Investment Startegies: Long Term, Short Term, High Risk
Long Term
There is a lot of material on the internet about classic long term investment strategies as well as many useful YouTube videos. They normally classify the approaches as follows:
- Growth investing
- Value investing
- Dividend investing
Effectively you are investing long term to achieve specific goals, namely growth, value or dividend income optimization. However, these approaches are not really mutually exclusive.
In practical terms you can buy shares in Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) which track a particular index or even a world index of all the major markets combined. Whenever you have additional income you can buy more shares and simply hold for the long term.
Another approach is the more akin to Warren Buffet. You can focus on a particular index such as the S&P500 and try to identify the 10 or 15 best companies to invest in for the long term.
Short Term
Short term strategies are more difficult because they require you to simultaneously:
- Time the market (buy and selling)
- Have cash balances available
- Identify specific stocks to trade
This approach is notoriously more time intensive, more difficult, and higher risk over a longer-term period.
High Risk
High risk strategies are perhaps the more complex approaches but require you at times to take a long term view on a nascent company or new technology with many factors determining success.
Many companies will simply not achieve what they set out to achieve. You may also combine short term value/timing considerations into an investment decision. For this strategy be prepared to lose 100% of your investment if the business is not successful.