How to Invest for Beginners

right so let's say you want to get started with this investing thing you might have a bit of money saved it's probably not enough for a house but you reckon i should probably invest this in something maybe you've heard on the news about tesla on netflix or amazon and how if you'd invested 10 years ago in tesla then you'd be a millionaire by now or things like that but if you're new to the game this whole investment thing can seem like a really complicated black box like how do you even buy a stock what even is a stock do you just go on tesla. com and buy some tesla like how does it work and if you try and look into this you get all these acronyms being thrown around like roth iras and 401ks in america or like isis and lysos in the uk and on top of that there is the anxiety that we all have that i know investing is risky and i don't want to lose all of my money so in light of all of that this is the ultimate guide on how to get started with investing it is the video i wish i would have had five years ago when i first started investing in stocks and chairs and we're going to cover this by thinking about investing in 10 different bite-size steps so the first one is forgetting about investing completely and just thinking what happens to my money over time by default and if you studied economics you will know that your money loses its value over time thanks to something called inflation inflation is generally around about the two percent two and a half percent mark and so that means that every year stuff costs about two percent more than it did the year before for example in 1970 in america a cup of coffee cost 25 cents but in 2019 that same cup of coffee cost 1. 59 that is inflation in action and so let's say you've got a thousand pounds in your hand right now and for the next 10 years you just stash it under your mattress and you never look at it again in 10 years time your thousand pounds is not going to be worth a thousand pounds anymore because everything will have increased by 2 ish every year so the value of your money will have fallen and so if you put your thousand pounds under your mattress for 10 years you will lose money over time and this is obviously not good even if you put your money in a savings account like these days a savings account will give you like 0.

2 percent interest which means your money goes up by 0. 2 percent every year but because inflation is up by two percent you're still losing money over time and again this is not good okay so that begs the question which is key point number two which is how do we stop our money from losing value over time and the answer is that if we had a hypothetical savings account one that was let's say an interest rate of 2. 5 that would match roughly the rate of inflation so inflation means everything goes up by 2.

5 in terms of price but our money in our savings account also goes up by 2. 5 each year therefore we're technically not losing money over time if you're watching this and you have an issue with the word interest and don't worry stick to it for now investment is not the same as interest but we'll come back to that a bit later but the point here is that we don't just want to not lose money which is what happens at our 2. 5 rate we actually want to make money and that brings us on to question number three which is well how do we actually make money now let's go back to our hypothetical savings account if hypothetically we could have a savings account that was giving us a 10 interest rate this would never happen because that's just way too high but hypothetically if it did that means that every year we'd be making 10 percent of the value of the money in our savings account so for example if i were to put 100 pounds in a savings account right now the next year would be worth 110 and then the year after it'll be 121 because it's 10 of then the 110 and then it would be 130 something and this would very quickly compound so that in 10 years time my 100 pounds will have become 259 pounds and if we adjust for inflation then our money is still worth 206 pounds in 10 years time this is pretty good we have more than doubled our money by just putting it in this hypothetical 10 interest savings account and it really doesn't seem like it would do that because 10 feels like a small amount of money but if you extrapolate 10 over 10 years you actually double your money which is pretty awesome sadly these hypothetical 10 saving accounts don't really exist because it's just way too high and real life is not that nice these days most savings accounts in the uk and i imagine around the rest of the world as well offer less than a one percent savings rate which means you're actually still losing money over time but we do have other options to try and get us to this magical nirvana of like you know this 10 saving thingy and that is where investments come in so point number four is what is an investment and the answer is that an investment is something that puts money in your pocket for example let's say you buy a house for a hundred thousand pounds and you want to rent it out to people there are two ways that's an investment there are two ways you're making money from it firstly let's say you're charging some rent to the people living in your house let's say you're charging them 830 pounds a month that becomes 10 000 pounds a year and so every year you are making ten thousand pounds in rental income which is ten percent of what you originally paid for the house that means that in ten years time you'll have paid off the hundred thousand pounds that you put in because you're making 10k a year and beyond that every year you're just making ten 000 pounds in pure profit so that's pretty good but secondly it's an investment because the value of the house itself would probably rise over time in general there is a trend in most developed countries that house prices tend to rise over the long term and so your house will probably be worth more than a hundred thousand pounds in 10 years time and in fact in the uk historically in the past some people have said that house prices have doubled every 10 years so maybe your house is worth close to 200 000 pounds and so you've made money off of the rental income but you've also made money off of the capital gains which is what we call it when an asset increases in value over time but the problem is that buying a house is a little bit annoying you need to have quite a large amount of money for a deposit you need to get a mortgage you need to actually have the house you need to sort out the rental management rent it out to people all that kind of stuff if only there were a way of investing without a having a large amount of money to start with and be without having to put that much effort into managing the asset as well and that brings us on to investing in shares and for me basically 100 of my investment portfolio is entirely shares i have a tiny percentage in bitcoin and i own this house but i don't consider this house an investment uh i'll talk about that in a different video therefore point number five is what are shares and how do they work so buying shares is probably as close as we're ever going to get to this magical savings account that just returns some amount of money each year and the idea is that when you buy a share you are buying a part ownership of the company that you've got to share in for example let's say that apple have a particularly profitable year because lots of people have bought ipads as per my recommendations and because apple are feeling kind they are choosing to pay out a dividend to their shareholders so for example they might say that they're going to issue a dividend of a million pounds and that's going to be split evenly amongst whoever owns shares in apple based on how many shares they own so for example if you happen to own one percent of apple you would get one percent of that dividend that they've issued so one percent of a million pounds which is ten thousand pounds obviously no one watching this actually owns one percent of apple unless tim cook you're watching i don't even know if you earned that much because that would make you an extremely rich person because apple is a very valuable company but that's basically how the dividend thing works a company decides to issue a dividend as a way of returning some of its profit back to the people who have invested in the company and therefore you make money through dividends the second way of making money from shares is sort of like with houses in that you get the capital gains over time so for example let's say you bought 10 shares in apple in 2010.

at the time those shares were selling for nine dollars each so you spent 90 on buying 10 shares in apple as of october 2020 apple shares sell for a hundred and fifteen dollars so your ten shares are now worth one thousand one hundred and fifty dollars despite the fact that you only paid ninety dollars for them ten years ago okay so we've talked about what a share is and how you make money from them and at this point you've probably got a few questions like how much money you need to get started or how risky is buying shares in a company and i promise we're going to get to that but point number six is how the hell do you buy a share in the first place and this is where it can kind of get complicated because it's not as simple as going on apple. com forward slash buy and just buying a share in apple it doesn't quite work like that instead you have to go through what's called a broker and back in the day a stock broker was a physical person usually a dude who you would call on the phone and say hey bob i want to place an order for some shares in apple and then bob would type some stuff into his computer or place like a paper order and then you would own shares in apple thankfully these days we don't really have to talk to bob because there's loads and loads of online brokers instead and so you make an account on an online broker and then you can buy shares in a company through that a bit annoyingly every different country has their own different brokers that operate in that country because to be an online broker in a country you have to abide by like a zillion different laws and so in the uk the system is different to the us which is different to canada and germany and so on in the uk for example most banks do have their own online brokerage type things so with most bank accounts you can also open an investment account with them and then invest online but usually the interface is a bit clunky it's a bit old-fashioned and so you're usually better off going with an online broker in the uk the two that i use are charles stanley direct and vanguard but before we get ahead of ourselves and make an account on vanguard or whatever we need to understand a few more things and so question number seven is how the hell do i decide which shares to buy and the easy answer to that is that you actually don't want to figure out which chairs to buy you do not want to buy individual shares and i'm going to tell you a little bit more about that once i've had a haircut so see you shortly all right so new hair i've got my invisalign braces on so i'm going to sound a little bit different but where were we oh yeah we were talking about why it's not a good idea generally speaking to invest in individual stocks and i'm going to do a video about this some other time but essentially the issue with investing in individual stocks is it's kind of risky like yes if you invest in something like apple chances are it's going to be around 10 years from now but historically there have been quite a few companies that people were like oh my god this is amazing this is the thing to invest in and then that company went bust so you're automatically exposing yourself to more risk if you're investing in individual stuff also in general like it's easy to say hey amazon grew 10x in the last 10 years therefore it's going to continue to do the same for the next 10 years but that's trying to predict the future and the past is no real indication of future performance and so the advice that most people would give for beginners is that you should not invest in individual stocks you should invest in index funds and this is what graeme stefan one of my favorite youtubers also says as well he says that index funds are the best safest and easiest long-term investment strategy for most people which begs the question point number eight what the hell is an index fund so there's basically two bits to understand here there's the index bit and the fun bit let's start with the fun bit and a fund is basically where investors will pool their money so multiple investors would invest in the same fund and then that fund would have a fund manager and the fund manager decides which companies the fund is going to invest in for example let's say i were managing a fund and i called it gringotts and let's say 100 people from my audience decided to invest in my gringotts fund i as the fund manager can say okay the gringotts fund now that we have 100 people's money let's say it's 100 million so everyone's invested 1 million each i've now got 100 million i'm gonna put 20 of that in apple 10 in facebook 10 and amazon 10 and tesla 10 in netflix 10 in johnson johnson all of that sort of stuff and so you the investor don't have to worry about this because you trust me and my funded gringotts to manage your money and as you know the fund performs well because the prices of these these stocks and shares increases you get the returns and i take a one or two percent management fee so i make a load of money because i'm you know earning one or two percent off of this 100 million that i'm managing and you're not worrying about having to pick stocks yourself you trust me as a seasoned professional to do to do that for you so that's what a fund is now the index bit refers to a stock market index and so a stock market index would for example be the ftse 100 which is the 100 biggest companies in the uk or the s p 500 which is the 500 biggest companies in the us or the nasdaq or the dao and these are all different in indices of the stock market and if we use the s p 500 for example these are the components of the s p 500 so we said it's the 500 biggest companies in the us so number one is apple and apple makes up 6. 5 percent of the s p microsoft makes up 5.

5 amazon makes up 4. 7 facebook is 2. 2 alphabet which is google makes 1.

5 and 1. 5 so about 3 of the total s p 500 and essentially we've got these 500 companies if you go all the way down oh ralph lauren is 496 but chances are you've not really heard of many of the other ones at the bottom of the list but chances are you've heard of most of the companies towards the top of the list so the s p 500 is an index of the u. s stock market and if you look at the performance as a whole of the s p 500 you get a general idea of how the u.

s economy is going as a whole so this is currently what the s p 500 looks like and if we do a five-year time horizon in fact let's go max so you can see you know the s p 500 started in 1980 and since that time this is what the u. s stock market has been doing so you know as you can see there is a general trend upwards but for example in 2000 there was a bit of a crash in 2008 famously there was a bit of a crash and earlier this year when corona was first starting to be a thing that was a bit of a crash but then the market basically immediately recovered after that okay so we know what our fund is ie a way of pooling money and we know what an index is like something like the s p 500 when you combine those you get an index fund which is a fund that automatically invests in all of the companies in the index and so with me for example basically all of my investments all of my money is in the s p 500 which effectively means that 6. 5 percent of my investments are in apple 5.

5 in microsoft 4. 7 in amazon 2. 2 in facebook three percent in google 1.

5 in berkshire hathaway and so on so why is this good well it's good for a lot of reasons so firstly index funds are really really easy to invest in a big problem that beginners have to investing it's like well how the hell do i know which company to invest in how do i read a balance sheet how do i do any of this stuff if you invest in an index fund you actually don't have to worry about any of that secondly index funds give you a decent amount of diversification there are all sorts of companies in the s p 500 so you're not entirely reliant on the tech sector or the oil sector or the clothing sector or anything to make the bulk of your money you are very nicely diversified across all these us companies thirdly index funds have very low fees so because it's not a real person who is deciding you know what to invest in and doing all this research and trying to make loads of money is essentially a computer algorithm that automatically allocates your money uh you know based on the components of the index fund the fees for those are really low and one of the main things about investing for the long term is that even a slight increase in your fees it's going to massively impact your financial upside and so for example an index fund with a 0. 1 fee is so much better for you than an actively managed fund where a fund manager is charging you even one percent because the long-term difference between 0. 1 fees and 1 fee is sort of absolutely astronomical over the long term and finally if you look historically and you know technically historical performance is not the same thing as future performance but if you look historically a very few funds have managed to actually consistently beat the market i.

e outperform the index and in fact someone like warren buffett famously says that if you gave him a hundred thousand pounds and asked him to invest it right now he would just invest in an index fund like the s p 500 and in fact in 2008 warren buffett challenged the hedge fund industry to try and beat the market he said that hedge funds are a bit pointless because they charge way too high fees and they don't actually get the sort of returns they claim to get and so he set up this 10-year bet which this company called protege partners llc accepted where buffett said that he was going to bet that the index fund outperformed the actively managed fund and he ended up winning that bet and sort of gave lots of money to charity or something like that but that just sort of goes to show that it's really hard to beat the market with an actively managed fund basically no one can predict what the market is going to do in the future and therefore if you hit your ride on an index i. e you're gambling on the entire market rather than thinking you know what i've got some kind of amazing insight that i'll know exactly which 10 stocks to pick that are going to beat the market you might as well hitch a ride with the whole market rather than individual stocks okay so we've sorted out the problem of which stocks to invest in by completely circumventing the problem and instead just investing in index funds the next big question people usually have about investing in stocks and shares is the amount of risk and that brings us to point number nine and the argument usually goes as follows that hey okay cool this investing in stocks and share stuff sounds kind of interesting but my uncle tom cobley invested lots of money in the stock market and he lost a load of money and my parents have told me that investing in the stock market is a really risky thing and i shouldn't do it and i should instead invest in real estate because real estate is safe that is usually the sort of thing the the sort of idea that people have about investing in stocks and naturally there is the anxiety of what if i lose all my money so let's talk about that now so if we take a step back the only way to lose money in anything is if you buy a thing and then you sell it for less than you actually bought it like let's say you bought a house for 300 000 pounds and then brexit happens the next day and house prices plummet and now your house is only worth 250 000 at that point if you decide to sell your house then yes you are losing money and you've lost 50 000 pounds equally the only way to really lose money in stocks is if you buy a stock at a certain price and then you sell it for less than that price so for example let's say you bought shares in apple on the 18th of february 2020 and let's say you bought one share which at the time was 79. 75 and because this is your first time investing you keep on looking at the price of the apple stock because every day you're thinking have i made money haven't made money and really annoyingly for you you see that over the next kind of few days a few weeks apple stock is actually going down and then on the 18th of march 2020 you decide screw it i'm going to sell my my one share in apple because i don't want to lose all my money and you sell it for a measly price of 61.

67 and so you technically lost 18 because you bought it at 79 in february and you sold it for 61 in march then you think damn i've lost 20 of my investment this stock market thing is bs i'm never going to invest in the stock market again and you call it a day and this would be a very bad thing to do because for example if we look at apple stock price in march it was 57. 31 but if you just held on to your one apple st apple share in that time what what is it today it's the 8th of october apple is now trading at 114. 96 so if you just held on for a few months you would have actually made a lot of money you would have bought it at 79 and within i don't know eight months it would now be worth 115 dollars that's a pretty good game and so the real lesson here is that when you're investing in stocks and shares and also when you're investing in real estate these are long-term investments ideally you shouldn't be putting any money into stocks and shares that you need to access within the next five years and actually a lot of people will extend that to 10 years and it's exactly like that with house prices it's like if you buy a house as an investment and then the houses house prices go down it would be completely stupid of you to sell the house unless you are absolutely desperate for the money because something major has happened and instead if you just held on to the house then you would have made more money in the long run because in the long term house prices always go up and in the long term basically the stock market always goes up and that's a bit of a it can be a controversial statement it is true but i'm gonna make a video at some other point explaining why it's true but for now take my word for it that over the long term the stock market always goes up but having said that again this is a long-term thing and so for example if we look at the s p 500 and look at how it was in 2008 at the financial crash right in 2007 it's 1500 you know per bit of the s p 500 and then the crash happens and then by what is it january to february 2009 it's down to 735 so basically 50 of the value has been wiped off of the s p 500 now if you bought it in 2007 and you saw it you know crashing and crashing and crashing and then you sold when it was 800 now you've lost a lot of money because you've bought high and you've sold low but if you just held on it took so you know let's see june 2007 it's at 1500 it takes about up until 2013 so it takes about five years for it to get back to its normal level and even if you'd invested like just before the crash and then your investment plummeted by 50 if you were just held on you'd have bought in at the s p 500 1500 and right now it would be 3445 so since 2008 2007 when you first invested over the last 13 years the s p 500 has more than doubled so you would have more than doubled your money provided you did not panic sell when the market crashed now hypothetically could the market crash down to zero and therefore you will actually lose all your money yes it could but if the u.

s stock market crashed literally to zero i. e all top 500 companies including apple google microsoft facebook like literally every company in the top in in the s p 500 all of those got destroyed overnight and the stock market market crashed to zero the world would be in some sort of mega apocalypse and you'd have a lot more serious problems to worry about rather than the value of your portfolio of stock market industry indices on vanguard in that scenario in that doomsday scenario money would stop meaning anything and you'd be using money to wipe your bum because money has no value because the stock market is completely crashed it's it's basically unfathomable that the global economy could be so completely wrecked such that every single company goes down to zero in my opinion and again you know i'm not a financial advisor this is technically not financial advice whatever that means but in my opinion it's unrealistic to think that if i put my money in stocks and shares i could lose all of it there's basically no way you're ever going to lose all of it provided you're diversified if you invested in i don't know myspace in 2000 and whatever it was and then myspace crashes and then you've lost all your money because you know they have no money but if you invest in the top 500 companies in the us or you know the top 500 companies in the world or the top 100 companies in the uk it is so vanishingly unlikely that you'll ever lose your money that i don't think that is a risk that we should even be thinking about so realistic worst case scenario yes investing in the stock market is risky in the short term but if you're investing in the long term the market will always go up and you will always end up more making more money in the long run provided you don't have to take money out at inopportune times okay so at this point we've established that investing in stocks is very good and investing in index funds is a relatively safe way of doing this the next question is usually when should you get started like how old do you have to be is it is it ever too soon to start is it ever too late to start and here the answer is pretty simple and basically all investment advice agrees with me on this front there's a very good website called the motleyfool fool. com and they have a nice article explaining this basically you should start investing as soon as possible it doesn't matter how old you are it doesn't matter how young you are the earlier you start investing the better there are three caveats though for like sensible financial advice firstly you want to make sure that all of your high interest i.

e credit card debt is paid off because when it comes to compounding even though gains compound losses compound as well and so if you've got like a six percent credit card debt that's eating into your bottom line every single month you want to pay that off as soon as possible point number two is that you want to make some sort of emergency fund and people usually say that your emergency fund should have in cash basically three to six months of living expenses so that if you lose your job or if you if you're hit with some kind of incredible medical emergency and you're not in the uk where medical care is free or you're in the u. s or something like that then you've got money to do that and you don't have to take money out of your investments and caveat number three is that you don't want to put any money into stocks that you think you might need to use in the next three to five years so let's say you're 24 and you've just landed your first job and you're thinking of getting a mortgage and buying a house and you need money for the deposit do not put that money into the s p 500 or into any kind of stocks and shares because no one can time the market and no one knows whether we might you know there might be a market crash tomorrow all we know is that in the long term the stock market goes up but if you need to buy a house next year there is absolutely no guarantee that that money will still be worth exactly the same or worth more this time next year so provided those two conditions i'm at like firstly you have no high interest credit card debt and secondly you've already got your emergency fund and thirdly you're not planning to you're gonna have a major expense in the next few years at that point and you know absolutely everyone should be investing something into the stock market in my opinion whether you're 12 or 20 or 21 or 22 or 50. it doesn't matter and as they say on the multiple there is almost no way your future self will regret making the decision to invest and as you'll know at this point this is because of compounding the more time you leave your money in the stock market the more it compounds and there is a huge difference there's like lots of interesting numbers about this on the internet that people have calculated that if you start investing at the age of 20 versus if you start investing at the age of 25 or 30 it makes such a huge difference to your bottom line that basically as soon as you watch this video and hear about investing you should start investing provided those three conditions that we talked about are met all right so we're nearly there now we're 0.

11 out of 12 where we've said okay you sold me on this idea of investing in index funds all of these three conditions i'm at i don't have a high interest credit card debt i've got my emergency fund or i'm a student and therefore my parents are in my emergency fund and i'm not planning to buy a house or a big thing in the next three years the next question is usually how much money do i need to get started with investing and i know a lot of students watch my channel and i had a lot of comments on instagram saying i'm 14 years old and i don't have any money how do i get started with investing and the answer here is again quite easy basically start with whatever you can so some of these websites and some of these apps that you can use to invest in stock market indices you can start with as little as five dollars or ten pounds depending on the website you might need to start with a hundred pounds or a thousand pounds you can research this and it kind of depends on which country you're in but basically you want to start investing as soon as possible and it doesn't matter if it's a tiny amount of money to begin with firstly it's it's useful to invest small small amounts of money because compounding is always good but secondly and more importantly the sooner you start investing the sooner it becomes a habit and so for me for example i started investing in 2015 i knew absolutely nothing about it before then but i really wish i'd started investing in like 2009 when i first had my first part-time job because a that would have encouraged good financial habits within me i would have kept aside maybe 10 or 20 from the top line to put into my investments secondly it would have meant that investing became a habit and so i would have known about the fact that stock market indices exist i would have done the research i would have watched videos like this although these weren't really a thing in 2009 and what i'm really annoyed about with myself is i started making actual money in like 2012 when my first business started to do very well and between 2012 and 2015 i did not invest any money just because i didn't know that you could and i didn't know how and i always kind of thought that huh i'm making money now it's just sort of sitting in my bank account and i know that inflation's a thing so i know my money's losing value but i just didn't think about investing and didn't realize how easy it is and that it's a thing and so i really wish i'd started investing my real money in 2012 but the only way i would have done that is if i had started investing from 2009 when i first started making i don't know six pounds an hour during my part-time job so again and i can't state this emphatically enough like it doesn't matter if all you have is a small amount to invest even if it's one pound even if it's 10p the process of making the account and researching online stock brokers in your country and figuring out how to actually do this stuff is like the most valuable thing that you can be doing with your time immediately after watching this video and finally point number 12 is okay i'm sold i'm i've got 100 pounds here and i want to put it inside a stock market index fund how do i actually do that and the answer here is you want to find an online broker so this will vary massively depending on which country you're in because these online brokers as i said have like zillions of laws they have to comply with and financial regulations and all this stuff in the u. s most people that i know use vanguard as well and my favorite blogger mr money mustache recommends that as well although in the us there are also other services like betterment which i've got a few friends who use that as well again depending on which country you're in like literally all you have to do is google the phrase best online broker germany or best online broker pakistan or best online broker india or whichever country you're in and you'll find something read some reviews basically the thing you're looking for is you want to be able to invest in index funds and you want the fees to be as low as possible i think charles stanley direct the fee is 0. 25 which was the lowest at the time when i made my account and i think is still pretty competitive so you want the fee to be like a really really really small fraction of a percentage then once you've made your account and verified your identity and gone through all the hoops and stuff which you sometimes takes a few days and they send you a letter in the post to verify your address like depending on what the regulations are once you've done that then you can start just putting money in here and there and all the friends that i've spoken to about this stuff over the last like four years since i first started knowing about investing in things they have all started making accounts and sort of making these uh investment accounts for themselves uh for the first few weeks they all sort of compulsively check their phones to see what the stock market is doing but then very quickly you realize that actually i'm investing for the long term here i actually don't give a toss what the stock market is doing in the short term i'm gonna check my port like i check my portfolio once every six months just because sometimes i'm curious i don't even bother looking at it this is very much a set it and forget it strategy you're investing for the long term your money will magically grow over time provided you don't touch it and think oh crap stock market's going down a bit i'm gonna take my money because i can't handle these losses there's loads more to say about investing in finance but hopefully this was a reasonably concise not very concise this is gonna be a long video but oh well hopefully this was a reasonable introduction on how to get started with investing in index funds if you have more questions about exactly what to do or anything else about money do leave a comment in the video description area thing i'm still trying to think of a name for this series i was thinking i posted on instagram there were a few options money talks was quite a popular one but that's already a film one that i really liked was penny syllan think of michael the series penny selling that was kind of cool a lot of people said like finance she ali financially because my name's ellie get it financially a few different options let me know what you think if you have any ideas for what this entire series about money and stuff should be called and final piece of advice if you're in the uk uh if you're in the uk and you're just getting started with investing basically go on a hargreaves landsdowne and make a lifetime iso the lifetime isa is a very good deal you can read more about it on moneysavingexpert.