I have been reading up on different posts on here and excited to share my first. I am a third year university student in the UAE and I have been particularly interested in learning how to better track my spending and invest for general wealth!
Managing my expenses mainly focuses on keeping track of my spending, I started off using spreadsheets and also used my banking app. There’s very limited apps available that integrate UAE banks like ADCB or allow me to track spending across all my international cards which can be particularly challenging as I travel a lot for study away and between UAE and my home country.
I am also really interested in building wealth and investing my leftover allowance for graduate studies and general wealth! I am looking into using Sarwa but overall a bit insecure about the whole process as it can be really complicated with lots of paperwork. It can also be daunting as a first time investor- how do I know if a portfolio is ideal for me if it was made solely based on a quick, automated quiz? How do I know what’s the ideal amount to invest as a college student?
I would love to hear your thoughts on this and any investment/saving advice
You could look at investing passively but take this advice with a grain of salt:
While it is commonly considered prudent to periodically allocate a fixed amount of money into index funds - essentially passive investing - this may not be the best time to do so because of:
Recent S&P 500 inclusions of perceived to be overvalued securities like Tesla. Introduces a lot of volatility and price risk to the indices.
FAANG (Tech stocks) make up a bulk (40%) of the S&P500, severe concentration risk inherent in the indices in case the world wakes up to fears of the current bull run being a replay of the dot com bubble.
The federal reserve has printed nearly 28% of all dollars in circulation only in 2020. A lot of that has fueled the current bull run in Index funds and equities. Pick your investments with care, and build in risk management tools like stop losses and trailing losses to ensure you don’t lose more than you can afford to. Happy investing!
Couldn’t agree more!! It’s readily apparent now that NTFs are heavily reliant on overvalued tech stocks. just a couple days ago a Tesla car crash drove the S&P 500 down by 0.53.
While it is true that the S&P is a robust index and relatively a low risk onez with favorable long term returns, It is important to investigate the status of each sector these indecies mostly relay on. Especially when investing on a budget.
That’s an excellent example. ETFs are now more bubble prone than ever.
On the flip side, this is giving birth to more niche ETFs for risk on/risk off investors. Thematic ETFs with a focus on value over growth shall see greater inflows over the next few quarters. Of course, bringing themes into ETFs defeats their purpose a tad by lowering diversification, in a way.
Some that I have on my radar:
$ESGV, $TAN, $ACES…clean energy plays.
