Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth
A very good investing book, somewhat similar to The Psychology of Money. It uses a lot of data and backtesting to convince readers.
The points I benefited from most:
Buy whenever you have money. Do not wait. Market timing is useless.
Do not buy individual stocks. Buy the broad market. Excess returns are unrealistic, and most likely cannot be achieved.
Real estate is not a good financial asset (housing returns are not as high as people imagine), but it has many other psychological and social benefits, such as a stable life.
Luck is too important in investing. The country and era you are born into determine the international environment after you reach adulthood. Also, returns in the final few years before retirement have a great impact on post-retirement returns and life.
Among assets, time is the most important. That is, “an inch of time is an inch of gold, but an inch of gold cannot buy an inch of time.”
When young, thinking about life and focusing on career are more important, especially because the first ten years are when income grows fastest. Investing becomes more important later. As Records of the Grand Historian: Biographies of the Money-Makers says: “Thus those with no wealth exert labor; those with a little wealth use ingenuity; those already wealthy compete for time. This is the general principle.” Without money, one can only sell labor; with a little money, one plays with cleverness; once already rich, one competes for time and profit. This is common sense.
A person is a growth stock when young and a value stock when old.