Investing Basics
A checklist for finding the costs a fund's headline fee can miss, including sales charges, redemption fees and trading costs, and where each one is disclosed in fund documents.
Loss aversion, recency bias, anchoring and confirmation bias are common thinking shortcuts that can distort investing choices. Each includes an everyday example and a way to check your own decisions.
Many holdings can still be fragile when they share exposures. Overlapping funds and hidden sector, country or employer concentration are the usual causes.
Five common beliefs about investing sound sensible but can lead to costly decisions, along with the more careful ideas that tend to replace them.
Single bonds have a maturity date and a face value repaid at maturity, while bond funds have no end date. Compare diversification, costs, liquidity and how each reacts when interest rates change.
Asset allocation is the split of a portfolio among stocks, bonds and cash. The mix shapes price swings and growth potential, and it is set by weighing time, goals and capacity.
A bond is a loan that pays fixed coupon interest until maturity. Learn how coupons, maturity dates and credit risk work, and why a bond's market price can change before it matures.