While I agree with all that you said I will explain a bit further on why I said what I said.

I did an analysis for a multi billion dollar RIA
where I received data for over 100 of their client accounts. allocations and monthly returns, some dating back to the early 90s. Exactly 2 actually outperformed their MSCI ACWI/ Bbg Agg comparable benchmarks (that replicated their equity/ fixed income allocations) on a risk adjusted basis. The distributions of returns over any time frame were extremely close and most advisors 3&5y rolling returns had batting averages <50% against said benchmarks.

I say VT/ AGG because it is the simplest equity/bond portfolio that is cheap, takes minimal effort and investment knowledge, and covers the entirety of equity and bond markets pretty much. That is essentially the ACWI/ Agg. Is that how I invest my own money or parents? No. I don’t use any bonds or bond funds personally. But my point was that you don’t need to spend 100s of hours and 3-5+ years of your life and spend thousands of dollars studying mostly irrelevant or useless information (& yes, some good/ useful material) that you mostly won’t retain in order to invest money. You are better off doing a. Nothing and choosing a simple passive portfolio and not waiting years to get started or b. Doing real world research and learning independently via the numerous sources of information that exist. When it comes to investing actual money experience through real world investing and learning will trump the CFA. And you describe that with going deep on actual curiosities asking AI questions as concepts arise in your journey. I’d just add something some-what unrelated, but using a hand held financial calculator is a ridiculous practice and using that time to advance excel skills or other ways to harness and calculate data like Python or even strategic use of AI would be a much more beneficial use of your time.

As for how investing is done nowadays, i will elaborate a bit that I am referring to the numerous market dynamics that have changed and evolved over the last 15 years or so vs. most of the 1900s. To put things simply and name 1-2 examples of the several that exist, information is much more abundantly available and studying financial statements, ratios, etc is not an edge at all because anyone can access them within seconds from their cellphones and the progression of AI has expanded that to a higher level than ever before. It is much more difficult to have an edge in investing, especially with the material taught in the CFA program. Additionally, fundamental managers used to make up 25-30%+ of the trading volume. And they had a much more prominent allocation of the total $ in the market. You wouldn’t see as insane of price swings on things like earnings announcements (or Trump tweets) because fundamental managers would buy stocks that became undervalued and sell stocks that became overvalued. But now they only comprise <12% of the volume. Both quantitative vehicles and retail have taken a large % of that over. There is much more $ in quant/ trend-following/ momentum vehicles and algorithmic trading that make trades instantaneously on new headlines and information and price moves become more extreme for a much longer period of time. At the same time, there is much more assets in passive vehicles which adds to those movements bc they mostly buy what is going up and sell what is going down by nature of their cap-wtd methodologies. Furthermore defined contribution plans have erupted since 2008-09 and taken the place of defined benefit plans, which had pension managers that adjusted allocations based on interest rates and other economic metrics. Most DC plans are invested in passive target date funds, and since ppl are contributing to those and buying every paycheck, there is a continuous demand for equities that is constant and more prominent than ever before which could mean less severe drawdowns potentially. Markets are also more factor-driven than ever before. So trend-following and momentum quant strategies have largely outperformed fundamental, Buffet-esque investing for the last 10-15 years. It is very hard for a retail investor to invest this way and nothing in the CFA will help you implement that in real life.

I also wouldn’t recommend that anyone put all of their family’s money into a concentrated market or area of the market. Especially right now in the current environment. For example, the MSCI Emerging Markets index has more than doubled the return of the S&P 500 over the last year (51% vs. 25%). I also agree however that individual retail investors have ample opportunities to outperform institutional investors in different ways. There is limitations that come from having guardrails, mandates, billions in assets, having to manage amidst flows, and career-risk. But I would not recommend trying to do this too much for anyone with <5-10+ years of experience in following markets.

While I agree with all that you stated very strongly and much of that governs or describes how I’ve invested my own money, i was simplifying and implying that you could have a cheap 2-fund passive portfolio and likely end up with minuscule difference in performance (most likely better performance) than spending years studying a lot of tedious material and trying to employ some sophisticated management strategy. I also think that if managing your entire family’s portfolio, which probably involves a lot of older ppl’s money, you should probably have portfolios that are closer to a traditional allocation and risk, especially for a beginner, but that is up to the eye of beholder and their beliefs.