Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it.

I'm your host David Stein. Today is episode 4991. It's titled The Five Layers of Investing.

LaPrel and I have been up in the mountains of Idaho for a couple of months now and as you drive into the long private road that goes to our cabin,

invariably there are mountain bluebirds, Vesperarrows, sometimes robins,

and they're in the road,

and they're looking for crickets and grasshoppers.

And as you drive, they just move down a little ways,

and then as you get closer, they move move down again and it's sort of like

why don't they fly off knowing we're coming. But the actions of a specific bird, which direction

they're going to go, or a grasshopper, which way will it jump is very very difficult to accurately

predict. A grasshopper a cricket lives only about 8 to 10 weeks, very short time horizon.

Mountain bluebirds, six to 10 years.

Other species can live decades.

When we think about the natural world,

things move on different scales.

Some such as microbes move very quickly.

Their life cycle is very quick.

Other plants and animals have a slower life cycle. They move at a slower scale, a larger scale.

With day-to-day weather, there's lots of fluctuations. Climate change moves much more slowly.

The investing world is similar. There are different

layers, different time scales and in this episode we're going to talk about five

different layers of the investing world.

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