To the protesters yesterday, do you see that the protests had exactly zero impact?
The protests right now are a glorified meet and greet. Most of these folks have never protested before.
But all the pamphlets and people I met proved that we are organizing and spreading ideas. This is how it starts.
The ‘protest’ part of the protest is just marketing. The actual work is when you meet the local unions and shake hands with the local powers. And no better time to meet them than a ‘protest’
Everyone who actually went to the protest knows what I’m talking about. The speakers and such are whatever and just preaching to the choir, but important to draw crowds. The actual work gets done at the tables and booths on the side.
Go to the next protest. Organize. We have 3 years before the next Presidential election, we have 1 year before the next congressional election. The time is ticking and we need to get the grassroots process started. It takes a long time.
You’ve got equities, debt and derivatives.
Equities are ownership into shares. These are the simplest to understand. You own a share of a company and thus are entitled to a % of the profits (though most companies today choose 0% as their decision).
Debt means funding… debt. SLABs (student loan backed securities), MBS (mortgage backed securities), bonds (government debt), bank loans etc. etc. These are surprisingly complex in practice but perhaps easiest to understand. There’s lots of different details to debt (callable, puttable, tax free, convertible, coupons, notes, bills, bonds, I-bonds, EBonds, 10Y, 3M, overnight repos). But in all cases, you lend money to someone, and later they try to return it to you + a little extra.
Derivatives (usually options but there are many kinds) are new inventions that are more complex. Ignore these as they are very very complex.
That’s about it.
The general recommendation is to buy an ETF for equities and an ETF for Bonds. ETF is just a combination of simpler investments that you pay 0.04% to 2% a year for convenience.
VOO takes the 500 biggest companies in the USA (aka the S&P 500) and buys mostly the biggest company and a very little bit of #500.
BND is a similar idea except it’s a whole bunch of different debts from across the entire economy.
So buy some equities (mostly equities), some bonds, and leave some cash in a high yield savings account. Done.
Stocks (aka VOO) make the most money on the average, but also loses money the most often.
Bonds (aka BND) makes middle amount of money but rarely loses money.
Cash / savings accounts never lose money (except inflation). But makes very very little. It’s still worthwhile to keep necessarily amounts as cash and this you should always be considering how much cash to keep.