Litar player, I have spent many hours watching You Tube clips for tips and advice about how to become proficient at guitar in the shortest space of time with the least frustration. Many teachers have the same basic advice, which is of course, the hardest part of learning to do anything.

Much advice is very simple and revolves around sticking to the basics and disciple required to maintain a focus on getting the basics right. Don't get ahead of yourself. 

We have a resolute focus on not losing money and as we say "making money is easy, losing money is easier". This means instead of talking about how much money we are going to make or expect to make, we want to ask ourselves how can we avoid losing money? We believe avoiding errors is what matters most.  

The reason for our focus on not losing is because of the mathematics of losses - using the geometric return instead of the average and secondly understanding that avoiding errors and losses by sticking to the basics and a simple investment strategy will deliver better returns over the long run.

Many of us want to jump into the deep end, allowing our emotions and media hype to dominate our simple and effective strategy that has the best track record. For example, sticking to indexes rather than selecting individual stocks is most certainly the way to higher returns. Yes, there is Warren Buffett and a few others that have beaten the market by stock selection but even here Buffett admits that a few big winners make up for some really bad choices. What Buffett did realise is that buying when there is blood in the streets is the best way to generate market beating returns.  

That's why we stick to thr 8 principles in our 3 Wells program. As boring as it may be, understanding the basics of investing, like earnings yields, market cycles and rebalancing will deliver better returns than trying to play too fast in the shortest space of time. 

Stick with those basics and you will progress a lot faster than trying to jump on all the latest tricks.