To win as investors, we must fight a mental and emotional battle with ourselves. Understanding our own psychology helps us make the right decisions for our unique set of goals.

To paraphrase Adam Smith, if you don’t know who you are, the market is an expensive place to find out.

Last July, Real Vision launched The Real Investing Course — the flagship of our Real Vision Academy. It’s been a huge success; we’re pretty pleased to be helping thousands of Real Vision members become better, more confident investors.
Now we’re unlocking the doors to The Real Investing Course — making it available on its own, with no commitment to an annual membership. Why? It’s gloomy out there and since The Real Investing Course lives up to its name, our hope is to get it into the hands of as many investors as possible.

We’re throwing it back to Real Vision’s second Festival of Learning.

Economist Dr. Pippa Malmgren and renowned investor Jim O’Shaughnessy sat down to discuss the 2 common traits that have informed every stage of their decorated careers: curiosity and a lifelong commitment to learning.

The Russell 1000, a subset of the Russell 3000, is a large-cap stock index consisting of the largest 1,000 publicly listed U.S. companies, ranked by market value. Despite the index having only a third of the stocks in the Russell 3000, which covers 96% of the U.S. investable stock market universe, it still offers a broad representation — 93% of the stock market. FTSE Russell, a wholly owned London Stock Exchange Group subsidiary, established the Russell 1000 on January 1, 1984.

We’re covering the business cycle — and how understanding the ebbs and flows of economic activity can help you analyze markets and build a sustainable portfolio.

The Russell 3000 is an equity index that tracks the largest 3,000 U.S. companies. It is market-capitalization weighted, meaning that each holding in the index receives a percentage size proportional to its total market cap. Overall, the index properly represents the broad market because it tracks 96% of the publicly listed U.S. equity market universe. It also has a diverse composition, holding a mix of large-caps, mid-caps, and small-caps.

This is a special guest post from Raoul Pal, our co-founder and CEO at Real Vision, and founder at Global Macro Investor. It might actually be the first blog post he’s written for us, and the reason for the special occasion is that we have just launched How to Unf*ck Your Future, a 2-week limited series that aims to do exactly what the name says.

Take it away, Raoul…

We’re going deep into the way-back machine of Real Vision — our chosen interview [paywalled] was filmed in 2015, but given that human nature takes millennia to change rather than years, it’s as valuable today as it was back then.

In it, Raoul Pal sits down with legendary fund manager Mark Hart and Tim Ferriss, the impressively multi-hyphenate entrepreneur-investor-author-lifestyle advisor.

At its core, the key lesson in this interview is how we all should be re-examining our habits and priorities in order to optimize the most valuable currency on earth: time.

Think of this episode as an evergreen lesson on ways to invest in yourself no matter what’s happening between the bells. Enjoy.

We’re back in the options game. Last week we covered:

The Basics — from the various use cases for options to a contract’s relationship with the underlying asset.
Premium pricing and how profiting from options comes down to understanding things like probabilities and time decay.
How to read an options chain to better understand demand and how premiums move.

This week, let’s dig into exactly how Imran Lakha, founder of Options Insight, uses options in his own investing process.