Sublime

Investing is not a very complicated business; people just make it complicated. You have to learn to go from the general to the particular in a logical, sequential, rational manner.

Investing is easy unless you try to beat the market. Settle for average. Be happy with a good-enough return from passive index funds that represent the entire world economy.

In the Berkshire Hathaway 2013 annual shareholder letter Buffett writes: “My advice … could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard’s.) I believe the trust’s long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained

you want to put money in investment funds, buy a group of

Finding investors who have done well in all economic environments—when inflation rises and when it falls, when there are booms and when there are busts—is like finding needles in a haystack, and they don’t live forever so that’s not a viable path.

your returns7 your risk, by deciding how much of your total assets to put at hazard in the stock market, by diversifying, and by rebalancing your tax bills, by holding stocks for at least one year and, whenever possible, for at least five years, to lower your capital-gains liability and, most of all, your own behavior.

The secret is to buy bonds the big money isn’t allowed to. To illustrate the point further, let’s look at the BlackRock Floating Rate Income Strategies Fund (FRA), which buys floating-rate debt. (More about floating-rate debt in a moment). For now, just know that most of the bonds it buys are issued by corporations, and most of them are below the “