What are the aspects or basic background info and source that are reliable to study a stock to invest, any sharing on rule of thumb for newbies to bring good at investment for a living & retirement?

Hi Chloe,

If you wish to invest in individual stocks, 10-Ks and 10-Qs are essential sources of information. These are essentially Annual and Quarterly reports for US companies.

However, with that said (I'll be assuming you're working a 9-5, 5 days a week), as a working adult with future children, I think it might be easier (due to time constraints) to simply do index investing. This is form of investing where you invest into funds that follow certain indices. An index is a basket of companies that usually are used to represent a country's economy or a particular sector. For example the STI is used to represent Singapore's economy and the S&P 500 is often compared to the US economy.

So to invest in such funds, you can take a look at:

• CSPX (Irish Domiciled S&P 500 ETF)

• VOO/IVV (US Domiciled S&P 500 ETF)

• IWDA/VWRA (Irish Domiciled Global ETF)

• VEU/VXUS (US Domiciled Global ex US ETF)

If your broker allows, the Irish ones are generally preferred for lower tax on dividends but if your broker only allows US, then it is fine too, the difference is not particularly large.

If you're not sure on which broker to use, you can check out my comparison here too!