Investing one’s savings is a very important part of life. Whether it is saving for a house, your children’s education or your retirement, everyone has to save and invest. Yet, general investment education is not something that is a core part of any public education. As someone who has taught investments at both the professional and university level, I understand how difficult it is to make good investment decisions. As a result, we are offering a one-year series of articles to provide basic investment education for the public.

Having taught finance at universities in both the UK and China, I realise there are many young people who have studied finance and investing. But, in reality, these people represent a very tiny proportion of our population. Most people, doctors, policemen, bus drivers, etc., have little or no education in how to invest their money for the future. Yet, saving for the future is often one of the most important things in every person’s life. Without this education society suffers in many ways:

• People do not make good investment decisions and lost their hard-earned savings
• People are at risk of mis-selling by fraudsters who take advantage of their lack of knowledge
• The society suffers as capital is not being used efficiently to support the economy

To address this issue, we have agreed with ANT Fortune to provide a year-long column in 2019 on investing.  This will include 26 articles (every two weeks) covering the basics of investing to more specialised topics.  It will be written in a non-technical (non-mathematical) way, illustrating with local examples.

The articles will be available in both Mandarin and English.  We hope when this series is complete, it provides a good set of fundamental knowledge for the public to understand investing.  These articles are free of charge to anyone who registers on the site.

Instructions for how to access the articles on ANT Fortune are shown below.  They can also be accessed via the Alipay app and we also have shown instructions for that pathway as well.

The posts are interactive; you can submit a question to comment related to the article and we will check and reply to any posts once each week.

Below, are the general instructions about how to access the articles via the ANT Fortune app.

One can also access the articles through the Alipay app as well and below are the instructions for that route.

We attach a high importance to providing financial education for the general public and would welcome any comments you have through our Contact link on our website.

John D. Evans, CFA

Founder of SEIML

16 February 2019