Nobody is born knowing what a share is. 10 short pieces, in order. Each one is one idea and a question to check it landed.
None of this tells you what to buy. It is here so that when you decide, you know what you are deciding.
There is no true price. There is only the last price two people agreed on.
A share does not have a correct price hidden somewhere. It has the price someone paid a second ago.
More buyers than sellers, and the price rises. Everyone heading for the exit at once, and it drops.
News, rumours and plain mood all feed into it. That is why nobody can tell you tomorrow’s price. Anyone who says they can is guessing confidently.
Someone on the internet says a price will definitely rise next month. What do they actually have?
One click can buy you a slice of hundreds of companies at once.
Buying one company is a bet on one company. If it goes wrong, it goes very wrong.
A fund is a basket holding many companies at the same time. Buy one slice of the basket and you own a little of everything inside it.
The baskets in this game are called ETFs. SPY, for example, holds the five hundred biggest companies in America. One decision, five hundred companies.
Why is buying a basket usually less nerve-racking than buying one company?
Sitting in cash is a bet that waiting beats taking part.
You never have to put the money anywhere. Leaving it as cash is allowed.
But it is not neutral, and it gets scored like everything else.
In 2022 almost everything fell, and cash quietly beat the market. In 2019 almost everything rose, and cash missed all of it. Same choice, opposite results.
Real annual returns, not examples.
You hold everything in cash for a year and the market rises a lot. How did you do?
Markets drop regularly. It is the price of being in them at all.
It is easy to think a fall means something has gone wrong. Falls are simply part of how this works.
Look at four years from the same decade. Two of them were bad. Both were followed by more years.
The people who came out worst were mostly not the ones who were there for the falls. They were the ones who sold during them and bought back after the recovery.
Real annual returns, not examples.
The market falls hard. What does that fact alone tell you about next year?
Things do not all move together, and that is what saves you.
In 2008 a crisis started in banks and dragged nearly everything down with it. The banks themselves fell furthest.
But not everything moved the same way. Gold and long government bonds actually rose that year while shares collapsed.
Someone holding a bit of each did not escape the year. They did survive it, which is the point.
Real annual returns, not examples.
What does spreading your money out actually protect you from?
In 2022 the thing everyone treats as the safe option fell harder than shares.
Long government bonds are the classic calm choice. When shares get scary, that is where people go.
In 2022 they fell further than shares did. The steady option was the worst place to be.
This is not a reason to avoid bonds. It is a reason to be suspicious of anything described as obvious.
Real annual returns, not examples.
Everyone agrees something is the safe choice this year. What should you do?
SPY does nothing clever and still beats most people who try hard.
SPY holds the biggest five hundred companies and then sits there. No skill, no timing, no opinion.
To beat it you have to be right about something the entire market got wrong. That is rarer than it sounds.
This is why your decade is measured against it. Beating the boring option is the actual test.
Real annual returns, not examples.
You made money this year. Did you do well?
The number cannot tell you which one you were. Only your reasons can.
Two people buy the same thing on the same day. It rises. One had worked out why it should. The other liked the name.
At the end of the year they have exactly the same result, and the market cannot tell you which was which.
Only one of them will be right again on purpose. That is why you write your reason down before you find out.
Your call went up and the reason you gave turned out to be wrong. What was it?
“I am wrong if ______.” Fill in the blank before you commit.
Anyone can say why they think something. Almost nobody says what would prove them wrong.
Naming it in advance does two things. It forces you to check whether you have a real reason at all. And it tells you when to change your mind, instead of leaving that to how you feel.
This is the one habit here worth taking with you into the rest of your life. It works on far more than money.
What is the point of writing down what would prove you wrong?
You now know more about how this works than most adults do. The rest you only learn by deciding something and finding out.
Start week one