Principles of Long Term Investment Success (2024)

FAQs

What are the principles of successful investing? ›

Invest early

Starting early is one of the best ways to build wealth. Investing for a longer period of time is widely considered more effective than waiting until you have a large amount of savings or cash flow to invest. This is due to the power of compounding.

Know Your Time Horizon

Everyone has different investing goals: retirement, paying for your children's college education, building up a home down payment. No matter what the goal, the key to all long-term investing is understanding your time horizon, or how many years before you need the money.

The Five Principles are: quality, responsibility, mutuality, efficiency and freedom. “There's not a conversation I have with our associates and leaders, other corporations, government officials, or when I speak in public that doesn't weave in The Five Principles,” says Victoria Mars.

Long-term investors tend to balance the overall risk of their portfolios by owning a diversified mix of stocks, bonds and cash. Over longer periods, proper diversification can help to increase the likelihood that you'll have some assets that gain value even while others decline.

One way to determine whether a stock is a good long-term buy is to evaluate its past earnings and future earnings projections. If the company has a consistent history of rising earnings over a period of many years, it could be a good long-term buy.

What is the most common winning investment strategy? ›

Investment Strategy #1: Value Investing

They buy stocks that appear to be trading for less than what they're really worth. They're willing to bet that these stocks are being underestimated by the stock market and will bounce back over the long run. As those stocks grow in value, they turn a profit for the investor.

Popular investment philosophies include value investing, focusing on shares that the investor believes are fundamentally underpriced; growth investing, which targets companies that are in a growth or expansion phase; and investing in securities that provide a return in interest income.

The "4% rule" is a popular example of the dollar-plus-inflation strategy. Here's how it works. You withdraw 4% of your portfolio in your first year of retirement. Then, in each subsequent year, the amount you withdraw increases with the rate of inflation.

They are: (1) Use specialist products; (2) Diversify manager research risk; (3) Diversify investment styles; and, (4) Rebalance to asset mix policy. All boringly straightforward and logical.

Trade-offs must be weighed and evaluated, and the costs of any investment must be contextualized. To help with this conversation, I like to frame fund expenses in terms of what I call the Four C's of Investment Costs: Capacity, Craftsmanship, Complexity, and Contribution.

Rule No.

1 is never lose money. Rule No. 2 is never forget Rule No.