Over the years, I’ve had many conversations with parents about money. One theme I keep hearing is this: “we just wanted to give our kids the best start in life.”

I’ve spoken to Baby Boomers who proudly helped their children into property, paid for weddings, or covered study costs.

When a close friend became a parent for the first time, university felt like a lifetime away. In those early days, the focus was on night feeds, figuring out how to use the car capsule, and adjusting to the new normal. But not long after, she said something that stuck with me: “One day, she’ll be 18 – and I want her to have choices.”

When you're in your 20s, it can feel like your money disappears the moment it hits your account. After essentials – rent, groceries, and transport – a good chunk often goes toward student loan repayments. And the rest? It can vanish without much to show for it.

If you're in your 40s or 50s, with a mortgage, a couple of kids, and the usual life expenses, retirement can feel a long way off. But this is one of the most important decades to take stock of where you're headed.

Against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions, economic challenges, and electoral uncertainty, markets continued to do what they do best: efficiently process information and set fair prices, rewarding long-term investors with positive returns.

Around the world, individuals are being asked to take on greater responsibility for their own retirement. This is causing investors to make decisions they have never had to face about how to save for retirement.

Technology is a powerful tool, but when it comes to investing and money management, my fear is that faster and easier ways of investing will allow people to lose more money faster and easier.

Investing and health can be two of the most important things in life, but sometimes they also can be the most confusing. There’s so much data and advice, so many articles—and unfortunately, they often don’t agree.

Many apps claim to calculate your net worth by tallying assets and debts, but that only reflects wealth. True worth is more complex — it comes from making life better for others. My parents never had much money, but they were worth a great deal.

Just by being human, we’ve been compelled to tackle the central challenges of life—which also happen to be the central challenges of investing.

Connecting life principles to investment principles is a powerful way to ground abstract principles in reality. It can also help make sense of investment concepts often dismissed as overly complex for those who aren’t familiar with them.

Compounding is one of the most powerful forces in the world. Just ask Albert Einstein, who’s said to have called it the “eighth wonder.” The seemingly small decisions we make everyday gain power over time.

There were a lot of negative surprises over the past 25 years, but there were a lot of positive ones as well. The net result was a stock market return that seems very reasonable, even generous.

Studying public markets from the past 60 years, one lesson is clear: investing in markets is an excellent plan for meeting long-term goals, like maximising your retirement income. When you develop a deeper understanding of public markets, you can cultivate a sense of optimism about investing.