Personal Finance

3912 readers

18 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 13 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

11 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] 3 points 12 hours ago (2 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] 9 points 11 hours ago

There’s quite a bit of research on lump sum investing vs dollar cost averaging. Here is one example: https://investor.vanguard.com/investor-resources-education/news/lump-sum-investing-versus-cost-averaging-which-is-better

Generally lump sum investing comes out ahead by a bit. However, my personal opinion is that it isn’t enough to always point to it and say that’s what you should do. If you’re more comfortable doing one over the other, then do it.

Generally time in the market beats timing the market, which is what you’d be doing by dollar cost averaging because you think the market is going to crash.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

Thank you! That's a good idea and I will keep that in mind.