Need help with the psychology of investing: past failures and future fears
You're being too hard on yourself. You've managed to save quite a bit, which is more than most people ever do. You're in a wonderful position, actually -- you have savings and time! You don't mention how long you want/need to continue working, but I'll assume 20 years or so? You don't have to invest it all at once. Like Pete B says, index funds (just read what Mr. Buffett said in recent news: he'd tell his widow to invest in the S&P 500 Index and not Berkshire Hathaway!) should be a decent percentage. You can also pick a target fund from any of the major investment firms (fees are higher than an Index, but it will take care of any asset allocation decisions). Put some in each. Also look at retirement accounts to take advantage of tax-deferred or tax-free growth, but that's another question and country-specific. In any case, don't even blink when the market goes down. And it will go down. If you're still working, earning, and saving, it'll just be another opportunity to buy more at lower prices. As for the house, no reason you can't invest and save for a house. Invest some for the long term and set aside the rest for the house in 1-5 years. If you don't think you'll ever really buy the house, though, invest the majority of it for the long-term: I have a feeling from the tone of your question that you tend to put off the big financial decisions. So if you won't really buy the house, just admit it to yourself now! I would read any and all of the John Bogle books.  Essentially:  We know the market will rise and fall.  We just don't know when specifically.   For the most part it is impossible to time the market. He would advocate an asset allocation approach to investing.  So much to bonds, tbills, S&P500 index, NASDAQ index.  In your case you could start out with 10% of your portfolio each in S&P500 and NASDAQ.  Had you done that, you would have achieved growth of 17% and 27% respectively.  The growth on either one of those funds would have probably dwarfed the growth on the entire rest of your portfolio.  BTW 2013 and 2014 were also very good years, with 2015 being mostly flat. In the past you have avoided risk in the market to achieve the detrimental effects of inflation and stagnant money.  Don't make the same mistakes going forward. As an investor you must remember to forgive yourself. However, you must not only forgive but make it up to yourself by putting in the hours of study necessary to ensure that what you are forgiving yourself for will not happen again. Studying (finance, fundamental analysis, statistics, etc.)will also help you to worry less. Once you have put in the hours of study necessary, you can turn to any of a number of still relatively conservative strategies, such as seeking out undervalued blue-chip stocks to purchase or selling covered call options. Good luck.
The steps you outlined are fine by themselves. Step 5, seeking criticism can be less helpful than one may think.  See stocktwits.com  There are a lot of opposing opinions all of which can be correct over different time-frames.  Try and quantify your confidence and develop different strategies for different confidence levels. I was never smart enough or patient with follow through to be a successful value investor. It was very frustrating to watch stocks trade sideways for years before the company's intrinsic value was better reflected in the market.  Also, you could make an excellent pick, but a macro change and slump could set you back a year and raise doubts. In my experience portfolio management techniques like asset allocation and dollar-cost-averaging is what made my version of value investing work. Your interest in 10k/10q is something to applaud.  Is there something specific about 10k/10q that you do not understand?  Context is key, these types of reports are more relevant and understandable when compared to competitors in the same sector.   It is good to assess over confidence!  It is also good to diversify your knowledge and the effort put into Securities Analysis 6th edition will help with other books in the field.  I see a bit of myself in your post, and if you are like me, than subsequent readings, and full mastery of the concepts in 'Securities & Analysis 6th ed.'  will lead to over confidence, or a false understanding as there are many factors at play in the market.  So many, that even the most scientific approaches to investing can just as equally be described as an 'art'. I'm not aware of the details of your situation, but in general, for you to fully realize the benefits from applying the principals of value investing shared by Graham and more recently Warren Buffett, you must invest on the level that requires use of the consolidation or equity method of accounting, e.g. > 20% ownership.   Sure, the same principals used by Buffett can work on a smaller scale, but a small scale investor is best served by wealth accumulation, which can take many forms. Not the addition of instant equity via acquisitions to their consolidated financials. Lastly, to test what you have learned about value investing, and order execution, try the inverse.  At least on paper.  Short a stock with low value and a high P/E.  TWTR may be a good example? Learn what it is like to have your resources at stake, and the anguish of market and security volatility. It would be a lot easier to wait it out as a long-term value investor from a beach house in Santa Barbara :) Here are a few things I've already done, and others reading this for their own use may want to try.  It is very easy to find a pattern in any set of data. It is difficult to find a pattern that holds true in different data pulled from the same population.  Using similar logic, don't look for a pattern in the data from the entire population. If you do, you won't have anything to test it against. If you don't have anything to test it against, it is difficult to tell the difference between a pattern that has a cause (and will likely continue) and a pattern that comes from random noise (which has no reason to continue). If you lose money in bad years, that's okay. Just make sure that the gains in good years are collectively greater than the losses in bad years. If you put $10 in and lose 50%, you then need a 100% gain just to get back up to $10.  A Black Swan event (popularized by Nassim Taleb, if memory serves) is something that is unpredictable but will almost certainly happen at some point. For example, a significant natural disaster will almost certainly impact the United States (or any other large country) in the next year or two. However, at the moment we have very little idea what that disaster will be or where it will hit.  By the same token, there will be Black Swan events in the financial market. I do not know what they will be or when they will happen, but I do know that they will happen. When building a system, make sure that it can survive those Black Swan events (stay above the death line, for any fellow Jim Collins fans). Recreate your work from scratch. Going through your work again will make you reevaluate your initial assumptions in the context of the final system. If you can recreate it with a different medium (i.e. paper and pen instead of a computer), this will also help you catch mistakes. "First, I applaud you for caring.  Most people don't!  In fact, I was in that category.   You bring up several issues and I'll try to address them separately. (1) Getting a financial planner to talk with you.  I had the same experience!  My belief is that they don't want to admit that they don't know how things work. I even asked if I could pay them an hourly fee to ask questions and review stocks with them.  Most declined.  You'll find that very few people actually take the time to get trained to evaluate stocks and the stock market as a whole.  (See later Investools.com). After looking, however, I did find people who would spend an hour or two with me when we met once a quarter to review my ""portfolio""/investments.  I later found training that companies offered.  I would attend any free training I could get because they actually wanted to spend time and talk and teach investors. Bottom line is: Talking to their clients is the job of a financial planner.  If he (or she) is not willing to take this time, it is in your best interest to find someone who will spend that time. (2) Learning about investing! I'm not affiliated with anyone.  I'm a software developer and I do my own trading/investments.  The opinions I share are my own. When I was 20 years away from retirement, I started learning about the stock market so that I would know how it worked before I retired so that (a) I could influence a change if one was needed, and (b) so I wouldn't have to blindly accept the advice of the ""experts"" even when the stock market is crashing. I have used Investools.com, and TDAmeritrade's Think-or-Swim platform.  I've learned a tremendous amount from the Investools training.  I recommend them.  But don't expect to learn how to get rich from them or any training you take. The TDA Think-or-swim platform I highly recommend BECAUSE it has a feature called ""Paper Money"".  It lets you trade using the real market but with play money.  I highly recommend ANY platform that you can use to trade IN PAPER money! The think-or-swim platform would allow you to invest $30,000 in paper money (you can have as much as you want) into any stock.  This would let you see if you can make more money than your current investment advisor.  You could invest $10K in one SPY, $10K in DIA and $10K in IWM (these are symbols for the S&P 500, Dow 30, and Small Cap stocks).  This is just an example, I'm not suggesting any investment advise! It's important that you actually do this not just write down on a piece of paper or Excel spreadsheet what you were going to do because it's common to ""cheat"" and change the dates to meet your needs.  I have found it incredibly helpful to understand how the market works by trying to do my own paper and now real money investing. I was and you will be surprised to find that many trades lose money during the initial start part of the trade because it's very difficult to buy at the exact right time. An important part of managing your own investments is learning to trade with rules and not get ""emotionally involved"" in your trades. (3) Return on investment. You were not happy with $12 return.  Low returns are a byproduct of the way most investment firms (financial planners) take (diversification).  They diversify to take a ""hands off"" approach toward investment because that approach has been the only approach that they have found that works relatively well in all market conditions.  It's not (necessarily) a bad approach.  It avoids large losses in down markets (most riskier approaches lose more than the market).  The downside is it also avoids the high returns.  If the market goes up 15% the investment might only go up 5%. 30K is enough to give to multiple investment firms a try.  I gave two different firms $25K each to see how they would invest.  The direction was to accept LOTS of risk (with the potential for large losses or large gains). In a year that the market did very well, one lost money, and one made a small gain.  It was a learning experience.  I, now, have taken the money back and invest it myself. NOTE: I would be happy with a guy who made me 10-15% year over year (in good times and bad) and didn't talk with me, but I haven't found someone who can do that. :-) NOTE 2: Don't believe what you hear from the news about the stock market being up 5% year to date.  Do your own analysis. NOTE 3: Investing in ""the market"" (S&P 500 for example) is a great way to go if you're just starting.  Few investment firms can beat ""the market"" although many try to do so.  I too have found it's easier to do that than other approaches I've learned.  So, it might be a good long term approach as well. Best wishes to you in your learning about the market and desires to make money with your money.  That is what is all about." "I'm 39 and have been investing since my very early 20's, and the advice I'd like to go back and give myself is the following: 1) Time is your friend. Compounding interest is a powerful force and is probably the most important factor to how much money you are going to wind up with in the end. Save as much as you possibly can as early as you can. You have to run twice as hard to catch up if you start late, and you will still probably wind up with less in the end for the extra effort. 2) Don't invest 100% of your investment money It always bugged me to let my cash sit idle in an investment account because the niggling  notion of inflation eating up my money and I felt I was wasting opportunity cost by not being fully invested in something. However, not having enough investable cash around to buy into the fire-sale dips in the market made me miss out on opportunities. 3) Diversify The dot.com bubble taught me this in a big, hairy painful way. I had this idea that as a technologist I really understood the tech bubble and fearlessly over-invested in Tech stocks. I just knew that I was on top of things as an ""industry insider"" and would know when to jump. Yeah. That didn't work out so well. I lost more than 6 figures, at least on paper. Diversification will attenuate the ups and downs somewhat and make the market a lot less scary in the long run. 4) Mind your expenses It took me years of paying huge full-service broker fees to realize that those clowns don't seem to do any better than anyone else at picking stocks. Even when they do, the transaction costs are a lead weight on your returns. The same holds true for mutual funds/ETFs. Shop for low expense ratios aggressively. It is really hard for a fund manager to consistently beat the indexes especially when you burden the returns with expense ratios that skim an extra 1% or so off the top. The expense ratio/broker fees are among the very few things that you can predict reliably when it comes to investments, take advantage of this knowledge. 5) Have an exit strategy for every investment People are emotional creatures. It is hard to be logical when you have skin in the game and most people aren't disciplined enough to just admit when they have a loser and bail out while they are in the red or conversely admit when they have a winner and take profits before the party is over. It helps to counteract this instinct to have an exit strategy for each investment you buy. That is, you will get out if it drops by x% or grows by y%. In fact, it is probably a good idea to just enter those sell limit orders right after you buy the investment so you don't have to convince yourself to press the eject button in the heat of a big move in the price of that investment. Don't try to predict tops or bottoms. They are extremely hard to guess and things often turn so fast that you can't act on them in time anyway. Get out of an investment when it has met your goal or is going to far in the wrong direction. If you find yourself saying ""It has to come back eventually"", slap yourself.  When you are trying to decide whether to stay in the investment or bail, the most important question is ""If I had the current cash value of the stock instead of shares, would I buy it today?"" because essentially that is what you are doing when you stick with an investment. 6) Don't invest in fads When you are investing you become acutely sensitive to everyone's opinions on what investment is hot and what is not. If everyone is talking about a particular investment, avoid it. The more enthusiastic people are about it (even experts) the MORE you should avoid it. When everyone starts forming investment clubs at work and the stock market seems to be the preferred topic of conversation at every party you go to. Get out!  I'm a big fan of contrarian investing. Take profits when it feels like all the momentum is going into the market, and buy in when everyone seems to be running for the doors." "I am sorry to hear that.   Well, finance is a VERY large field encompassing decades upon decades of research, and thousands of pages of research. This question is usually a difficult one to answer simply because of the scope. My usual answer to people is to browse around this sub and the internet and learn from that, and then for specific questions to ask.   For your purposes, take a look at investopedia.com. While here it's an ""okay"" source, for a beginner I think it's a good place to start.  Is there any specific thing you have a question about now?  I know you mentioned the Big Short and some other things. Just keep in mind anything coming from Hollywood will be *extremely* biased." I’ll start with what worked for me, to get me hooked. This list is by no means exhaustive.   *One Up On Wall Street* by Peter Lynch discusses competitive advantages and staying close to the story of a business. Explores the concept of ‘buy what you know’. He has also written *Beating the Street*.  *The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives* by Leonard Mlodinow is not dissimilar to *A Random Walk Down Wall Street*, but I preferred this book as it explores the concepts of randomness and survivors bias.   *Against the Gods* by Peter Bernstein is a dense book, but in my opinion is the definitive text on the development of numbers, probability theory, and risk management. I absolutely love this book.   *The Most Important Thing* by Howard Marks is immensely readable, enjoyable, and looks at value investing for the long run. Howard Marks has been a macro behavioural investor before behavioural investing was a thing.   Speaking of behavioural biases, *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman is a spectacular look at how your brain’s quick-trigger responses can often be wrong.  On the subject of behaviour and biases, *Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion* by Robert Cialdini is another topic-defining book  More books by long term veteran professional investment managers that should be enjoyed: - *The Little Book That (Still) Beats the Market* by Joel Greenblatt - *Beat the Crowd* by Ken Fisher - *Big Money Thinks Small* by Joel Tillinghast - *Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits* by Philip A. Fisher - *The Little Book of Behavioural Investing* by James Montier - *Margin of Safety* by Seth Klarman  And I’ll be banned from this forum without mentioning *The Intelligent Investor* by Benjamin Graham.    As per some other comments, my personal opinion is that books that describe events or periods of time like *Liars’ Poker* [80s Junk Bonds], *The Big Short* [Financial Crisis], *When Genius Failed* [the LTCM collapse, excellent read by Rogers Lowenstein], *All The Devils Are Here* [by McLean and Nocera, another Financial Crisis book, much better than Lewis’s, IMO] are all educational and quite entertaining, but don’t honestly have much to do with the actual nuts and bolts of the real financial industry.   Enjoy! "My feeling is that you're basically agreeing to throw away a bucket of money for a lesson that doesn't have to cost a penny. Like another commenter said, you're putting the cart before the horse.  I once asked a similar question to a seasoned investor, though I wasn't in the position to toss my hard-earned cash into the well yet. He told me that the difference between the winners and losers is that the winners don't need the money. I'm not trying to say that there's a ""rich keep getting richer ..."" component here, while schlubs like me get nada.  The real nugget of wisdom he offered was that if anyone wants to do well as investors, we must invest in a way that we're not dependent on the money we have in the market. Instead, manage risk carefully so that you don’t get swept up in the emotional highs and lows.  For you, what I applaud is that you're willing to do your research first. And part of that should be anticipating how you will handle the anxiety when you put your money in at the wrong time or get out a little later than you should.  What I understand now is that you don’t need to be wealthy to “not need the money.” You just need to invest smartly and leave your emotions out of it." "This article is written by an idiot!!  Risk ≠ failure, risk = possibility of failure  Reward (return) should be commensurate with risk and this is why long-shot propositions should be worthwhile. An example of this could be something like the following; an investment with a 95% chance of success should return about 5% on the investment (1 in 20 risk of loss, 1/20th return on investment for taking the risk) while a long-shot investment with a 5% chance of success should be paying a 2000% return (1 in 20 will succeed but they will pay 20 times the investment if they do).  An investment with a 0% chance of return (that you are suckered into due to ""opacity"") is not an investment, it is being robbed and it should be illegal. WTF is opacity? Lying?" "The article ""Best Stock Fund of the Decade: CGM Focus"" from the Wall Street Journal in 2009 describe the highest performing mutual fund in the USA between 2000 and 2009. The investor return in the fund (what the shareholders actually earned) was abysmal. Why? Because the fund was so volatile that investors panicked and bailed out, locking in losses instead of waiting them out. The reality is that almost any strategy will lead to success in investing, so long as it is actually followed. A strategy keeps you from making emotional or knee-jerk decisions. (BTW, beware of anyone selling you a strategy by telling you that everyone in the world is a failure except for the few special people who have the privilege of knowing their ""secrets."") (Link removed, as it's gone dead)" "Can you easily stomach the risk of higher volatility that could come with smaller stocks? How certain are you that the funds wouldn't have any asset bloat that could cause them to become large-cap funds for holding to their winners? If having your 401(k) balance get chopped in half over a year doesn't give you any pause or hesitation, then you have greater risk tolerance than a lot of people but this is one of those things where living through it could be interesting. While I wouldn't be against the advice, I would consider caution on whether or not the next 40 years will be exactly like the averages of the past or not. In response to the comments: You didn't state the funds so I how I do know you meant index funds specifically? Look at ""Fidelity Low-Priced Stock"" for a fund that has bloated up in a sense. Could this happen with small-cap funds? Possibly but this is something to note. If you are just starting to invest now, it is easy to say, ""I'll stay the course,"" and then when things get choppy you may not be as strong as you thought. This is just a warning as I'm not sure you get my meaning here. Imagine that some women may think when having a child, ""I don't need any drugs,"" and then the pain comes and an epidural is demanded because of the different between the hypothetical and the real version. While you may think, ""I'll just turn the cheek if you punch me,"" if I actually just did it out of the blue, how sure are you of not swearing at me for doing it? Really stop and think about this for a moment rather than give an answer that may or may not what you'd really do when the fecal matter hits the oscillator. Couldn't you just look at what stocks did the best in the last 10 years and just buy those companies? Think carefully about what strategy are you using and why or else you could get tossed around as more than a few things were supposed to be the ""sure thing"" that turned out to be incorrect like the Dream Team of Long-term Capital Management, the banks that were too big to fail, the Japanese taking over in the late 1980s, etc. There are more than a few times where things started looking one way and ended up quite differently though I wonder if you are aware of this performance chasing that some will do." "I think that ""memoryless"" in this context of a given stock's performance is not a term of art. IMO, it's an anecdotal concept or cliche used to make a point about holding a stock. Sometimes people get stuck... they buy a stock or fund at 50, it goes down to 30, then hold onto it so they can ""get back to even"". By holding the loser stock for emotional reasons, the person potentially misses out on gains elsewhere." Aswath Damodaran's [Investment Valuation 3rd edition](http://www.amazon.com/Investment-Valuation-Techniques-Determining-University/dp/1118130731/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1339995852&amp;sr=8-12&amp;keywords=aswath+damodaran) (or save money and go with a used copy of the [2nd edition](http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0471414905/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&amp;condition=used))  He's a professor at Stern School of Business. His [website](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/) and [blog](http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/) are good resources as well. [Here is his support page](http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/Inv3ed.htm) for his Investment Valuation text. It includes chapter summaries, slides, ect. If you're interested in buying the text you can get an idea of what's in it by checking that site out. Well, what I would do would be to read every journalist's article on the subject, every academic paper, and the appropriate chapters from the CFA curriculum. I'd write down everyone's name (authors and those mentioned) and then email call them for advice. I'd try to find out who those players are, what their specific philosophies are, and then find someone i thought was really smart, had an investment philosophy that I agreed with, wasn't a dick, and then I would call them.   By the way, Warren Buffett went to Columbia to learn specifically under Ben Graham. Prior to graduation, Buffett said he'd like to work at Graham Newman for free, such was the value of the education. Benjamin Graham told him (Warren), he wasn't worth that much.   You or I literally have nothing to offer these guys that they can't get somewhere else (smarts, hard work, etc) for better. I'd be humble, attentive, and humble (did I say that already). There's an intellectual honesty that comes with admitting you don't know anything (but are willing to learn) that is very much important.  That's what I would do. Did any of that help? "There may well be several such graphs, I expect googling will turn them up; but the definition of risk is actually quite important here. My definition of risk might not be quite the same as yours, so the relative risk factors would be different. For example: in general, stocks are more risky than bonds.  But owning common shares in a blue-chip company might well be less risky than owning bonds from a company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and no single risk number can really capture that. Another example: while I can put all my money in short-term deposits, and it is pretty ""safe"", if it grows at 1% so that my investment portfolio cannot fund my retirement, then I have a risk that I will run out of money before I shuffle off this mortal coil.  How to capture that ""risk"" in a single number? So you will need to better define your parameters before you can prepare a visual aid. Good Luck" From what little I know about statistics and behavioral finance, it appears that the “October effect” is based more on psychology than actual statistics.  With that said, if you’re young you shouldn’t worry. I couldn’t care less if the market gets smacked again and drops 20%+. I’m only 31 and have plenty of time to make my money back and capitalize on depressed asset prices. If you’re older though, that’s an entirely different story and one should account for their required time horizon.