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10 September 2026
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Investors spend decades learning how to stay invested, yet few have a plan for getting out. When a financial goal has a hard deadline, a worked example shows why a fixed derisking schedule should outrank buy-and-hold discipline.
Everyone including investors needs to evolve to get better. Here are five steps to improve your investment toolkit, including thinking probabilistically, running your own race, and measuring yourself objectively.
Faced with confusing complexity which often fails to improve investment outcomes, a former managing director set himself the task of writing a one-page introduction to investing for his 18-year-old grandkids.
Many new investors make common mistakes while learning about markets. Losses are inevitable. Newbies should read more and develop a long-term focus while avoiding big mistakes and not aiming to be brilliant.
From a financial view, most earnings calls and stock picks are a waste of time. For most people, their investing would be better served in an index fund. So why bother with it? The best reason is because you enjoy it.
The Warren Buffett/Charlie Munger partnership is the stuff of legends, but even Charlie admits it is coming to an end ("I'm nearly dead"). He is one of the few people in investing prepared to say what he thinks.
In this second part on the reader responses with advice to younger people, we have selected a dozen highlights, but there are so many quality contributions that a full list of comments is also attached.
From the hundreds of survey responses, here is a selection of 100 tips, with others to come next week. There are consistent and new themes based on decades of experience making mistakes and enjoying successes.
Many of our readers possess decades of investment experience. Let's share your lessons with those starting out, or is this time different, and your Living Years have left you 'prisoner to what you hold dear'?
'Sophisticated' investors can be offered securities without the usual disclosure requirements given to everyday investors, but far more people now qualify than was ever intended. Many are far from sophisticated.
Favourite quotations from famous people on markets, investing, processes, noise, pessimism, self perception and life balance. These lessons carry across investment cycles and lifetimes.
To mark our 200th edition, we asked investors and market experts for the top two investing insights they would give to their 20-year-old selves if they could go back in time.
For the last few years there has been much talk of a 'cost-of-living' crisis in Australia and of 'falling living standards'. Lately this has flared up again with the pickup in inflation resulting in a renewed fall in real wages.
Fear of running out has become a defining retirement anxiety. Why do some retirees die with substantial wealth while others deplete their nest egg? Evidence suggests the answer is more complicated than we think.
What if Australia’s golden age of dividends is ending? Rather than overhaul your portfolio, it may be worth considering where new capital can work harder. I discuss four income strategies and the trade-offs behind each.
Conventional wisdom encourages retirees to preserve superannuation. But if those likely to qualify for the Age Pension later in life spend a little more today, it may deliver higher lifetime income and a more stable retirement.
Tax rules have changed, but many investors are still using yesterday’s strategies. Insurance bonds may offer advantages for those seeking greater control, tax efficiency and certainty about their wealth.
Treasury’s latest CGT reform draft delivers a win for testamentary trusts and deceased estates, exempting estate-derived gains from the 30% floor. However, questions on death and divorce rollovers remain unresolved.