Ask HN: Where do you invest online? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Where do you invest online?

5 pointsmaguay11 comments

I'm looking into investing into stocks/bonds and potentially an IRA, and was wondering what online broker others are using. Any reason why you picked the one you did?

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Sharebuilder. Super low fees for buying stocks/ETFs, they have good automated investment options, and you can buy partial shares. This means that if you are doing, e.g., $250 a month in a Roth IRA and telling it to buy $1,000 of shares in an index fund ETF every time it hits $1,000 balance, this will result in vanishingly little loss to trading fees and you'll always get that $1,000 invested no matter what the share price is.

It automatically grabs money from my main checking account every week from April to December ($100 a week because the yearly limit on a Roth IRA is $5k) and I top it off when I do my taxes every year. That's also when I take a look at the portfolio and set it to put money towards whatever bit needs rebalancing. About 75% of my money gets invested in index fund ETFs and 25% in funny-money investments. I understand that the math is very much against me if I pick stocks for myself but, hey, I played WoW and enjoy the feeling of seeing pixels move on command, so that 25% is essentially buying myself permission to not touch the other 75% ever. (Ironically, I lucked out on one of my picks -- Chipotle -- and now burritos are a larger contributor to my net worth than anything but bingo cards.)

I understand that the math is very much against me if I pick stocks for myself...

Don't sell yourself short! If you learn a few things about how to value companies and if you're really disciplined about waiting for great opportunities (with the proper margin of safety) and letting undervalued prices turn rational again, the math is on your side. Picking a good stock is very similar to buying into a good business.

This is more or less the opposite of the conventional wisdom on this topic; Malkiel, Bernstein, Swensen, Andrew Tobias all wrote whole books more or less dedicated to the premise that you should invest passively through indexing.

Here's a great Derek Sivers comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157768

I'm sure a bit of stock picking isn't going to kill you, as long as your portfolio is mostly passive. (Every time this discussion comes up, someone points out Malkiel picks a few stocks for himself).

On the other hand, there is a whole financial industry lined up more or less directly against your interests in picking stocks; they have better research, direct access to company principals, influence over the markets, a drastically lower cost of trading, and the ability to wait out irrational conditions far longer than you can stay liquid.

I'm doing what Sivers suggested; it makes sense to me.

On the other hand, I've been telling a friend of mine to stop investing Apple since, oh, 2006. So, grain of salt.

Passive investing through indexing is great. If your investment philosophy is "I want to make decent returns without researching companies or exploring financial statements" then indexing is the right approach.

Note however that the choice between "smart investing" and "hyperactive investing" is a false dilemma. Timing the market and worrying about technical analysis is definitely a way to lose money to traders with quicker access to information and greater ability to profit from arbitrage. Solin's comments on the marketplace of financial experts is right, but indexing isn't the only way to avoid that mess.

Sure, 80% of my portfolio is in a couple of indexes, but that other 20% I don't count as mad money. I don't make blind guesses; I'm very careful about where I put it. So far my strategy of five or six smart trades a year has paid off very well. That's hardly day trading.

I suspect the ratio of 80/20 will get change in favor of active investments as I get more confident.

Your 5 trades per year, just curious, how many of them are in any way related to tech?

I only hold one tech-related stock directly. It's a semiconductor company where a good friend works, so I have a decent understanding of the business and its prospects. I've made about 400% on it in five years.

Interesting. One reason I'm wary of picking stocks is that most of my expertise is in technology; if my field goes south, I don't want my investments tracking it. But you don't have that problem. I'm worried I would; my best picks have always ended up being tech companies.

Your concern is valid. You do want to invest in companies you understand, but you don't have to be an expert. (It helps, especially if you're looking for what Peter Lynch calls an edge.) I approach things from the other direction: I wrote my own stock screener that analyzes financial reports and suggests companies which might be dramatically undervalued at their current prices. If a few minutes of research on my own reveal that I don't understand the business or that the numbers are obviously skewed by something which jumps out (the company increased its free cash dramatically by taking out hundreds of millions of dollars of short term financing and that skews the return on invested cash numbers), then I look further.

If I don't understand the company or the industry, or if it's a coinflip either way of being undervalued, I move on.

As a concrete example, I have a pretty good idea of what Apple makes and where it can sell and where it might go in the future, but I don't believe it can keep up the 30% returns on invested cash rate for the next ten years. I don't buy it.

Maybe I'm wrong in that case, but my backtests work even with eyeballing numbers.

Thank you so much for the advice! Sharebuilder, for a number of reasons, looked like a good choice to me so far, so it's nice to hear your thoughts on it.

Now, to find my own Chipotle for 2012...

check out vanguard mutual finds, funds such as VSCGX, VASGX, VASIX, VSMGX are all very diversely balanced and their past performances weren't too shabby consider how low risk the funds are. if you were looking to take risks and actively buy/sell your positions, then those funds arent for you. but if you are looking to just grow your money conservatively because online savings are pay close to 0%, these funds are the right vehicles for your investment. as with all investments, do your homework and research and never put down what you cannot lose.

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