The best auto-pilot approach is to decide how much you want to invest each month and then buy that same dollar value each month whether the market is up or down. The technique is called “dollar-cost averaging“.

Over the long-term, it tends to average your cost in a downward direction (which is good). This happens because when the market is up, you buy fewer units. Conversely, when it’s down, you buy more units at cheaper prices. It lowers your average cost and benefits you when the market turns around.

For example, if you’re investing $100 per month in Fund X, when Fund X’s shares are $10, then that month you buy 10 shares. If next month the price drops to $5/share, you buy 20 shares. If it jumps to $20 per share the next month, you buy 5 shares. In this scenario, your average cost for 35 shares would be: $300 / 35 shares = $8.57 each.

By dollar cost averaging, you automatically buy more when it’s cheap and less when it’s expensive. That way, your average cost per share will tend to be lower over time.

Index funds

Another important factor is to focus on whole-market index funds and avoid specific stocks and sector- or industry-focused funds. Individual stocks and sector funds will be subject to greater fluctuations than the general market, and (regardless of what an “advisor” might say), very, very, very few fund managers outperform the general market over the long-term. By sticking to a general market index fund, you can avoid the risk of a bad stock pick.

If [investors] are not going to be active investors — and very few should try to do that — then they should just stay with index funds. Any low-cost index fund. And they should buy it over time. They’re not going to be able to pick the right price and the right time. What they want to do is avoid the wrong price and wrong stock.

– Warren Buffett

Allocation

It’s best to select three or four funds that expose you to (for Canadians) corporate bonds, Canadian equities, US equities and international equities. Once you have the low-cost index funds selected, then a good allocation between them is:

• 20% in bonds;
• 30% in Canadian equities;
• 30% in US equities;
• 20% in international equities.

Let’s say you can spare $500 a month. By owning and dollar-cost averaging into just three index funds — $300 into one that holds the total US stock market, $100 into one that holds foreign stocks, and $100 into one that holds US bonds — you can ensure that you own almost every investment on the planet that’s worth owning.

– Jason Zweig, commentary on chapter 5 of The Intelligent Investor

Regardless of the funds you choose, it’s important to remember to only select funds that:

• Represent the total market of the securities included. No industry- or sector-focused funds regardless of how hard the sales pitch is;
• Have a Management Expense Ratio (MER) below 1%, preferably below 0.5%. The MER is the fee (regardless of performance!) that the manager will take every year. It represents a direct drag on any gains or losses that are made in the fund.
• Have no “load”. A fund load is a fee that is charged either when you purchase the fund (a “front-end load”) or when you sell it (a “back-end load”).

Sample funds

The following collections of funds from two Canadian banks will get you into Canadian bonds (which tend to hedge the general market), and Canadian, US and international equities. Each bank has its own family of funds and may allow you to buy funds from other banks.

The important thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter who the manager is in a whole-market index fund, because the corresponding index decides what to buy and sell. The manager just executes the transactions. Minimizing your fees is more important than who the manager is.

RBC Royal Bank index funds

• RBC Canadian Government Bond Index Fund (MER: 0.66%) (*government bonds)
• RBC Canadian Index Fund (MER: 0.71%):
• RBC U.S. Index Currency Neutral Fund (MER: 0.69%)
• RBC International Index Currency Neutral Fund (MER: 0.70%)

TD Bank index funds

• TD Canadian Bond Index (MER: 0.51%) (*corporate bonds)
• TD Canadian Index (MER: 0.33%):
• TD U.S. Index Currency Neutral (MER: 0.51%)
• TD International Index Currency Neutral (MER: 0.53%)

CIBC index funds

• CIBC Canadian Bond Index (MER: 1.10%)
• CIBC Canadian Index (MER: 1.12%):
• CIBC U.S. Index (MER: 1.12%)
• CIBC International Index (MER: 1.17%)

If it’s free, sure, let’s try it. If not, then… maybe.

Of course, it’s more common to ask, “Is it expensive?” or “Is it cheap?” While the intent is the same, the results vary. “Cheap” and “expensive” require judgment and subsequent grading on a spectrum of opinion. Different ideals produce different outcomes. What my wife thinks is cheap for a dining room chair is not what I think is cheap for a dining room chair. That being the case, “Is it cheap?” doesn’t always produce the desired result.

In contrast, the answer to “Is it free?” requires no judgment whatsoever. It either is or it isn’t. Everyone, regardless of taste and frugality, will give the same answer in the same situation. And a consistent response will lead to consistent actions promoting pre-meditated (and not impulsive) control of expenses.

Geologic time, how we chronologically track the back story of earth’s history, is a real mind bender. Its vastness is unfathomable, really, unless broken down into human terms. My favourite analogy is squishing the planet’s 4.57 billion-year history into one calendar year. Unicellular life shows up in March, dinosaurs go extinct by Christmas Eve, and in the blink of an eye, humans show up in time for the big New Year’s Eve party at 8:30pm, just before the finger snacks run out. We might be glad to have skipped the epic buildup to the mother of all shakers, but we shouldn’t forget just how quick good parties end.

– Mitchell Scott, “All that was now isn’t” from the Backside section of Kootenay Mountain Culture, Summer 2011 Edition

People that mourn the (apparent) death of idealism naturally focus on the wrong explanation. Assuming that there has been a decline in principles assumes that the past was better. Your email to me triggered a new thought, that is, that climbers haven’t changed, it’s just become easier to get what they want.

It comes down to recognition and money. Our celebrity-focused culture lusts after recognition for its own sake, whether it’s deserved or not. And brands want to sell more gear. The two come together (as they have in other sports before climbing) to get what they want from each other. And both are rewarded for it. And what gets rewarded gets repeated.

In tennis a while back, there was a female player — not at the top, but close enough — that was better looking than the other contenders by a long shot. Her sponsorship contract was also the most lucrative. The subtext is that what sells rackets gets rewarded and the public regards performance second to appearance.

This is bleeding into climbing with brands starting to call their sponsorees “ambassadors” rather than athletes. It takes skill and effort to be a real athlete, while anyone comfortable behind a microphone or at a tradeshow can be an ambassador.

The bar is too low. Brands are catching on that sitting on the couch is the modern standard of athletic achievement, so anything better is commendable and easy to capitalize on.

Budgets are too big. When sponsorship budgets were lean, it was hard to get on the team. What happened? The best of the best got support. As business and budgets have grown, brands found themselves in a funny position: everyone good was already sponsored. What to do? They could support genuine athletes even more (full rides perhaps like skiing), but the cost-benefit ratio is much lower than, instead, lowering standards and sponsoring more people of lesser talent in more places.

Ah… what to do? Not much I’m afraid. Greed and insecurity are a big part of human nature. The pretenders haven’t sold their souls; they had no soul to begin with. The brands could stop the nonsense dead in its tracks by only sponsoring the truly deserving, but they won’t. They’re making too much money selling the fairy tale.

It is much harder psychologically to be unsure than to be sure; certainty builds confidence, and confidence reinforces certainty. Yet being overly certain in an uncertain, protean, and ultimately unknowable world is hazardous for investors. To be sure, uncertainty breeds doubt, which can be paralyzing. But uncertainty also motivates diligence, as one pursues the unattainable goal of eliminating all doubt. Unlike premature or false certainty, which induces flawed analysis and failed judgments, a healthy uncertainty drives the quest for justifiable conviction.

Seth Klarman

A quick and easy way to find out is to run the developer’s own website through Google Pagespeed. Google Pagespeed is a tool that evaluates the performance of web pages according to current best practices. Pagespeed will run tests on any web page and spit out a grade between 1 and 100.

Chances are good that your web developer has optimized their own website to the best of their abilities. A quick run through Pagespeed will give you a good indication exactly how current they are on web best practices.

To evaluate a web page using Pagespeed, go to pagespeed.googlelabs.com, and enter the name of the website you’d like to test in the field provided. Click “Analyze Performance”. Pagespeed will run some tests on that page and then deliver an overall score and a list of things to be improved.

Pagespeed is a great way to evaluate your own website, and a quick and easy way to grade web developers based on the sites that they build for themselves.

Getting something for free is a thrill, a gift. If you find $20 on the street, it’s a natural reaction to buy yourself lunch and be excited about it.

But what if your parents bought you a new car when you were 16? Or subsidized your living expenses well into adulthood? What if you could shortcut your physical training and development and win your sport with a magic pill? Would your possessions or your success have any value?

It’s probably normal to fantasize about achieving something with little or no effort. But nature abhors a vacuum. If you get without giving, the universe still charges you for it. It may not cost in terms of money or effort, but it will have a greater cost in terms of empty pride and self-deception.

Here are nine ways to improve your website:

Relevant content

The best websites have focused content that their site visitors value. For example, Craigslist will never win a design contest, but it has millions in annual revenue due to the relevant content that it provides.

1. Make it better

The number one way to create value is to take something mundane and make it better. Highrise simplified CRM and made it easier to track correspondence. Dropbox took file sharing and made it easier to manage, eliminating expensive servers along the way.

2. Solve a problem

The flip side of the same coin is to solve a problem. GuitarTricks makes it convenient to learn guitar at your own pace rather than on a local teacher’s schedule. Take away your visitor’s headaches and they’ll love you for it.

3. Be proud of your price

The best way to annoy visitors is to hide your pricing. “Call for details” is a sale killer, especially on the Internet. If they wanted to call, they’d be on the phone, not on your website. If you’re not proud enough of your price to post it, then maybe it’s too complicated or too expensive for what you’re offering.

Speed

In our instant, fast food world, website visitors’ expectations are measured in fractions of a second. You need to deliver your content fast, or you’ll lose traffic to competitors.

Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20% (Linden 2006). When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks (Farber 2006).

Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1% (Kohavi and Longbotham 2007).

- from The Psychology of Web Performance

Don’t handicap your business by using outdated “spaghetti code” or cheap web servers. The money you save in programming and servers will quickly be lost to competitors because your site is too slow.

4. Build lean, clean code

Not all websites (or web developers) are created equal. Just as if you were building a house, you want to build on a solid foundation that meets industry requirements and construction norms. Ask your web developer if all of their websites are:

• W3C standards compliant;
• Optimized for modern web browsers (not just Internet Explorer);
• Accessible for all users (key for good search engine results).

5. Use fast servers

Once you have a structurally sound website built on industry standards, be sure to deliver it using fast servers. Although having a local server service may be reassuring in a 1990′s kind of way, choosing a web host based on uptime, support and speed (regardless of where their head office is), will yield better performance and happier visitors.

6. Use a content delivery network

Hosting your website on only one server isn’t enough to meet the rising expectations of impatient visitors. Thankfully, cheap (and even free) “content delivery networks” will mirror your content on several servers across the globe, and select the closest server whenever a visitor requests your site. CDNs reduce load times and keep your visitors on your site longer.

Usability

Like the party bore whose every sentence starts with “I”, too many websites focus on what the site owner wants to say rather than on what the visitor wants to hear. Make sure that your website is designed with your users in mind rather than your resume.

7. Focus on only one type of visitor

Although it’s tempting to try and cast a wide net, the best websites focus on a particular niche and then serve that niche exceedingly well. Imagine what your target customer wants and then tailor your website to fulfill those needs.

8. Make it obvious

Simpler is better: “If the user can’t find it, then it doesn’t exist.”

Design each page to focus on only one action that you want the visitor to perform — i.e. filling out a contact form, buying a product etc. Don’t make them think, and you’ll go a long way to helping your site visitors get what they came for. (The Tumblr home page is a great example.)

9. Embrace constraints

Most importantly, “let limitations guide you to creative solutions“. Like climbing a mountain, decide what backpack your going to take (your limitations) before you decide what’s going to go into it. Trying to say everything at once on your website only dilutes your message and increases the chance that you’ll be misunderstood or will lose a customer.

Criticism is necessary and useful; it is often indispensable; but it can never take the place of action, or be even a poor substitute for it. The function of the mere critic is of very subordinate usefulness. It is the doer of deeds who actually counts in the battle for life, and not the man who looks on and says how the fight ought to be fought, without himself sharing the stress and the danger.

– Theodore Roosevelt, 1894

Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper, but no less rigorous, self-generated approach assembled from less-famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?

- Seth Godin on “Buying an education or buying a brand?“