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24 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.
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.
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.
Reversionary pensions have long been a staple of SMSF estate planning, but are they still the best option? Meg Heffron revisits a once-clear favourite and asks whether changing super rules have shifted the balance.
For generations, Australian investors have backed banks, miners and dividends. But has that loyalty come at a cost? A look at the numbers raises an uncomfortable question about where future returns will come from.
The 4% rule has long been retirement's gold standard. But after a difficult period for investors, fresh analysis suggests a more conservative approach may significantly improve the chances of making savings last.
The fight over testamentary trusts looked settled. Then the draft legislation arrived. Hidden in a technical detail is a question that could force many families to rethink wills they thought were already future-proof.