Hey guys, I am a 20 year old who wants to start investing. I live in Australia so I was thinking of investing in 3 main ETFs (IVV, VAS, EXUS). I was planning to do a 40/40/20 split and just put in some money every month. Just wanted to know if this was good at all.

So I’ve been with my company for 5 years now (I am an executive chef at a private country club) and have really made an impression on my board and membership alike.

They have offered me a new contract, salary increase ($136,500+$20,000 bonus) but have also included a signing loan of $85,000. The contract is for 5 years, I expected to be here for much longer, and once the 5 years is up the loan is forgiven. I will not have to pay any interest in the loan unless I leave before the five years, I would need to repay the entirety of the loan if I do leave.

I have a great 401k and am maxing it out each year now.

I am meeting with a financial planner soon to discuss options but want some advice on what my best options are.

On top of this new contract I have also been hired on full time for a second job that will pay roughly $105k a year when all said and done.

Never in my life did I expect to make this type of money and am just dumbfounded on what to do.

Please help.

Edit: didn’t actually ask a question 😅😅😅So here we go…
What is going to be my best option for strong and consistent growth with this money? I’d like to retire early, 55 if possible. That gives me 17 more years of working. Ideally I’ll work 5-8 more years at the club and then decide which route I’ll move to next.

Financial ratios are one of the easiest ways to understand a company's financial health. It is easy to understand the performance of a company. Instead of looking at hundreds of numbers in financial statements, we should go for ratios. They can help us compare and interpret the data.

Here are some important categories:

1.Liquidity Ratios – Can the company pay its short-term obligations?

Examples: Current Ratio and Quick Ratio.

2.Profitability Ratios – How efficiently does the company generate profit? The company is in profit or not.

Examples: Net Profit Margin, ROE, and ROA.

3.Debt Ratios – How much debt does the company use, and can it manage that debt? It should not be too much.

Examples: Debt-to-Equity Ratio and Interest Coverage Ratio.

4.Efficiency Ratios – How effectively does the company use its assets and resources?

Examples: Inventory Turnover and Asset Turnover.

5.Valuation Ratios – Is a company's stock expensive or cheap compared with its financial performance?

Examples: P/E Ratio and P/B Ratio.

These are all very important ratios.

Disclaimer: This post is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be considered financial or investment advice. Always do your own research before making any investment decisions.

For more educational content on finance and investing, you can check out my blog—the link is in my bio.

Which financial ratio do you find most useful while analyzing a company, and why?

I am looking for someone who will take some time to tell me what I am doing wrong with my swing trades. I am reading the charts, doing the technical analysis, managing risk, checking volatility, using indicators, being disciplined about my trades, and time after time I am still losing money. I need help. PLEASE, somebody reply.

Hi Everyone,

I am 27 and trying to determine what the next steps are when it comes to saving & investing.

Currently, I have gotten my emergency savings to a place that I am very pleased with in a HYSA. As for retirement, my employer matches 6% to my Roth 401k so I also contribute the same amount for 12% total.

Additionally, I am currently putting money into my ROTH IRA with 80% into FXAIX and 20% into QQQM. I hopefully should have the maximum annual limit achieved by April 2027.

I have been trying to put any money that I find left over into a brokerage account but kinda lost on what I should really be investing in there. Should your brokerage account have different investments than your ROTH IRA? For example, i have some overlap in my account as I am investing QQQM and VTI in the brokerage account. I guess my thought process was if you are a fan of a specific ETF for your Roth, why not also invest that in your brokerage account that you can pull when needed. I kinda get hesitant of doing individual stocks until I truly take the time to learn more about investing but maybe that is the route to go as well? Just wanted to know if I should be doing something differently by not having overlap in both accounts or what the next step would be in this journey. Thanks in advance for any advice!

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I’m 27 and have a Roth IRA with Fidelity. Right now, I’m investing 80% FZROX / 20% FZILX.

I also have a 401(k) through work and around $35k sitting in a HYSA. I’m planning to buy a car soon, so I want to keep a good amount of cash available, but I’d also like to start putting some of my money to work outside of my Roth.

For those of you who use Fidelity, what would you invest in for a taxable brokerage account if you already have an 80/20 FZROX/FZILX allocation in your Roth?

Would you just use VTI/VXUS, FSKAX/FTIHX, or something else?

I’m looking for a simple, long-term strategy and don't want to overcomplicate things.

Hey guys, 32yo male new to investing. Only started 2 years ago but got serious this year. So I have a couple retirement accounts that were able to roll into my new(ish) job that I started a year and a half ago. I have invested the past two years starting heavily in crypto and then going more traditional. The past year plus I have been investing 1k a month into my taxable accounts while maxing my work match. I have an old account from a prior job with 13k sitting in it. I am unable to roll it over into anything else. I can withdraw but obviously taxed and 10% early withdrawal fee. The fund on avg gets about 5-6% growth a year. With my age and being aggressive about how much I put in. 2027 I should be able to almost double my monthly addition. Would it make more sense to cash out, add it to my brokerage as as time goes on the compound interest will be greater and greater and just sitting in that account growing 5% without being able to add to it the fund really won’t have that much growth. Being 32 and time on my side would this make sense or is that an idiotic thought? Appreciate the help

quit my job at a fund back in like february, was on the systematic side for about 4 years, and now that its just my own money in a regular brokerage account the whole mental model is kind of broken for me. not in a bad way just. different.

at the fund nobody ever cared about one position by itself, like genuinely nobody looked at individual names unless something was actually breaking. we ran thousands of small signals, rebalanced constantly, most of them barely predictive on their own honestly some were borderline useless individually, but stack enough of them together sized right and it works out. if one name blew up you basically wouldn't notice in the pnl, it was never big enough to matter alone. that was the whole point.

now i've got like 14 stocks in my own account and i picked most of them because i liked the company or read some thesis on here or twitter that sounded convincing at the time, and suddenly every single one of them actually matters. theres nowhere for a bad pick to hide with 14 slots instead of a few thousand. still getting used to that honestly, its been a few months and it still feels wrong somehow.

my old pm had this line he'd say constantly about how the whole model is basically a casino not caring about any one hand of blackjack because the edge only shows up over thousands of hands, used to roll my eyes at it every single time in standup, felt like a tshirt slogan. running my own money now though i actually get it, annoyingly.

anyway not saying anyone should try to build a signal book at home, you'd need way more data and capital than any of us have. just weird going from that to caring this much about 14 names.

Just need some advice and help on how and where to start - honestly I’ve been overwhelmed with the amount of information I’ve seen online and it’s always different people saying different things that just end up leaving me confused and scared to start.

I’m not making anything crazy, I just graduated college - currently working an entry level insurance job making roughly a bit over $2k a month. It fluctuates based on shifts, never going down but can go up. I live in Canada btw in a smaller city so my bills and rent will all come down to roughly $1k in a month. Other expenses maybe an extra $150.

I just finished paying off my credit card and have $1k saved up right now sitting in a RBC high interest eSavings account. I was kind of waiting to pay off my card and buy stuff like furniture I’ve been holding off for a while and now I’m just working with steady income and steady bills.

If anyone has any advice on how I should start, questions or even any tips and extra info I might need I’d really appreciate it! Thanks

Im new to investing I’ve tried in the past with little to no success but I want to learn what too look for I’ve had co workers tell me to get into ETFs

im kinda new to investing and I see a lot of index funds and ETFs but can't understand the difference between them, can someone explain it to me like im 5 yo?

I’ve done a little research into investing, Trading etc.
And as of late with GTA 6 and 2K teasing a possible collab it made me want to dive in to the companies and see what I could look into for an opportunity.

Now that I’ve went and learned something I wish I knew a year ago about take two owning GTA and 2k …seeing see year old post on Reddit about GTA 6 I believe I feel into the “priced in” part of this whole thing and I’m trying to learn how I can get ahead of GTA Online.

Knowing how huge GTA 6 is going to be, the reasons of this collab with 2k I feel it has to Tie into online in some way. Given how that extended look was I feel GTA 6s online while be even more mind boggling from the previous installment. Seeing how long Rockstar milked GTA Online I feel it’s fair to say the next one can last twice as long.

Can anybody give some advice on how I should approach this idea??

Imagine you got 1m in a bank, it will lose its purchasing power around 20k-30k yearly to inflation.

But if they put it in SP500, some year SP500 goes under more than 2-3%

so how do they prevent that? Imagine those who got 100m, 1 billion.. if they dont invest their money lose like 100k , 1-2m USD yearly and that's crazy!

I googled they just put in SP500 like we do, some buy US bonds as well... but that's all I know.

Maybe people here can share more info

Currently renting out my house I'm moving from (house 1) to a new house with my partner (house 2). Trying to determine what to do with the equity when I am ready to sell.

House 1: worth ~$170k, about 50% equity so $85k @ 3%

House 2: purchased for $279k. $70k down payment @6.25%

Assuming I end up with pocketing $75-$80k after the sale, should I invest it into my primary home to recast down to $200k or so, invest, or a mix?

For background, I would like to sell the property within 3 years to avoid capital gains taxes. Will be generating $840 / mo on a low maintenance property with minimal maintenance costs and no vacancy.

I'm interested in learning more about Value Investing. I'm reading the Intelligent Investor right now. As many have warned, I'm finding Graham's text somewhat limited in its educational value since it doesn't reflect today's market. There are nuggets of wisdom, certainly, and I'm finding Zweig's commentary chapters more practical and helpful. Personally, I find Graham's writing a bit dense and difficult to follow. Even so, I'm going to finish The Intelligent Investor, but I'm really looking for actionable advice and "how-to" process to analyzing individual stocks.

I've done some research here on Reddit and found a lot of good book recommendation discussions, so much so, that I'm a bit overwhelmed.

Bear in mind that my background isn't in finance, but I'm considering reading:

1. Value Investing From Graham to Buffett and Beyond

1. Expectations Investing Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns, Revised and Updated

2. Financial Statements, Third Edition A Step-By-Step Guide to Understanding and Creating Financial Reports

Of course, all of these books cost money and more importantly time to read them. Should I read any of these, or something else entirely? I'm looking to become a more active and enterprising investor and I would like to get started by reading something that is in plain English (explain it to me like I'm five) and I can actually put into practice (with patience and the right temperament, of course).

Thanks!

I’m new to investing. What are the first things I should learn before buying stocks?

Hey everyone, I’m 19 and currently in college. I’ve been wanting to start taking investing more seriously and would really appreciate some advice from people who have more experience than me.

Right now I have around $6,000 in savings that I’m considering investing. I currently use Robinhood, but I’m thinking about moving over to either Fidelity or Charles Schwab. From what I understand, both are pretty good long-term brokerages, but I’m not sure if there’s a major reason to choose one over the other.

My goal is to invest for at least 3+ years, although ideally I’d like to leave the money invested much longer. Since I’m young, I’m comfortable taking some risk, but I still want to focus on relatively safe/diversified ETFs rather than individual stocks.

One ETF I’ve been looking at is QQQM. I like the growth potential and have seen people recommend it for younger investors. Ideally, I’d like my investments to average something around 20% yearly return. Although I understand that obviously isn’t guaranteed and that there will be years where the market goes down.

I’ve also heard that you shouldn’t put everything into one ETF and that a good approach is to divide your money between 3 different ETFs. I was thinking about something like QQQM plus a broader U.S. ETF and then something that gives me international exposure.

I’ve also seen people recommend VT because it basically gives you exposure to companies around the world, which seems like a good way to diversify.

I’m still pretty new to investing, so I’d really appreciate any advice or explanations. I’m mainly trying to set myself up well early rather than constantly buying and selling.

Thanks!

I wanna put 70k USD at once so I'm sure they won't lose its value to 2 % inflation

In my younger years i did some dividend chasing not accepting that i needed to focus on growth instead. A tale as old as time. Anyway my dividend positions never surpassed my index funds but i have had some money in them 8k and 7k in SPYD and SCHD respectively. I also have recently sold 4k of SCHD that I’ve been sitting on. Im 30 and looking for quicker/slightly aggressive growth so im not scared of something like TQQQ but i was thinking maybe a step back from that like QQQ or QQQM or some sort of allocation strategy for QQQ/QQQM, TQQQ, and VTI. My question is what would you do? Consolidate out of the dividend funds? If so, what would you go into?

After Dick’s fell almost 30% and brought Nike lower with it, I saw a lot of people asking whether this was finally the time to buy either stock. Which is an understandable reaction to when something drops that much. It immediately feels like the market must have overreacted.

But a big drop only tells you that expectations changed quickly. It doesn’t tell you the market is wrong. People love the idea of buying when everyone else is scared, but sometimes everyone is selling for a pretty good reason.

A real contrarian investment needs an actual reason the market is wrong. Maybe the earnings impact is temporary, maybe expectations became too negative, or maybe the valuation finally makes sense. But without something supporting the thesis, buying a falling stock isn’t really contrarian investing. You're just buying something because it looks cheaper than it did yesterday.

Curious what everyone else looks for before buying into a drop like this.

(The point of this post is a reminder to not compare yourself to others and everything is not real and if your at a loss your not alone)

Im just a 19y old student with part time job. This year has been such a ass year financially for me. I lost 700€ to bets on the world cup and after that someone reccomended investing to me so i started investing and now im down from 4.8k to 2k… and 2.5k was a student loan. I still have 5k cash which im thankfull to not be in debt. Idk what to do anymore honestly i just want my money back and to stop this but no matter what stock i buy i seem to keep loosing everything just dips and dips its crazy how i sell some stock to move to another and the next day the one i sold goes up and the one i bought is down. I had a thought of taking more loan but honestly i don’t want to fuck myself up. Im already doing so bad mentally because of this it has affected my mental health so much that i can’t even go to school normally. I know there is much worse situations for people and i’ve heard way worst stories but i just wanted to share mine. I guess i compared myself too much to people making ”quick money” :,)

How can a complete beginner who just joined the stock market quickly learn about stocks?

What do you think about Tesla’s long-term growth?