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Financial educator Sammie Ellard-King said he first studied personal finance in his 20s.
His financial education platform, Up the Gains, began as a blog in 2021, five years after he started investing, having fallen into serious debt as a university student. It’s now his full-time job, with a podcast and soon-to-launch app.
He shared three pieces of advice for beginner investors with Business Insider.
1. Start simple — you don’t need to be a trader
“You can make it extremely complicated if you’re a trader, but you don’t have to be,” Ellard-King said. Rather than spending hours glued to screens and options, he recommended mainly investing your money in index funds that track the broader market.
“Just let the smartest companies in the world do their thing,” he said.
2. Appreciate that your portfolio will sometimes dip
Beginners often assume they’ll lose money as soon as they invest, in part because of the ubiquity of warnings that “your capital is at risk,” Ellard-King said.
Even if the market drops close to retirement, you probably still would have done a lot better than if you had put all your money in savings, where the returns are usually much lower, he said.
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The way to overcome the fear of investing is to adopt a longer-term mindset: put money in regularly, expect ups and downs, and think in terms of decades, not days, he said.
3. When you invest in stocks, look at industries you know
Ellard-King said he kept most of his money in index funds, but when he does buy individual stocks, he invests in areas, like fintech and e-commerce, which he understands.
Beginners should consider investing in areas where they work or have relevant experience, he said.
For him, buying into AI feels like putting “money down on the roulette table” because he doesn’t know where those companies are headed.
“You could do in-depth research and make a conscious decision, but then you’re putting hours of your time into this,” Ellard-King said, adding you could likely benefit from booming companies’ growth through an index fund anyway.
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