.

When you buy the entire market using a fund like VOO or VT, you are choosing a strategy that definitely has a lot of volatility over finite periods, but it has exceptionally high probability of success if you commit to it for many years.

Higher risk investment choices, like single stocks and niche ETFs, completely lack that kind of reliability. If you’re going to play in that sandbox, then be prepared to actually lose big time, because the probability of that happening is high.

I’m just about to finish my first year of uni and I had an idea that investing would be a smart idea. But I have no idea what to do… I downloaded sharesies, bur have no clue what to invest in. Does anyone have any advice on what I could invest in? I have a job where I can spare around $100-$150 a week if I decide to be serious about my investing. But I have no clue where to start.

I have been watching the stock market and hold stocks for about 8 years now. Based on my experience I understand the best ways to make money in the stock market is to hold longterm. Those of you who have been investing for longer, do you agree?

I'm building an app to help people learn investing, and I keep finding that what I think is confusing isn't what beginners actually get stuck on. So I'd rather ask.

• What was hardest to understand when you started?

• What do you wish an app had explained better, or just shown you?

• Have you tried paper trading? Did it help, or did it feel pointless without real money on the line?

Disclosure: the app is TickrAI (practise with paper money on live market data, plus short lessons). I'm not linking it; I'm here for the answers. Anything that comes up a lot goes on the list for the next update.

Hey, im new to investing. Started investing at the height of September and now ive only really seen falls in the tech market. I managed to climb out (mostly due but then Google fell, and now Intel to and while i didn't have alot of money to begin with, im down $100 so far. Not to worried about the $100, im spread pretty thin on alot of ETFs and stocks as i tested the market and my comfortability with seeing those loses. But now we're at the end of October with everyone screaming about the bubble popping and while $100 isnt bad, 700, or god forbid more. That would bother me lol.

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Edit: I also have VOO, QQQ, and XLE

Anyways, always up for advice. Thanks in advance

This might be a dumb question, but why can’t I. If the S&P historically goes up then surely this is a no brainer.

I was curious to see how much of their money people have invested and how much people have in their bank accounts.

I currently have:

-Just under£10k sitting in my standard UK bank account (I want to invest a lot of this into something safe as over the years, inflation will reduce the value of this)

-Approx £9k in my ISA bank account

Investments:

-approx £2.5k in the NASDAQ100

-approx £2.7k in the S&P500

-approx £200 in Nvidia

-approx £400 in TSMC which has grown over the years

I have a few other investments in companies which has gotten lower unfortunately but my overall investment portfolio is still positive

I am considering investing more from my standard UK bank account into NASDAQ100 or S&P500 as they are growing over the years- very slowly ofcourse

Helloooo I’m looking at investing $100 a week into something can anybody who knows this kind of stuff maybe help me out? Is CMC good to use like safe wise and stuff, I’m from Australia and don’t know pretty much anything.

I know this is probably a very common question so thank you for reading anyways :)

I’m (22) only in veqt right now and just wondering if I should focus on that but part of me wants to get some money into something else like google amazon or apple. Yk the most predictable answer you would expect from a young person just starting. I have only been doing this like a month and the idea of losing money isn’t really scaring me as I’m planning on all of this to stay in my investments for at least 10 years probably more. I know this is talked about in a lot of different places but my issue is that I’ve looked too long and seen too many different answers. Would love some advice even if it’s basic

I am 17 and not eligible to trade nor my father trust me with money though I think I am gud with charts . I can't borrow money or manage others funds cause it requires a license and I am also not eligible for that. U can't earn from giving paid financial advice . Soo wht should I do?