New Investor path

How investing works, what risk really is, who the other investors are, and how people lose money - before any real decision.

The lessons, in order

  1. What investing actually is — Investing is putting money at risk today in exchange for more of it later. Everything else in this Academy is detail on top of that one trade. (9 min)
  2. An angel invests their own money, and that changes everything about how they decide — Individual and angel investors put personal capital into companies. They move fast, write smaller cheques and answer to nobody - which is both their advantage and their risk. (9 min)
  3. Public versus private markets — One prices your asset every second the market is open. The other might not price it again for years - and that silence is not the same as stability. (11 min)
  4. What risk actually means — Risk is not 'the price went down.' It's the chance the money never comes back at all - and those are two very different things to manage. (10 min)
  5. Volatility versus permanent loss — A price drop that recovers is volatility. Money that never comes back is a permanent loss. The single decision that turns one into the other is usually your own. (11 min)
  6. How compounding works — Compounding is earning returns on your returns, not just your original money - and time, more than the rate itself, is what makes it powerful. (12 min)
  7. The cost of fees — A 1% fee doesn't sound like much. Compounded over decades, it can quietly consume a quarter or more of everything you would otherwise have earned. (10 min)
  8. Why diversification works — Spreading money across many holdings does not raise your expected return. It changes the range of outcomes around it - and in particular it removes the ones you cannot come back from. (11 min)
  9. Asset allocation: the decision above the holdings — How much you hold in each broad type of asset shapes your experience far more than which particular items you choose inside them - and it is the decision most people spend the least time on. (14 min)
  10. Confirmation bias and the fear of missing out — Two failures that feel like diligence and enthusiasm: reading only what agrees with you, and buying because the decision is being made for you by other people's excitement. (11 min)
  11. Fraud, and the tells that give it away — Most investment fraud does not look exotic. It arrives through someone you already trust, offers returns that are only slightly too good, and fails a small number of checks that take an afternoon. (12 min)
  12. A startup is a search for a business model, not a small company running one — A startup is designed to grow very fast by finding a repeatable, scalable business under deep uncertainty. That purpose is why it behaves, fails and is valued so differently from an ordinary small business. (9 min)

All Investor Academy subjects