What this is

One Investing Checklist is a plain-language investing course for beginners, written by one person for friends who kept asking the same question: “I have some savings — now what?” It began as a Chinese-language site and has grown into a full curriculum there: four course levels, printable checklists, twelve browser-based calculators, and a read-only dashboard tracking rule-based strategies.

This English edition is its hand-written sibling. It is not a machine translation. Every article is written directly in English, and content that only makes sense in a Chinese context (social insurance, local tax rules, A-share quirks) is either rewritten for a global audience or left out. Where the site names account types or regulations, it tries to speak generally — a tax-advantaged retirement account might be a 401(k) or IRA in the US, an ISA in the UK, an RRSP or TFSA in Canada, or Super in Australia. The principles underneath don’t change at the border.

Three things this site will never do

  1. Sell you a course. Everything here is free, with no paid tier, no newsletter upsell, and no “advanced” version behind a gate.
  2. Recommend a stock. No tickers to buy, no sectors to rotate into, no forecasts. The site teaches broad, boring, diversified investing precisely because it does not require anyone’s predictions — including ours.
  3. Pretend to be advice. Everything here is educational. Your situation, tax residence, and risk tolerance are yours; the decisions and their consequences are too.

Why bother writing it

Because most beginner investing content is either a sales funnel or a firehose. The sales funnels want your fear; the firehoses want your attention. What a beginner actually needs is shorter than both: a small number of durable principles, a specific order of operations, and honest warnings about the two or three ways people predictably hurt themselves. That fits in a checklist. Hence the name.

Data and privacy

The site collects anonymous usage data — page views and reading progress — and nothing else. No accounts, no emails, no advertising trackers, no sale of data to anyone. Collection only starts after you confirm the notice at the bottom of the page; decline it and nothing is recorded. The numbers exist to answer one question: which articles actually get finished, so the weak ones can be rewritten.

Mistakes

There will be some. This site deliberately has no comment box and no inbox: every claim, data source, and known limitation is written down in How this site works, and that page’s correction log is the single source of truth. When an error is found and survives checking, the article gets fixed — quietly for typos, with a dated note for anything that could have changed a decision. Being wrong in public and correcting it in public beats looking polished.

This page has a Chinese edition: 阅读本页中文版 →. The Chinese site is the larger, older sibling; this English edition is written by hand from the same principles, not machine-translated.