[shoo]

While not directly answering your question re: choice of funds, i personally found reading the following books helpful:

  1. "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" - Burton Malkiel
  2. "Fooled by Randomness" - Nassim Taleb
  3. "The Little Book of Value Investing" - Christopher Browne

I suggest avoiding investing in things that you don't understand. You can keep learning and make small-scale experiments over time.

I started off with vanguard ETFs indexing the whole market, then after a year or so read about measures of long-term valuation like CAPE and started buying into country-specific ETFs that seemed undervalued by those metrics, then kept reading about value investing, portfolio theory, etc, and am now mucking around selecting and buying stocks of individual companies. This is not necessarily a sound investment idea, or a good use of time, but is something of a hobby.