It remains to be seen what's going to happen over the next few decades. It's entirely possible that it'll all get wiped out (the substantial gains, not all value).

While the market was a very good bet for the last 50yrs, its not a guarantee.

Especially in the current climate you should be fully aware that it's significantly more risky to start investing today vs 10 yrs ago.

(Riskier doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad idea. It should just be a conscious decision under the acknowledgement that the upward trajectory is not certain. Especially in current political climate - and that "hodl"-ing doesn't necessarily mean you'll eventually get back what you invested, if a downturn manifests)

All the choices you have to make can be very daunting. I was very lucky to have a colleague at work who gave a talk at the right time in my life with some plausibly right choices.

In the UK I started out using https://www.charles-stanley-direct.co.uk/ and later moved to https://www.ii.co.uk/. I initially invested in https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/investments/vanguard-life... which is a fund which is available on a bunch of platforms. These days I recommend https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/ to some people as an easy and low fee way of getting started with Vanguard funds in the UK.

I don't know what the best trading platform options are in Switzerland - it looks like all of the ones I'm familiar with are not relevant to you.

The key thing is you want to minimise two types of fees: * Platform fees * Product fees

For example Charles Stanley Direct charge 0.3% platform fees, and https://www.vanguardinvestor.co.uk/ charges 0.15% platform fees.

Vanguard LifeStrategy® 100% Equity Fund charges 0.22%.

The bottom line is that there are lots of good choices, and the main thing is to make a choice and get started. You can always optimise/improve your choices later.

My understanding is that, if the market generally continues on the rate of return it's averaged throughout its history (that is, if you're not a doomer), then the single most important thing is showing up to play.

People who try to time the market or wait for a perfect time or pick the exact right blend of stocks generally don't do as well as people who pick a boring index or mutual fund and forget about it for 40 years.

Don't know about Switzerland, but most US brokers offer some kind of "target retirement date" fund, which automatically shifts from higher-risk assets to lower-risk as you approach retirement. VFIFX is one from Vanguard, for example. Pick one you like (just ask a coworker what they use, if you pick a big-name brokerage it really doesn't matter which one), shove your extra cash into it regularly, and forget about it. Then cross your fingers the market isn't actively crashing when you plan to retire (this is unlikely, but it does happen a couple times per century).

If you start to get into truly high wealth amounts (USD$500K+) you might consider hiring a wealth advisor, who can probably do better even after accounting for their fees.

I'm also in Switzerland, currently my approach is to invest in Vanguard VOO (tracks the S&P500) via Interactive Brokers. There is a way to setup auto transfer and invest every month

As a caveat your money will be in dollars and in American companies, which might not be what you want, but it's worked for me well so far

Read "The Four Pillars of Investing". Basically index funds, diverse whole markets, leave it alone and watch it grow.

I did this at 22, and that seed money has grown a ton.

Your bank probably has an investment platform, you can just use it, it doesn't matter. My portfolio is 70% XEQT 30% CASH.TO—don't bother with anything else.

For the plattforms, that also blocked me for a while. But it is easy now. You just get one account at a platform that offers a free broker account and supports buying the etf you want without extra fees.

Typical options in Europe: Trade Republic, scalable, Consors Bank.

Then the usual: Around 10K where you can access it directly, a small amount in an investment with percentage (scalable and trade republic both offer that, limit there is or was 50k), rest in one broad ETF like one that follows the FTSE all world (vanguard or invesco offer that, one is bigger, the other asks for less fees).

No affiliation, and I dont know whether being outside of the EU changes things. And yes, there is the risk that we are in a huge bubble now and it popping would at first significantly lower the money put into the etf. But you certainly do have access to vanguard etc.

Have a look now and at the latest this weekend you have this solved, hopefully forever.

It is one of the most common reasons people invest though so it's entirely relevant

I don't think you even need to wear a tinfoil hat to reach this conclusion. Knowing about the origins of the modern outcome-based education systems in the West (we borrowed from the Prussian education system which replaced the classical education system based on the Trivium and Quadrivium) I would assert that your claim is spot on.

Probably, because everything would collapse if everyone was an "investor" and fewer people did actual work to keep the world going.

How couldn't it be? If the finance industry made things clearer then more people would benefit from it.

While I certainly had the _concept_ of compound interest taught to me at some abstract mathematical level, the application to real life practical financial scenarios was definitely not done [1]. Economics as a whole was an optional subject.

I think schools and curriculums could do a whole lot better in representing this important facet of life. More broadly, I often feel that "applying all that math you've learned to real things" is a subject that could be taught.

[1] Seriously, having applied math questions like "Johnny earns X per year, with a cost of living of Y. Assuming inflation of Z and average yearly returns of R, what percentage should he be putting away, starting at age 25, so that at age 50 he essentially gets the equivalent of his own salary each month?" would likely cause some lightbulbs to go off in the kids' heads.

Where do you send your money to invest? What is a stock? This is the type of information missing.

> that's most adults' level of financial literacy too.

The vicious cycle! We have to start somewhere..

The Rothschild bloodline is responsible for helping to orchestrate every modern war since the Napoleonic Wars, by loaning money to both sides of the conflict. Major General Smedley D. Butler wrote about this in War is a Racket. I personally, don't give a damn what Mr. Rothschild would be fine with, or the rest of his disgusting family.

Narrative: You are teaching about the intricacies of finance and the stock market.

Reality: Dump everything into Nvidia / S&P 500. Number go up.

Different as in much worse? It's not that you're wrong but, just to be clear, the problem with investing as the only place to keep up with inflation means that markets will detach from value, and become a giant Ponzi scheme.

There is no such thing as "growth detached from value" lasting forever.

What is going to happen specifically when billionaires decide the show is over?

That's the first thing I thought when opening it. Sure looks like a "make me an app" response that Claude would output.

I mean nothing wrong with that, I needed a silly calculator thingimabob too yesterday (for some CRC checks on a piece of text) and Claude quickly cooked something up for me.

But I'm not writing blog posts about it, releasing the tool in the wild, and claiming I wrote it. Blegh.

I have a "plain Python file" that only imports TensorFlow.

In my opinion this can't even be labeled as a single HTML file, because it loads external files to complete the app. But back to the question, a "plain html" file doesn't load any external resources and is usually semantically described.

When people talk about a single plain HTML file, it implies that all markup and code is contained in the file and no libraries are being used

If you can run the app without any other files and without internet then it’s plain and a single file.

It’s just a static hosted page they run on the family iPad. There’s no server at all!

I should really clean it up and make a blog post about it. But wanted to share it here because this project reminded me of it :)

My decade in the making habit of only reading HN comments is finally paying off. Nowadays when I do randomly skim an article it's almost always slop.

py = Paraguay, for those like me who didn't know

stay vigilant Lebanon was granting 12% rates and everything was fine and “covered” by central bank until it wasnt

> 11% is a safe interest rate on my country

11% may be the safest bond you have access to, but that doesn't make it _safe_ in absolute terms.

the issue is your local currency will lose its value over time

And can they take loans with negotiated interest rates and lock-in periods? Or invest in more risky products such as derivatives with a corresponding chance to lose all money? So much potential... ;)

The screen is the biggest consumer imho.

I mean of course I understand that the phone can be removed by the suction mount, but thus also defeats the idle infotainment concept.

Also seen screen burn in...

open to adoptions :P

That's not just crypto :)

Can they pull money out? I don't see any place to update the balance up or down as the kids want to add money into the piggy bank or withdraw it.

That comment is spot on and in my opinion completely in the spirit of the post. It is all about number go up and competition.

What is the point of your comment, actually? At least GP is talking about children psychology and is totally on topic. Wanting a faster profit then getting scammed or lose money in a crash market is also part of the learning.

It's for the lolz. I laughed and upvoted, just imagining my kids someday lecturing me on crypto. Then I thought about creating a bubble for them and then saying to their faces "Annnnnd it's gone."

In what way are you doing that? Not that I disagree just curious how

If he's not able to also provide them with a sizeable initial capital, this lesson is also completely irrelevant. No one becomes really wealthy by investing savings off their modest salary.

It's better to invest in assets though than just the stock market. The wealthy build wealth by borrowing and buying assets like real estate. This ways makes it easier to avoid income taxes and capital gains taxes and you also get massive tax deductions for asset deprecation that you can use to offset most or all of what income it does provide.

Or they could work for money when they are old enough to

>Done right this could set them up for life and make them millionaires with virtually no effort by the age of 30

This seems hyperbolic. Given that money doubles in roughly 10 years at a 10% rate of return, if kiddos are 10 years old they get two doublings by 30. To be a millionaire by 30 requires a present value investment of $250k per child.

Investing isn't bad? Sure we all do it but how isn't it bad?

> How is teaching your kids to invest some portion of their money

That’s not what the article says. I explicitly quoted the relevant part. It’s not “a portion of their money”, this is not money they had lying around in an envelope that grandma gave them. This father is incentivising the kids to not get what they want for their birthday and instead ask for money with which they’ll do nothing but unrealistically watch grow for a period of time. That’s not a good core memory, no one looks fondly on “that birthday I had as a kid where I got nothing but a number on an app stated growing at a snail pace”.

> doesn't suddenly make investing bad.

That’s not the argument. Nowhere in my comment does it say investing is bad.

> This is such a wild take.

Any take is wild when you blatantly misrepresent it. Don’t straw man.

> This is a super reactive take speaking from no experience whatsoever.

You have no idea what my experience is, please don’t assume.

> My own parents did something like this for us when we were in elementary/middle school and it taught me restraint in spending, not the opposite.

I’m glad it worked out for you. Truly. But don’t assume your experience is universal, because I unfortunately know for a fact it’s not. Also, the argument isn’t that it causes unrestrained spending, that’s not what financial dude bros are about. Excessive restraint in spending can also lead to unhappiness and an unhealthy attachment to money.

Source: "Since 1957, the S&P 500 has delivered an average annual return of 10.54%, but when adjusted for inflation, the real return drops to 6.68%."

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/042415/what-average...

And on top of that there's huuuuuuuuge variance over time. You have to scale in and out of the market over a very long time to actually get the ~7%. Any one time investment is just a straight up gamble. It's only in aggregate over a long time that you get something somewhat reliable. But then the numbers aren't that impressive. I understand why people are so fond of buying bigger or second houses instead. It's a shame because it drives up the price of housing making it less available for our young. We're basically saving for our future by robbing the future of our young. It's pretty dark to be honest.

I remember watching the statements for my savings account as a kid and getting like 2¢ of interest per statement and thinking… that’s it?? Why bother??

It's less surprising Paraguay has 14.5% interest rates when you realise there's persistent 4% inflation (spiking to 11% in 2022).

Effective interest rate is something like 7-10%

Those two aren't similar. Brazil's annual inflation is 4-5%, you get 10% real return. South Sudan is 74% against your 15% return: you lose money.

So, not really.

People keep repeating this. But why is it people’s nature. Maybe it is learned, because everyone keeps repeating this phrase!

My mistake, it's just such a common trope in the US I didn't realize it was a universal complaint. It is true for US incidentally, people generally don't remember it because a) the learning and real world practice are too far removed b) people often are poor with finances regardless of knowledge.