= Personal finance
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* the American stock market gives 10% / year, which is about 2x over 10 years. It has been the sure-fire best investment on a 10 year horizon for many decades, and should serve as your benchmark.
* risky diversified investments (e.g. ETFs that track a market index) are basically the best investment if you can keep your money in them in the long term (10 years)
* risky investments can gown down for a while, and you cannot take your money out then. This effectively means risk is a form of <illiquidity>
* investment funds have taxes, which eat into your profit. The best investments are dumb index tracking investments (like an ETF that tracks the stock market) that are simply brainless to manage, and therefore have lowest taxes. No fund has managed to beat the market long term essentially.
* when you are young, ideally you should invest everything into riskier higher yielding assets like stock. And as you get older, you should move part of it to less risky (and therefore more <liquid (asset)>, but lower yielding) assets like bonds
The desire to buy a house however complicates this for many people.
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