Focus on investing and not investments: Mark’s top articles in May
Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance covered the transition to retirement, building a portfolio with ETFs and investing lessons from Michael Lewis’ Moneyball during May.
Constantly coming up with topics for articles and podcasts that help investors improve their outcomes can be a challenging endeavour. The easiest approach is to simply follow the news cycle and overemphasise the importance of each new event and piece of data.
This is a good way to come up with topics. But it leaves the impression that the best investors are constantly tinkering with their portfolios to reflect whatever has the professional pundits chattering. This couldn’t be further than the truth.
Consistency and patience are the secrets to investing success. And I’m far more interested in helping investors develop a plan and evaluate opportunities in the context of personal circumstances. I think the secret to success is not to stick your head in the sand but instead develop a way of thinking and strategy to filter out the noise and focus on what you want to achieve.
This month I re-read Michael Lewis’ Moneyball which got me thinking of the implications of his study of changes in baseball on how we invest. I also reflected on the fact that I constantly get questions about how many ETFs should be included in a portfolio. I wanted to tackle that question with an article on considerations when building an ETF portfolio ETFs. Finally, I revisted a topic that understandably causes a lot of anxiety for investors – the transition to retirement.
As always my best ideas come from readers. Please email me at mark.lamonica1@morningstar.com with any topics you would like covered.
Top articles in May
Transitioning to retirement can be a perilous time for investors. In a time when so many parts of life are changing an investor must transition from building a portfolio to using financial resources to pay for life. A plan helps and I offered my own to guide your thinking.
It has been more than 20 years since Michael Lewis wrote Moneyball. I looked at what we can learn from the book to improve investing outcomes and offered 3 lessons for investors.
There is a difference between investing and investments. Investing is a process to help you achieve your goals. An investment is a means to an end. Building a portfolio is more than assembling a random mix of investments that you think will ‘do well’.
Inundated by choice ETF investors are too focused on the merits of each ETF instead of how they fit together in a portfolio. I outlined a 4 step process to build an ETF portfolio and applied the logic to a choice between NDQ and IVV to get US exposure.
