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The Most Important Takeaways I Got From a Course on Investing
I’ve been a member of The Curve’s Investing Club for the last few months. If you’re unfamiliar with The Curve, it’s a women-only financial education platform that aims to make talking about money fun. It was started by Sophie Hallwright, a producer at the time, and Victoria Harris who’d spent a decade in the investment and finance industry.
Harris’ time in the industry showed a gap in the market for places women could go to talk about money and learn investing basics. So she teamed up with Hallwright to start The Curve. Today, the brand has a podcast, newsletter, TikTok and Instagram and, of course, a membership-only Investing Club that I got to try.
A little bit about me before I tell you what I got from the Club: I’m 37 and have substantial savings, but I don’t have any big assets. I have invested in ETFs (exchange-traded funds) over the years with my dad’s help but never stocks. And I didn’t understand much about ETFs, just that they were less risky to invest in than stocks.
Now that that’s out of the way, here are my biggest takeaways from The Curve’s Investing Club. Obviously, I learnt heaps more and, if you’re interested in becoming more financially savvy, I suggest you sign up to learn first-hand too, but, in the meantime, these are my Club highlights.
Investing Basics
The video library you get access to in the course is extensive. There are videos analysing stocks, of experts sharing their advice and weekly briefs on what’s happening in the finance world. But there are also, importantly, videos on investing basics and another set on its foundations. Answers to all the silly questions you might be too afraid to ask.
“Investing is all about putting your money into something that will be worth in the future than what you paid for it today,” says Harris in a video. She also breaks down the difference with investing in shares, ETFs and managed funds, all using analogies so I could really understand.
Yes, you could go out and buy stocks in companies you think might do well, and hope for the best. But what I got from the course is that to better understand finance, you need to know investing basics.
Risk Assessment
Aside from investment basics, it’s also important to understand the role of risk assessment when making any financial decision. It kept coming up again and again in The Curve’s content. When Harris would break down stocks, she’d look at the company’s competitors and see if she could spot any general red flags.
“What are some red flags with Duolingo?” Harris says in a video. “In terms of big picture, I’d say it’s all around converting those free users to paid. When things are tough people aren’t travelling overseas and so wanting to learn a new language and also, they’re more likely to want to cut back on discretionary items and this falls into that.”
It’s common sense that you need to assess the risks when investing but hearing Harris mention it again and again taught me to start thinking that way automatically too. Like in the Duolingo example, she also taught me to apply a lens of human behavriour to looking at finance.
Emotional Connection
What I also didn’t realise until doing the course is how much of an emotional connection people can have to stocks. I thought you should invest in companies you thought would do well, the brand names you hear every day.
But The Curve taught me that your emotional connection to a company should also be factored in. For instance, if you believe clean energy is the future, you’d invest in that industry. In another example, Harris says you might think that mooncups (menstrual cups) will take over the world and be the product of choice in the future.
“Based on this view and what you’re seeing around you, you might invest in shares of a company that sells mooncups because you believe the company will be worth more in the future,” says Harris.
Long-Term Perspective
Another learning was the importance of adopting a long-term perspective when investing. A term that kept popping up in The Curve’s content was ‘compound interest’. It means to earn interest on your initial deposit and on the interest you’re earning from it. Harris showed a line graph showing how compound interest worked.
“Compound interest works better if you leave your investments alone,” says Harris in a clip. “If you sell your investments early, you’re effectively recessing the compound clock as the amount in there will now be much, much lower. Compound interest needs you to be patient.”
In another video, Harris shows a zoomed-in part of a graph of a stock price over time. It’s up and down, up and down. Then she zooms out to show that overall, the graph indicates a gradual rise in the stock price. These visual elements helped me to fully grasp how crucial it is to have a long-term perspective on your financial investments.
Continuous Learning
Finally, in doing the course, I remembered how great it is to keep learning. When I had a spare few hours on the weekends, I’d watch a few course videos and always feel better having done so. Even though Harris spent a decade working in finance, some of her videos about stocks started with something like, “I had a lot of fun researching this one”.
It showed me she was continuously learning too, which was inspiring. If you’re not quite ready to, well, invest in an investment course, I’d recommend you at least follow The Curve on TikTok and Instagram and listen to their podcast. No doubt you’ll be reminded of how great it feels to learn something new. Even better it’s know-how that can help you earn.
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