Hey friends,

A 40 page investing starter guide included, and a problem with social media.

Take care,

Eddie

Together with my new friend, Claude, I put together a 40 page investor starter guide and am sharing here with subscribers. This should be helpful for everyone new to investing but perhaps also for those of you more experienced to reference now and then.

Inside you'll find my Lion vs Gazelle framework for thinking about money, the math behind compound interest, a breakdown of index ETFs, how to open a brokerage and make your first trade.

As mentioned before, I don’t use AI to write this journal - I actually enjoy writing. But I do find AI, particularily Claude, extremely valuable to create large works like this guide, research, and develop the SmartMoneyKids app (what I am accomplishing with SMK is truly incredible, more on this in next week’s email).

In this case, the guide was created by feeding Claude the entire Goodwill Investing Journal Archive (117 issues and over 120,000 words), and all the content from the Simply Investing Masterclass (created three years ago btw, before AI as we know it existed).

👉 get the (free) guide or share this email with someone who might want to download it.

Love hate for social media.

On the one hand, if you curate your feed, follow friends and people that lift you up, educate you, entertain you in a positive way, or run a business that supplies products and services that help others, that’s great.

On the other hand, the algorithm will in many instances override your follow-set and push you things it essentially knows you’ll disagree with because the emotion of disagreement (especially when it comes to politics) is sometimes more valuable than the contrary, because it drives engagement.

So last week I posted a video when the S&P500 hit an all time high. The war in Iran is ongoing but there was an interim cease fire and the markets have seemed to look through the carnage, which is common in the stock market world.

In no way did I suggest my feelings positive or negative about the war itself or the human casualties or the question of legality. I was neither here nor there.

I get on social media to help people understand how to invest, and part of the investing world is that markets love to climb walls of uncertainty.

This is why you’ll often hear the old adage “this is the most hated bull market in history” - because there will always be someone crying wolf about it in some way or another.

In return for my attempt to educate and help others about how to set aside emotions when it comes to investing, “jon” and “manitoba michael” had these terse words for me in response:

This is my distaste for the social media algorithm - instead of the goal of inspiring people to earn more, spend less, and invest the difference, regardless of the headline of the day - it often attracts people that entirely disagree and worse as they obfuscate the message and turn it into politics such that they become pissed off enough to essentially call me a piece of shit.

Don’t worry, my feelings aren’t hurt.

To Manitoba Michael’s comment: sorry michael, there are wars and human conflict and starvation occuring all over the world all the time; indeed, this is sad. But the stock market is just a way to earn money. Do you stop going to work to earn money? No, didn’t think so. Don’t blame the rest of us that use the Stock Market properly as a way to increase our financial well being.

What are your thoughts? Did you stop investing because of the war? Am I a peice of ___?

"Keep calm and carry on"

—1939 British wartime slogan designed to boost morale

If you could go back and tell your 20 year old self something, what would it be?

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