It’s our conviction that the universities should offer a new investment education for guiding people. It should differ radically from prevailing university investment education, which is better suited for financial and academics. Differ in all the most fundamental ways – in investment purpose, assumptions, and presentation.
Purpose – The new investment education should be focused on seeking, assessing, and comparing investments in result probabilities for the investor’s purpose – her future dollar-purchasing-power needs and goals.
Prevailing university textbooks ignore this purpose. Instead they divert the focus to technical measures and abstractions for the volatility-dominated individual year, omitting considerations of dollars, years, and compounding along the way, misleading people to obsess about the investor’s short-term fears.
Assumptions – The new investment education should emphasize skepticism about assumptions about investments’ future-performance probabilities, emphasize that for most of the many thousands of investments, grounds for such assumptions are just too weak, guide people toward the few investments with least-weak grounds for such assumptions – and question those. Generally, across the range from conservative to aggressive, it should lead people toward mixes of whole diversified asset classes.
Prevailing university investment textbooks and courses do just the opposite. While there’s talk about the cost advantage of whole-asset-class investments, they are chock-full of examples and student practice in unquestioning acceptance and use of whatever assumption numbers are at hand for whatever investments are in sight.
Presentation – The new investment education should be concise and clear, designed and labeled for people to understand.
Prevailing university textbooks and courses are exactly the opposite – oceans of confusing diversionary complexity, with labels so misleading to normal people they appear chosen for that purpose.
The pages in this New Course section, listed with links below, are draft and notes on parts of what we think should be featured in the new investment education for guiding people. We hope they will help in shaping that new education, and possibly grow into a book. Your comments are welcome.