I wrote a web site about investment before I became a financial planner. It is a fairly comprehensive guide to investing, in fact it may take you months to finish reading the whole thing! If you take the time, I think you'll be rewarded with a fairly in-depth understanding of investment, from both the active (Warren Buffett style value investing) and indexed (portfolio theory) points of view.

http://www.travismorien.com/FAQ.htm

General financial planning information

These are your standard issue financial planning sites, you'll find a lot of info on most of these sites if you look around.

http://www.fpa.asn.au
http://www.centrelink.gov.au
http://www.ifsa.com.au
http://asic.gov.au
http://fido.asic.gov.au
http://www.ato.gov.au/super
http://www.superannuation.asn.au/
http://www.superannuation.asn.au/dictionary/dict_main.htm
http://www.superannuation.asn.au/super/rpm.cfm?page=calc
http://law.ato.gov.au/atolaw/index.htm
http://www.moneymanagement.com.au/default.asp
http://www.sjq.com.au
http://taxlawyers.com.au/
http://familylaw.gov.au/AccessPoint/servlet/AccessPoint
http://www.tiaa-crefinstitute.org/

Articles you should read before investing

Most financial information on the Internet and in the media is basically worthless garbage that will, if you pay any attention to it, cost you money either now or in the long run. If absolutely nothing out of the ordinary happened today in investing, journalists would still have to dig up enough material to feed all those cable TV "finance" channels, financial newspapers, web sites and newsletters and tip sheets, usually by consulting "experts" who are asked to explain every little random market fluctuation.

Because investment consumers demand so much information, the quality and relevance of the information that gets published is on average very low, and is getting worse. Although so much of this investment information published for public consumption simply isn't worth spending the time to read or listen to but sometimes nonsense gets repeated often enough that people end up believing in it.

Oscar Wilde observed this more than a century ago:
"The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything. Except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands."

These articles will give you a certain amount of immunisation against common "wisdom".

http://www.investorsolutions.com/lc-library.cfm?show=detail&articleID=199&artcategory=3
http://www.smithbarney.com/pdf/products_services/consulting_group/bad_bear.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/talks/indexed_investing.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/fantasy/fantasy.htm
http://marriottschool.byu.edu/emp/srt/passive.html
http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/sp2004AIMRefficientMrkts.html
http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/sp20050210.htm
http://money.cnn.com/best/magazine_archive/2001/06/FUN.html
http://www.investorsolutions.com/lc-library.cfm?show=detail&articleID=326&artcategory=3
http://www.indexfunds.com/articles/20010118_FRCstudy_iss_gen_JS.htm
http://www.bus.umich.edu/NewsRoom/ArticleDisplay.asp?news_id=4265
http://www.investorhome.com/mutual.htm
http://www.investorhome.com/cherry.htm
http://www.investorhome.com/asset.htm
http://www.russell.com/AU/Institutional_Investors/Russell_Library/Survivorship_Bias/default.asp
http://www2.standardandpoors.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=sp/Page/PressSpecialCoveragePg&c=sp_speccoverage&cid=1052691123001&r=1&l=EN&b=4
http://library.dfaus.com/faqs/
http://www.altruistfa.com/readingroom.htm
http://www.investorsolutions.com/ArticleShow.cfm?Link=art_Three_Factor_Model.cfm
http://www.investorsolutions.com/lc-library.cfm?show=detail&articleID=346&artcategory=3
http://www.ssga.com/library/resh/ericbrandhorstproblemswithmanageruniversedata20021122/page.html http://www.investorsolutions.com/NewsletterGate.cfm?Mem=17304&Cnt=377&NID=88&Track=Art&Link=art_Academic_support_for_indexing.cfm
http://www.financial-planning.com/pubs/fp/20010401034.html
http://www.thestreet.com/funds/mutualfundmondaybg/10036923.html
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2358
http://www.indexfunds.com/articles/20020530_smallcaps_iss_act_LS.htm
http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/december042000.html
http://www.barra.com/research/BarraPub/hpp-n.asp
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=00007525
http://www.sscommonsense.org/page04.html#spot03
http://www.fee-only-advisor.com/premier/premiercontent/book/index.cfm#contents
http://www.thestreet.com/funds/deardagen/762746.html
http://www.thestreet.com/funds/mutualfundmondaybg/10038756.html
http://www.indexfunds.com/articles/20021212_risk&reward_iss_gen_FA.htm
http://viking.som.yale.edu/will/finman540/classnotes/notes.html
http://www.schwab.com/SchwabNOW/SNLibrary/SNLib133/SN133mainInvestmentTopics_Seasonal_Investing.html
http://www.indexfunds.com/articles/20020315_turnoverstudy_iss_act_ST.htm
http://www.fundadvice.com/FEhtml/BHStrategies/0309/0309a.html
http://www.johntreed.com/BSchecklist.html

Some of the better sites belonging to fee only advisers and researchers

The following sites come from United States advisers with a similar sort of focus to my own. At these sites you'll find a variety of great stuff, like newsletters to read, data about index funds vs active funds etc. Unfortunately, I don't know of any Australian web sites with a similar focus (though I am building one!). Note: I have no affiliation with any of these people, I don't necessarily endorse everything they say and they don't necessarily endorse everything I say.

http://www.tamasset.com
http://www.efficientfrontier.com
http://www.journalofindexes.com
http://www.altruistfa.com/
http://www.efmoody.com//
http://www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/art.htm
http://www.ifa.com/
http://www.investorsolutions.com/
http://www.tilsonfunds.com/
http://www.mcmoney.com//
http://www.indexfunds.com
http://www.coffeehouseinvestor.com/
http://www.lsvasset.com/jsps/research/
http://www.psychologyandmarkets.org/research/research_main.html
http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/

Discussion forum

The Vangaud Diehards Forum is based in the US but is one of the best discussion groups on the Internet for discussing portfolio construction, indexing, the value and small company premiums and other similar issues. Regular contributors there include professional fund managers, academics, advisors and authors, as well as a legion of very well read individual investors, so discussion tends to be excellent, intelligent and interesting. This is a real contrast to the "spam" ridden mess of most investment newsgroups, chat rooms and online forums. This forum often hosts lively debates on asset allocation and risk profiling and if you lurk for long you are almost certainly going to learn a great deal.

http://www.diehards.org/

Market beating

In the last 20 years only about 10% of American fund managers outperformed the major US benchmark, the Standard and Poors 500 index. If you want to know how the 10% did it then the following sites have some of the information you are looking for.

http://home.netvigator.com/~raymondo/MMD_main.htm
http://www.tilsonfunds.com/superinvestors.html
http://www.tweedy.com/library_docs/papers.html
http://www.buffettsecrets.com/index.htm
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/products/subject/finance/bgraham/

Online legal documents

The following site is a provider of electronic legal documents like Wills, self managed super fund trust deeds, family trust deeds and loan agreements etc. The law firm behind it is Brett Davies Lawyers (http://taxlawyers.com.au/), a Perth based private law firm that operate only via referrals from financial planners, accountants and other advisors (they don't accept clients who walk in off the street). Law Central does not provide legal advice, it is the legal equivalent of an online discount stock broker, providing an execution-only service using information that you input electronically. Although this is not a financial product and therefore I am under no obligation to disclose this fact, Law Central will pay me a 10% referral fee on any documents you buy via this site, provided you use the link below which includes my referrer ID.

http://www.lawcentral.com.au/clickthrough/logref.asp?RefID=20