The Best Investment to Make in 2023 Is in Yourself
From learning new skills to cultivating interests and relationships, investments of time and money now can pay off in the years ahead
3 min
Want your stock to rise in 2023?
The same principles investors use to build wealth can be applied to enriching yourself in other ways. Just as we buy stocks and bonds to generate financial growth, we can build a portfolio of how we spend our time and money now that pays off in the months and years ahead.
Investments in ourselves, or what economists call our human capital, can be a more productive way to frame efforts for bettering our lives. Diane Ring, interim dean and professor of law at Boston College, has previously researched new developments in human capital investments and the sharing economy. She points to three major categories of growth that can be nurtured by investing in ourselves: professional, personal and health.
“Those buckets are all connected,” she said. “Think of it as wanting different kinds of returns for yourself. They’re all slightly different, but still moving toward stability, with the aim to retire in a way that seems to make sense for ourselves and our plans.”
You can use the same ideas that guide your personal finance goals to invest in your career, well-being and happiness. By focusing on these three buckets, you can make strides on your 2023 goals.
Set a long time horizon
Investing in your long-term success goes beyond one-and-done actions like joining a gym or stocking your closet with professional attire. These goals for the future require management and attention to develop rewards later on—just like managing your stock portfolio.
“Investment means, at the core, planting a seed and then getting returns down the road,” said Megan McCoy, assistant professor of personal financial planning at Kansas State University. “It has to be a path.”
To do this, Prof. McCoy said it is best to envision your investment as a long road with multiple steppingstones. Each step helps you visualise yourself one step closer to the end goal. These same steps also provide opportunities to check in and ask yourself the big questions about how your investment is performing.
“Everyone is so over scheduled, and I feel like everybody is just surviving rather than saying, ‘What is giving me intellectual stimulation? What is my purpose? What is my passion? What am I doing any of this for?’” Prof. McCoy said. “Make time to develop these internal maps.”
Don’t forget to diversify
Just as you wouldn’t want to over invest in a single stock, Prof. Ring said, neither would you want to put too much energy toward a single goal at the expense of your other interests.
Divide your time and attention equally among the career and financial investment, personal investment and investment in health. Over investing in one bucket may weaken the other two, just as when putting all too much money into a single company or industry can hurt your overall stock portfolio.
In self-investment, we have to safeguard ourselves against burning out too soon, Prof. Ring said.
“If we’re pushing so hard on the financial side, maybe picking up an extra job on the weekends, ask, ‘Does this put a strain on the personal and health side of things? That could impact your ability to perform at work,’” she said.
Pay yourself dividends
Research shows people are much more successful at accomplishing a goal when they build in rewards and other incentives along the way, said Katy Milkman, professor of operations, information and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania.
In a 2021 study, Prof. Milkman and her colleague Angela Duckworth, a professor who co-directs the Behavior Change for Good Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania with Prof. Milkman, looked at how incentive programs affected gym attendance. In one finding, gym goers who missed a workout received an extra incentive—bonus points they could convert to cash—if they returned after a missed workout. Compared with a placebo control group, this incentive program increased gym visits by 27%.
Rewards help turn a long-term goal—such as starting a new hobby to enrich your retirement years or more carefully considering how you use your working hours—into a series of short-term pursuits.
Prof. Milkman calls this strategy “temptation bundling.” Combining certain tasks with a reward can help them feel less like chores, she said.
“If you are bundling it with something that’s super fun for you, like saying ‘I only get to open my favourite bubbly wine when I’m making a fresh meal for my family’ or ‘I am only allowed to binge watch my favourite TV show when I’m at the gym,’ you see more success.”
This strategy also allows us to reframe these aspirations as fun things, rather than financial chores or burdensome tasks.
Bringing friends, joining a group or finding a way to make a long-term commitment more social helps more people see their goal through to completion, Prof. Milkman said. Even after you’ve accomplished several steps, you may find that sharing your progress with others and playing the role of “advice giver” leads to progress on your own goals.
“When we coach other people on something we’re also hoping to achieve, we also see better outcomes in ourselves,” she said. “So advice giving helps the advice giver.
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Gold miners are emerging as a compelling way to navigate market uncertainty, with analysts pointing to strong cash flows, attractive valuations and rising profit margins. As gold prices stabilize above US$4,000 an ounce, mining stocks could offer investors both downside protection and long-term upside.
3 min
Gold is one of the market’s go-to hedges in rocky times. Don’t forget that gold miners’ stocks are too.
The stock market’s gains in 2026 belie the rocky macroeconomic picture: elevated inflation, heightened geopolitical tensions, and jitters about the artificial-intelligence trade. That backdrop, in theory, should be the time for gold to shine. Instead, the price of the yellow metal has tumbled more than 5% so far, after last year’s blistering 65% rally. In part, the U.S. dollar’s recovery has stymied gold, which benefited from the greenback’s weakness in 2025.
Even with the precious metal’s recent weakness, gold mining stocks could be the best way to profit from this year’s uncertainty.
Gold miners “are a valuable hedge against macro risks that would likely be damaging for equities,” BCA Research’s Noah Weisberger and Rishabh Shah wrote this week.
Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s next moves to tackle inflation, the increasingly crowded AI trade, and steep valuations for tech stocks are just some of the drivers that could help gold’s price get on even footing— and lead to even bigger gains for miner stocks.
These stocks’ prices tend to outpace gold’s moves, because the companies have fixed operational costs. So when gold’s price rallies, their profit margins soar, and vice versa. For instance, the VanEck Gold Miners GDX +7.39% exchange-traded fund has fallen 11% this year as the metal has slumped.
Now, gold’s price just needs to stabilize to help miners’ stocks take off, and that seems to be happening. The precious metal has recently found support above the $4,000 level, and has stuck in a narrow range since the end of June. But its price rose ever so slightly in July, ending a four-month losing streak for the metal. Technical analysis also suggests that gold is due for a comeback.
Barron’s recently wrote that the pullbacks for both gold miners and the metal itself are overdone. Senior technical analyst Doug Busch noted that the VanEck ETF is on the “verge of a breakout” and has the potential to hit $11o in early 2027, up more than 40% from its current price.
Gold miners also have more than their role as a market hedge going for them. Their fundamentals are solid, too, says Chris Mancini, portfolio co-manager of the Gabelli Gold Fund.
“Precious metals miners are generating substantial amounts of free cash flow given profit margins of over $2,000 per ounce, and are returning this cash to shareholders through buybacks and dividends,” he said in an email.
“Buying the miners is a cheap way to get exposure to the price of gold,” he added. His fund owns Newmont NEM +6.71%, a Barron’s stock pick last year, and Agnico Eagle Mines as top holdings, as well as miners Northern Star Resources, Endeavour Mining, and Kinross Gold K+8.59%.
Miners are better businesses than they used to be, the BCA team added.
“Capex is more disciplined, margins are high and rising…and they are largely independent of the AI story,” Weisberger, BCA’s head of equities, and Shah, a senior analyst, wrote.
That last part is key. AI is disrupting the software industry and many other services and information-oriented businesses, and investors have piled into AI stocks. But ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and other large-language models aren’t going to replace the need to mine for metals.
“Equity portfolios can benefit from exposure to quality that is uncorrelated to AI risk, and gold miners fit the bill,” the BCA team said.
They recommend that investors buy the VanEck Gold Miners ETF, which owns top miners such as Agnico, Barrick Mining ABX +7.24%, and Newmont.
An important bonus for big gold miners’ stocks is that their valuations are attractive after the gold’s pullback, too. The VanEck ETF is now trading at just a little more than nine times next year’s earnings estimates. That’s a big discount to its five-year average price-to-earnings ratio of 14, according to FactSet.
What’s more, the ETF is currently valued at a more than 50% discount to the S&P 500 SPX -0.17%, which is trading for about 19 times earnings estimates for 2027. Mining stocks have typically traded at just a 25% discount to the broader market over the past five years. So there is significant upside for the group if valuations move back toward normal levels.
One factor that complicates mining stocks as a market hedge, of course, is if stocks bounce back, which has been the case so far in August.
But both the market and economic outlooks remain cloudy, and investors remain nervous about the Fed’s next moves and AI stocks. Gold miners should do just fine, even if the anxious mood on Wall Street persists.
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