Each week BusinessDesk and the NZ Herald's Cooking the Books podcast tackles a different money problem. Today, it's strategies to help out DIY investors. Hosted by Frances Cook.

One of the big trends of the last few years has been people trying out shares investing by themselves. 

Let's declare upfront, overall I'm a big fan of this. 

That people can now build their wealth and plan for the future by just logging into a website and putting in a few bucks is fantastic, and creates the opportunity for more people to have financial security. 

But every silver lining does have a cloud, and there can be downsides to this trend too. 

If you want to be a smart investor it helps to know the pitfalls ahead of time, so that you can avoid them. 

For the latest podcast I talked to InvestNow founder and managing director, Anthony Edmonds.

• If you have a question about this podcast, or a question you'd like answered in the next one, come and talk to me about it. I'm on Facebook here,  Instagram here, and Twitter here