Diversification
Diversification means spreading your money across many investments so no single one can sink you — the financial version of not putting all your eggs in one basket. It's the one 'free lunch' in investing: it lowers risk without necessarily lowering expected return.
A single low-cost total-market index fund already holds thousands of companies, so broad diversification is one purchase rather than a project. Adding bonds and international exposure diversifies further, across asset types and across economies. What diversification cannot do is worth being clear about: it removes the risk of any single company failing, not the risk of the market falling — in a severe crash, most shares fall together. Two habits undermine it in practice: holding a large position in your employer's stock, which ties your savings to the same event that would cost you your job, and home bias, the tendency to hold almost only domestic companies.
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