0. Demystified

We are flooded with investment advice - from newspapers, websites, TV, friends, consultants, financial advisers, work colleagues. The amount of uncertainty surrounding the markets adds a halo of a closed, secret club, which only insiders can decipher. When they do drop hints and give advice, they often act in their own interest, making it even more difficult to separate good advice from bad.

Don't you trust me?

The purpose of this blog is to demystify this world a bit, by choosing a topic once a week, explaining it and describing the impact it might have on your investments. Along the way, one of the most important lessons I learned is that simpler is often better. Einstein was famously said "Make every thing as simple as possible, but not simpler". In this blog I'll attempt to do just that.

A bit about myself: my background is with math and software engineering. Everything I know about investment I learned from my experience, from books and from applying common sense to what I hear from consultants, advisers and friends. I'm a rational investor - or at least trying to be one (more on that in a forthcoming blog.) I believe in a rational universe, even when it's governed by irrational people. For me, this means that there's a way to sort out the chaos of Wall Street and come up with a rational, logical, realistic plan that maximizes gains, minimizes risk, and, perhaps most importantly, takes as little time as possible from you and let you spend your time doing more fun stuff.

Along the way I plan to include math tidbits - I promise to keep them in check. Still, the basis of everything I try to do here is simple arithmetic, and sometimes it's important to go back to basics and see what the numbers tell us.

I hope you enjoy the journey. Let's begin!