How to begin my investment journey? Any tips on when and how to decide the right time and stocks to invest?

Hi anon, here at Seedly, we have an investment guide for beginners just like you. You can find the guide here: https://blog.seedly.sg/ultimate-personal-financ.... Hope the guide becomes your companion in your investment journey.

In terms of timing, there's no best timing. Waiting for the "best" time might make us lose out on the returns over the long term as many studies have soon. Examples here: https://blog.seedly.sg/sell-in-may-and-go-away.

If you are not confident about picking individual stocks, what Chris mentioned about passive index investing/robo-advisors would help to kickstart your investing journey.

Remember, stocks will be volatile in the short-term, but the long-term is what matters.

All the best!

There are two main ways I would advise someone to get started on investing:

1. Index investing (sometimes called passive investing)

2. Roboadvisors

Both methods expose you to well diversified and tried and tested methods of attaining decent returns in the market. In fact, the US stock market as a whole has returned about 9.8% per annum for the last 90 years!

For roboadvisors, Syfe and Endowus are my favourites although others like Stashaway are great as well. You can take a look at their approaches and their portfolios to see if theyre suitable for your needs.

As for passive investing, you'll also need a broker. You can check out my comparison on some brokers here.

As for when is the best time to start investing, I would say if you have a long time horizon (10 years and more), the best time is now! However, I do understand that most are cautious on their first purchase, as such you can consider Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) into the market as well. Do note of course, that lumpsum investing (putting it all in at one go) does tend to outperform DCA (about 66% of the time).

Hope this helps! If you have any more questions, do feel free to contact me on my site!