Silvan's Blog

2020-10-12

How to Invest Step 2: What should I buy?

This blog post is part 2 of a bigger series called “How to Invest”. The first post was about “How much should I invest?”

If you invested in a very low cost index fund, where you don’t put the money in at one time, but average in over 10 years, you’ll do better than 90% of people who start investing at the same time. – Warren Buffett

You will not get that advice from anybody because nobody gets paid to give you that advice. You will have all kinds of people that will tell you how much better they can do for you if you just give them a fee or a commission, but they won’t do better. – Warren Buffett, 2008 Annual Shareholders Meeting

So you decided that you’re going to invest and you ask yourself “what should I buy?”. In the following I’ll attempt to answer this question. You could skip right to the end of this post to find the answer. However, in the following you will see how I derived it.

2020-08-23

How to Invest Step 1: How much should I invest?

This blog post is part 1 of a bigger series called “How to Invest”.

What is the goal of this blog series?

Over the last couple of years friends and family repeatedly approached me with the question of how to invest. It usually sounds like this:

“I inherited 100k from my parents. Do you have any advice on what to do with it?”
“I’ve been working for 5 years and I saved some money. The stock market has been going up like crazy. Should I invest ..and if so, how does it work?”
“I saved some money and I think I should do something with this money rather than having it lay around on my bank savings account. There’s practically no interest on the bank and then there’s the risk of inflation. So do you think I should invest this money?”
“I saved some money and I want to invest. But I also have plans of buying a house or founding a business in 2 years. What should I do?

The goal of this blog series is to answer these questions.

2018-03-12

Prophets of Wall Street (Cycles part 2)

In my previous post I wrote about generational cycles, which were identified by Neil Howe and William Strauss. However, cycles also appear in financial markets. Have you heard of legendary investors from the 19th and early 20th century that allegedly predicted financial booms and busts of the following 100 years? In the following I am going to take a closer look some of these investors and the predictions they made.

2017-08-21

Winter is coming: The Fourth Turning (Cycles part 1)

“History is seasonal, and winter is coming.” (Neil Howe)

Some questions have been haunting me in recent years:

How come that Trump, a narcissistic populist was elected into power?
Why is the call for order (or even for fascism) getting louder? (e.g. calls from the French National Front, the Dutch Party for Freedom, the Alternative for Germany, the Freedom Party of Austria, and the UK Independence Party)
Why are we seeing these nationalist movements and why did Britain vote to leave the EU?
How will southern Europe get out of the mess that they find themselves in – with record rates of youth unemployment? ..do they have to abandon the Euro? ..what currency will follow?

I recently found some answers to these questions when I stumbled upon this podcast with Neil Howe.