Tonight I am up because I have a cold and/or allergies and can't breathe very easily. I suppose I may also be up because I spent my day sitting in the car and then at work instead of moving about as I have been during my vacation. Working from home certainly does have its unseen perks.
I've been thinking about financial education and how I lack what are considered the basics. Here is a Wall Street Journal article about how most Americans are in a similar situation. It is a serious oversight in our education system that there is no curriculum for building basic financial knowledge. Aspects of this stuff should really be taught throughout K-12. One need simply look to people's ignorance of financial basics compounded with stupid human nature to see how the disastrous tech and housing bubbles happened.
Getting back to what should be fundamental knowledge as stated in the article, it says that it is better to be invested in a mutual fund than in one stock. Ok. I get that it is better to diversify and mutual funds are a good way of doing that without you, the earner of your money putting time into research. Over time, diversified funds would be less volatile than a single stock. But then, with so many types of funds, how can one evaluate them? I see articles like this that show me money fund managers don't seem to be more responsible than an average investor and they want to blame the company for presenting an optimistic outlook. For crying out loud, these are pension funds. What are they doing investing so heavily in a highly speculative stock like Facebook? If these mutual funds are what average Americans should be investing to protect themselves from their own bad judgement we might as well not even bring home a paycheck.
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