Investing 101
I’m a recently divorced woman whose ex didn’t believe in investing. I have some savings I’d like to invest in stock, but being from Europe I don’t understand the system well. I want to be neither too conservative, nor too risky ventures are my thing. Where should I start? I have about 100K ready to invest. Thank you! Clarification: I don’t need suggestions for companies where to invest. I need to understand how the system works, not shoot in the dark. Books? Classes? Websites? Agents? Consultants? What do I need to know?
Open an account at any broker and invest all of it in VTI. If you need that money for short term, put it in some online savings account.
If you don't know much, read about passive investing - indices and ETFs. If I were you, I'd put most of it in S&P and maybe diversify a little bit with bonds or foreign investments. Get some professional advice, e.g. from Fidelity. MS also has free financial webinars you could attend. Just take all of that professional advice with a grain of salt though. Another question is whether it is a good time to enter the stock market now. I won't comment on that, but you can read about dollar cost averaging.
(this is about long term investing over years, for short term you might be better of with other options)
Random Walk Down Wall Street is a good book. Bogleheads is a good wiki/forum (but can be dense and technical). Mr Money Mustache is a good blog. Vanguard is a good company and has the lowest fees.
Bogleheads or one of Jack Bogle's introductory books. Roboadvisors are also worth considering although personally I prefer a bunch of passive ETFs and mutual funds.
Boggleheads. Buy broad index funds. Save yourself lots of time and failure
My approach is low cost index ETF. Fidelity has many of them that are commission free. It also has a pretty good website that you can do your own research (like past return, top holdings, expense ratio, etc). It’s debatable whether do dollar cost averaging or just invest all if you have a lump sump. Going forward I’d recommend dollar cost averaging. You can also try Wealthfront, which basically does the DCA and rebalancing for you. But a brokerage gives you more control and flexibility and lower cost with the right ETFs. I don’t recommend stock picking. It’s just pretty hard to beat the market but you can try it for fun. Also max pretax 401k, yearly backdoor Roth IRA, and mega backdoor Roth IRA since MS got an awesome 401k plan. Also don’t forget ESPP.
MU WSB WTF? :)
JL Collins has a blog series on investing: http://jlcollinsnh.com/stock-series/ . Based on this he also wrote a book on investing in index funds. Basically, the main idea is that if you are Warren Buffet you can pick and choose stocks and make a lot of money in the long run. If you are just the avarage investor you will most probably lose money if you pick and choose, so you should do it the easy way and just invest in index funds which, it is said, that in the long run perform better than other managed mutual funds (blog/book explains why, no spoilers). The blog and the books are very easy and nice reads (more like a story than financial terms and ideas) and they may change your life :).
Buy some GE. They are really cheap right now and their CEO is doing a great job turning them around
Are you sure about this, they’re at an all time low. Do you think they’ll hit back atleast 20 per share?
Don’t buy GE.