Foundations

Most of an investor result is decided before a single company is chosen. It is decided by how long the money stays invested, how it is put to work, and what gets done when the market falls.

This section is the arithmetic underneath everything else on the site. It assumes you already know what a share is, and it will not explain how to open an account.

Compounding comes first, because the shape of that curve explains why the last decade of a long holding matters more than the first three combined. Then the two questions every saver meets in practice: whether to invest a lump sum at once or spread it out, and what the record says about waiting for a better entry point instead of staying invested.

Bear markets get their own article, with how deep they went and how long they took to come back. Read it before you need it, because nobody reads it calmly on the day.

These articles come first for a practical reason. An investor who picks well and sells in the third bad quarter finishes behind one who picks averagely and holds, and the gap is not close.

So the section is less about choosing than about the behaviour around choosing. And one piece asks the question the rest of Arcarios exists to answer: what beating the market actually means, and how you would know whether you had done it.