Investing Basics: Asset Classes, Liquidity, and Growth

How can I understand investment decisions and participate more confidently in conversations about wealth, risk, and long-term growth?

Investing Basics: Asset Classes, Liquidity, and Growth introduces investing fundamentals in the context of significant wealth, where decisions are shaped by liquidity needs, time horizon, risk, taxes, fees, distributions, family goals, and long-term stewardship. Learners explore asset classes, portfolio construction, goals-based investing, equities, fixed income, mutual funds, ETFs, SMAs, alternatives, hedge funds, digital assets, compounding, and the forces that can erode investment growth. Trusts are introduced as a common context for these decisions, but the broader focus is helping participants build the language, judgment, and confidence to engage more meaningfully with advisors, trustees, family office teams, and family members.

What You’ll Be Able to Do on the Other Side

• Identify major asset classes and investment vehicles and describe how each may support liquidity, income, preservation, growth, or diversification.
• Interpret how liquidity, time horizon, risk tolerance, taxes, fees, inflation, and spending or distributions affect investment decisions and long-term outcomes.
• Use a goals-based framework to connect personal, family, or portfolio objectives to appropriate investment principles and asset types.
• Compare common investment options, including equities, fixed income, mutual funds, ETFs, SMAs, alternatives, hedge funds, and digital assets, by their structure, risks, liquidity, and role in a portfolio.
• Ask more informed questions of advisors, trustees, or family office teams about investment strategy, performance, fees, diversification, and alignment with long-term goals.

The Experience

This self-paced module combines plain-language explanations, reflection prompts, mini-cases, activities, worksheets, videos, and podcast resources to help learners make sense of investing in a wealth context. Participants classify asset classes, evaluate liquidity needs, map goals to investment principles, review equity and fixed-income examples, compare fund structures, and explore alternative and digital assets.

The course emphasizes practical engagement over technical mastery. Through liquidity scenarios, goals-based strategy examples, compounding exercises, hedge fund due diligence prompts, and quilt map activities, learners practice interpreting investment trade-offs and preparing for more productive conversations with advisors, trustees, family office teams, and family members.

Featured Resources: 

• StackTrack Personal Trading Simulator
• "Senior and Subordinated Debt" by the Corporate Finance Institute
• Bond Yield to Maturity Calculator
• Interactive Compounding Interest Worksheet
• Compound Interest Calculator 
• Wealth of Wisdom by Tom McCullough & Keith Whitaker
• Podcast with David McCombie entitled, Private Equity Perils and Pearls
• Podcast with Jenna Arnold entitled, Impact Investing
• Scott Peppet's Financial Capital Series, "Compound Interest"
• Tharawat Magazine, "The Future of Family Offices"