Personal Finance

3944 readers

2 users here now

Learn about budgeting, saving, getting out of debt, credit, investing, and retirement planning. Join our community, read the PF Wiki, and get on top of your finances!

Note: This community is not region centric, so if you are posting anything specific to a certain region, kindly specify that in the title (something like [USA], [EU], [AUS] etc.)

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Investing in S&P 500. Which broker to use? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm a complete newbie. The only "investing" I've ever done is use HYSAs. Obviously the yield there, while pretty good, isn't as good as investing in say, the S&P 500. So I want to invest a chunk of my savings into that and just leave it there until I retire. I'm not really looking into daily/active trading or anything. The problem is I don't know how fees work with brokers.

I saw this graph a while ago so I was thinking of Fidelty. It also helps that I already have an account there for my employer RSUs and my 401k. On the other hand, a colleague of mine suggested Schwab and said they don't have any fees.

Can anyone suggest the best broker (minimal/no fees, easy-to-use, set-and-forget) that I should go with if I just want to invest in the S&P 500?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Just a tip, don't dump it all in at once. Spread it out over 12 months or so. This will prevent losing too much money when the market crashes. It is called dollar-cost averaging.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

That’s kind of dollar cost averaging.

It’s also kind of attempting to time the market.

If you invest $100k in one lump sum in this year and it drops 50% but you then hold it for 30 years before selling I’m quite sure you’ll come out ahead. Of course the difference in what you’d make splitting that $100k investment over 12 months is minimal over that time frame but by investing it all you at least get dividends and lock in a price. The market goes up as well, wouldn’t you hate if your dollar cost average increased?

TL;DR You are far better off just investing a lump sum all at once and then regularly investing what you can.

You want to maximise the time that your money is in the market.

If you can’t stomach a 50% loss then you need to work out why that’s the case.

load more comments (3 replies)