I discourage you from buying individual stocks unless you know what you’re doing.
If you must invest in investment banks, consider XLF, the largest ETF for the Financials sector. Top 10 holdings in order are: WFC, JPM, BRK/B, BAC, C, AXP, USB, AIG, GS, and MET. These 10 holdings together account for 50.32% of XLF.
Price is currently $21.48, well off its high of $38.15 before the financial crisis. You’d have been better off in a total stock market index like FSTMX or VTSMX. If you bought $10k of these funds in February 2004 and reinvested dividends, you’d have $20,500, whereas you’d barely be at $9k today with XLF.
People think about how they could have doubled or tripled their money buying off a stock’s lows, when history shows the average clueless investor/trader is more likely to have had a 50% loss.
Stick with the Bogleheads investing philosophy of keeping all your money in a few low-cost index funds such as those offered by Vanguard and Fidelity. 90 percent of the time people try to take the stock market into their own hands, they lose money or fail to match the market’s returns while wasting time and emotional energy that could have been used elsewhere. After you develop your own consistently successful investing/trading strategy while also maintaining the discipline to not fuck it up, you can designate a small percentage of your portfolio for that. The stock market will always be there.
All throughout 2013, everyone was trying to pick a top, pointing to economic events both here and overseas, saying the market was rising on low volume and only because of the Fed, and that we were way extended, and guess what? We never even got a meaningful correction. 90 percent of stock market “experts” don’t know shit.
p.s. I don’t think WestCoast is angry at all. I’m probably coming off the same way just because I’m trying to keep people from getting burned or missing out on better investing opportunities in index funds.
If you must invest in investment banks, consider XLF, the largest ETF for the Financials sector. Top 10 holdings in order are: WFC, JPM, BRK/B, BAC, C, AXP, USB, AIG, GS, and MET. These 10 holdings together account for 50.32% of XLF.
Price is currently $21.48, well off its high of $38.15 before the financial crisis. You’d have been better off in a total stock market index like FSTMX or VTSMX. If you bought $10k of these funds in February 2004 and reinvested dividends, you’d have $20,500, whereas you’d barely be at $9k today with XLF.
People think about how they could have doubled or tripled their money buying off a stock’s lows, when history shows the average clueless investor/trader is more likely to have had a 50% loss.
Stick with the Bogleheads investing philosophy of keeping all your money in a few low-cost index funds such as those offered by Vanguard and Fidelity. 90 percent of the time people try to take the stock market into their own hands, they lose money or fail to match the market’s returns while wasting time and emotional energy that could have been used elsewhere. After you develop your own consistently successful investing/trading strategy while also maintaining the discipline to not fuck it up, you can designate a small percentage of your portfolio for that. The stock market will always be there.
All throughout 2013, everyone was trying to pick a top, pointing to economic events both here and overseas, saying the market was rising on low volume and only because of the Fed, and that we were way extended, and guess what? We never even got a meaningful correction. 90 percent of stock market “experts” don’t know shit.
p.s. I don’t think WestCoast is angry at all. I’m probably coming off the same way just because I’m trying to keep people from getting burned or missing out on better investing opportunities in index funds.