Episode 381: Investing 101

This is the Rational Reminder podcast, a weekly reality check on sensible investing and financial decision making from three Canadians. We're hosted by me, Benjamin Felix, chief investment officer, Dan Bordelotti, portfolio manager, and Ben Wilson, head of MMA and portfolio manager at PWL Capital. Alright. Get to do another episode with all three of us. Looking forward to it. Yeah. It's fun bringing on different PWL folks to episodes. It's always a different dynamic. It's kinda neat. I had a interaction with someone recently who was all excited to come up and tell me that they've been listening to this podcast and that that's encouraged them to move away from their banks high fee mutual funds and start investing in ETFs. So I'm, like, listening to them. Like, oh, that's great. That's great. As we continued talking, I realized that there were still a lot of blanks that needed to be filled in, which makes sense. Like, if you listen to 20 Rational Reminder podcast episodes, you might not actually come away equipped to implement the general ideas that we talk about on the podcast. You'll get all these bits and pieces and you might get sort of very, very broad strokes, but that interaction kinda got me thinking back to when I first started working at PWL with Cameron almost twelve years ago now. One of my first big, like, take the training wheels off assignments after I've been working with Cameron for a bit was giving this forty five minute investing one zero one talk to employees at a local tech company, which is like I was super nervous, whatever. I did a bunch of preparation, spent the whole weekend, like, recording myself and testing out the presentation to try and make it good. It's probably still terrible. But I did get good feedback. It was good enough that I got invited to come back every month and it became a thing. Be this kind of packed boardroom once a month of people who were all excited to learn how to invest. People would, like, hear about how good the talk was, and so everyone would be all excited. It was cool. In a lot of ways, those talks were sort of a precursor to this podcast and to my YouTube channel. I thought it'd be useful to do an episode that covers that basic investing one zero one information. Now that talk did cover other stuff too. It covered Canadian account types and when to use each type of account and that kind of stuff. But this will just focus on the investing aspect here. The intention is for this to be, like, a jumping off point for someone, like, the person that I spoke with recently who's new to investing and learning about this stuff so they can listen to this and really have a good foundation. And then also, I think it's hopefully useful as a reaffirmation of important principles for even seasoned investors. …