Investing education from the ground up — foundations to advanced strategy, built in order so the back catalog stays binge-able from EP-001. We explain how things work and review the evidence; we never recommend specific products, tickers, or personal allocations.
8 episodes
You're scrolling an investing forum. One post says managed fund. The next says mutual fund. Then index fund, then ETF, all used as if they mean the same thing. Four products, or one product with four names? Here's the twist: two of those terms describe how you buy. The other describes what the fund is trying to do.
13 min
You're scrolling an investing forum. One post says managed fund. The next says mutual fund. Then index fund, then ETF, all used as if they mean the same thing. Four products, or one product with four names? Here's the twist: two of those terms describe how you buy. The other describes what the fund is trying to do.
Between 2022 and 2023, Australia's cash rate climbed from 0.1 to 4.35 per cent. Many investors who sold bonds early in that stretch locked in losses, even though the borrower was the government. How can the safest borrower in the country leave you worse off? And what does it have to do with price and yield moving in opposite directions?
When you press buy on a share-trading app, you haven't bought anything yet. Your tap is only a request, and what happens next explains a lot that looks odd: why a share has two prices instead of one, why you can end up paying a little more than the number you saw, and why the money doesn't move the moment you're told the trade is done. I'll also be clear about where the public sources run thin.
A share of stock looks like a simple number in an app. But underneath that number is a specific legal claim — one that puts shareholders last in the payment queue, limits their losses to exactly what they paid, and gives them enforceable rights that most retail investors rarely use. What that claim actually means, how shares get priced, and whether the casino critique holds up — that's what this episode is about.
There are only a small number of ways a financial investment can actually earn a return — and most people, including experienced investors, can't name them. This episode builds that map from first principles: what equities, bonds, property, and commodities actually are as economic relationships, why wrappers like ETFs and superannuation accounts are containers rather than asset classes, and where alternatives like infrastructure and crypto sit on a map that may not yet have a place for them.
Investing is full of promises: strong returns, minimal risk, the best of both worlds. The risk-return trade-off — one of finance's most durable principles — says those promises deserve hard scrutiny. But the academic evidence on whether the relationship actually holds in real markets is, by researchers' own description, elusive. This episode works through what the principle genuinely explains, where it breaks down, and what the word "risk" is quietly hiding.
Most people underestimate how wealth grows over time — and the research suggests the reason is cognitive, not financial. Human brains are wired for linear thinking, and compounding is a multiplicative process. That mismatch shapes one of the more counterintuitive questions in personal finance: does the age at which you start investing matter more than the amount you start with?
Your bank shows you a number every month — and that number is almost certainly not telling you the whole story. Not because anything is hidden, but because there's a gap between what your balance says and what your savings can actually buy. This episode is about that gap, how inflation creates it, why most people don't see it, and what the evidence says about what to do.