Hi all! I would like to invest about $500 to $1000 every month for the long haul! I would like to know if anyone has any recommendations or ideas. I am looking for some sort of an aggressive but very diversified strategy. (Diversification is very important to me)! I am open to any investment vehicles domestic and foreign such as stocks, mutual funds, bond funds, ETFs etc. as long as it is diversified and as long as I don't have to baby sit this account and shift stuff around. The account will be a taxable NON-IRA account and am looking for 10%-15%+ annual return for the long term (over 10 to 15 years+)! I would appreciate any ideas and recommendations that fits the criteria. Bluedog
at Motley Fool.com they have a mechanical investment strategy board/section, they screen stocks for relative strength, and other technical studies. But they seem to outperform the indices by a good margin in a favorable equity environment. Do your due diligence, when adopting a technique your not familiar with.
As much as I would like to invest in individual stocks or ETF's, it is hard to invest $500 increments in high priced stocks or ETFs and still try to diversify...
Index ETFs already have built-in diversification. Buying 1 unit of SPY is like buying 500 stocks at the same time. Use website like Sogoinvest.com, you pay $3 commission every month to put aside that $500 in any type of ETFs.
you are coming in at a time when many insitutions are going to cash or looking to short. We have had aver a 4 year bull run and the ol bull is getting tired for the time being. if you are not very knowledgable about the markets...you can really get hammered in times like these...and you dont want to get beat up right out of the gate...it is not a fun way to get started. I would be in a money market fund or bonds for the time being until after the market takes its down cycle. which it is due for. Dont ever believe in the theory of "dollar cost averaging" either...that is bunk. dont buy in to a shrinking asset, buy into an a growing asset. good luck.
Fidelity investments is very good for the small individual investor, low minimums, friendly customer services, good web interface, no hidden fees, etc. I don't use them for short term trading, but all my IRA and "buy and hold" stuff is with them. You can set up something called "automatic investments" to link your fidelity account to your bank account. Then you can tell it to buy $500 of mutual fund ABCDE and $500 of VWXYZ on, say, the 15th of every month and it will do it for you. No reminders, no forgetting to do it, most importantly no second guessing yourself if the market is way up or way down that month. Off the top of my head, I would say split your assets between FSTMX (US Total Market Index Fund) and FSIIX (International Index). Throw in 10% to a bond fund (IE: FTBFX) if you want some diversification into fixed income. Got your US allocation covered, your international allocation covered, your large caps, your small caps, heavily diversified, zero maintenance other than periodic rebalancing. Indexing generally beats most of the actively managed funds out there. Mainly because the fees on these funds are super low. Both the stock index funds have an expense ratio of 0.10%. However if you don't have at least $10k in each fund, they charge an annual fee of $10 ea. That is still pretty cheap. I'm sure you could do something similar with Vanguard family of index funds too, but I don't have any experience with them in particular.
Vorpal, Thank you for the advice. The two funds you mentioned seem like great funds and well diversified. I will add them to my list. Bluedog
Anyone knows of any good bear funds I can add to the mix?! I assume this would be a good entry point for bear/defensive funds or stocks. The small portfolio I started in January has done really well so far. I don't wan to trade anything frequently in this account so I would like to add some bear funds or defensive instruments as well as some more long choices.. Bluedog