Hi everyone, I have a small chunk of money saved up and want to get some investments going. I've taken classes in college and what not; however, I've never been comfortable to learn more and actually get started. Anyone have advice on sites that can guide me from the ground up? I would prefer a website that's more handholding, even if at the end of the day it depends on your goals in terms of risk and so forth.

Would appreciate some guidance on the topic. And yep, I'm aware I could probably just Google this, but... I like you guys too much!

I know this isn't the advice you want, but it's such an important part of the decision that I must emphasize it:
It all depends on these things:
- Your financial stability
- The time over which you'll be investing
- How much money you have
- Your sense of risk and reward

If you're in a stable position (employed, no debt, enough money for a 'cushion') and wish to invest long-term, then something like a Roth IRA would be good, where you're investing post-tax money and will get all the gains from it (you have to have the account a few years and be about 60 to avoid fines though; this is fine because it's intended to be a retirement account). Long term investment strategies give the most gain while still being mostly stable; unless you can make it your full time job, playing individual stocks is like playing slots.
There are also many, many mutual funds to choose from. Having taken classes before, you probably know this, but these funds are collections of stock and other assets that are managed to have a specific level of risk vs reward; you can purchase into these yourself, but if you don't know what you're doing, you might want to get some professional consultation. Keep in mind that you do have an up front fee for these funds, which you can not recover when you sell.
(I don't have an IRA or any mutual funds, because my financial situation doesn't allow it currently)

For short term investments (a couple of years), you have CDs and money market savings accounts; the rates on CDs are usually only slightly better than the savings accounts, but aren't liquid in the least, however, the bank accounts have minimum balance requirements and are usually tiered based on how much money you have in them (personally, I think that if you have the money to get the higher tiers, you should consider investing it in something with better gains).
(I have used CDs and one of these savings accounts; as a college student without consistent work, I decided that this was the best course for me until I have consistent income)

As for resources, I highly recommend Dave Ramsey's radio program for a consistent stream of money advice (I don't know if this goes over anything other than AM radio in the US, so if you're not in the States...). He has multiple programs intended to teach money management and basic investments; there are books, CDs (the audio kind), websites, classes, etc; he's pushed into every medium possible, excluding television (maybe). Beyond that, I don't really have any suggestions; I've only picked things up from that show and people I know; never took anything more than a basic economics class.

Anyway, I suggest you look up some of Dave Ramsey's products for the ground work; hopefully one of them fits your needs.

Also, here's a site where you can purchase mutual funds and such, conveniently on a page describing Roth IRAs (and trying to sell you one at the same time):
https://investor.vanguard.com/ira/roth-i...mpgn=PS:RE
Keep in mind that they'll be trying to sell you stuff, though.

Random walk down wall street is a pretty good book.

This guy has a pretty good book. He points out the limitations of averages which is a lesson most financial planners need.
http://retirementoptimizer.com/
I got the book via interlibrary loan

Stocks for the Long Run another good book.

I wouldn't follow the investment advice but "Your Money or Your Life" is pretty good for spending advice which is half the battle.

As for particulars of tax shelters and the like, I only know the Canadian system, I know nothing about the RRSP and TFSA equivalents elsewhere however they are easy to find out about.

Usually this kind of talk is just speculation and this has been mostly from casually reading through reddit and watching youtube predictions for the past week or so.

People say 2016 will be a 'historic' year in the sense many underlying issues within our* economic system will come out of the woodwork. These issues have been known for a while (printing money to pay off debt, banks manipulating the economy, bizarre loans by government(s), overwhelming debt, many other issues) but will reach a tipping point and become unmanageable by the end of this year, perhaps coinciding with China and Greece economies experiencing potential economic bursts.

*Our referring to the world's monetary exchange
*The dollar is currently the reserve currency
*Not quite certain how Europe / Japan / other major economies would be affected in this hypothetical situation

In other words, if all the commotion is accurate the value of the dollar may drop drastically within this year, although I'm not exactly sure how this change would affect stock value. Thus, much needed change or economic reform would occur as the issues become glaringly obvious. No one can predict the future but [economic collapse] is bound to happen eventually (our current economic state can't be maintained for much longer -- trillions of debt to who-knows-where).

Extravagant predictions like these occur every new year, so I / the internet may be totally wrong.
Feel free to correct me or provide more insight if I'm off-base.

There are people who predict the same outcomes for 40 years non stop. I suppose one day they will be right. Funny thing is that their arguments are often basically correct, just the resulting predictions overstate what happens.

(2016-01-16, 3:26 am)Aspiring Wrote: Usually this kind of talk is just speculation and this has been mostly from casually reading through reddit and watching youtube predictions for the past week or so.

I find this kind of thing really interesting but wouldn't know where to look to find discussion about it, would you mind you sharing the YouTube channel/video and what subreddit you're referring to?

I try to focus on sources where data presented far outweighs predictions made (unlike my post lol)

Alex Jones is one of the more entertaining figures who speaks on the topic. He recently posted a thorough documentary on the subject or a shorter version summarizing his views and predictions, over-exaggerated at times but informative.

X22Report's Youtube Channel is consistent but rambles and makes a lot of unnecessary claims, gets kinda repetitive.

r/economicCollapse is a smaller sub-reddit but provides good information

"Small chunk of money" isn't very descriptive really, nor do I really want to ask how much.

What I will say is this. You should run your monthly expenses (be conservative), and keep 6 months of expenses in the bank in case you end up unemployed suddenly or the like. If that basically amounts to your "small chunk" then just keep saving.

r/finance and r/investing are good sources for investing info. Generally though, I'd look at an Roth IRA or at mutuals for investing, something that is aimed at long term/retirement saving. I wouldn't bother with stocks directly too much since they require a bit too much attention and you are more likely to get burned when the market goes under.

Buy gold. Sell it in 20 years from now. Done.

Read the Bogleheads Wiki:
https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

Read "If You Can" by William J. Bernstein, a short 27-page intro.

Are you located in Japan?  If so, there may be some tweaks as far as the types of accounts you are allowed to open.

Unless you want to spend a good proportion of your time reading annual reports, earnings conference calls, and SEC fillings, I highly suggest buying a low cost, broad index fund in a retirement account.  Always keep in mind that you are trading against seasoned pros who have advanced degrees in math and finance from prestigious universities and they spend every day perfecting their craft and researching their investments.  Despite this, the majority of active funds and hedge funds can't do better than the indexes, and many of the funds that beat the indexes are probably outliers.

If you want to read some of the books mentioned, I still suggest parking most of your money in an index fund anyway while you get up to speed and play around with a paper account or small portion of your money until you have proven your strategies over several years.

Here's my classic investing book list:
The Intelligent Investor
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits
Margin Of Safety  <- available on p2p if you don't have $1600
Why Stocks go (up and down)
One Up on Wall Street
The Essays of Warren Buffett
You Can Be a Stock Market Genius  <-silly name, but good book

One more thing.  If you have a serious chunk of money, say several months of earnings or more, you may want to consider scaling in over several months/years.  Nobody is seriously considering another worldwide recession like happened ~2008, but the stock market is historically quite high at the moment and overbought by a number of comparisons.  See here, for instance:  Is the Stock Market Cheap?.  

Personally, I don't see another crash happening soon.  But I do feel like there are a few clues suggesting stocks could potentially be lower several years from now and caution is warranted.

(2016-01-19, 5:11 pm)yogert909 Wrote: Always keep in mind that you are trading against seasoned pros who have advanced degrees in math and finance from prestigious universities and they spend every day perfecting their craft and researching their investments. 

Seasoned pros are playing the short term game with turn arounds measured in weeks. Someone that learns Fundamentals should probably be fine in the long term. The other problem is that the pros do this as their job and so they have the time to constantly monitor the market and read the news affecting their portfolios.

Quote:Nobody is seriously considering another worldwide recession like happened ~2008, but the stock market is historically quite high at the moment and overbought by a number of comparisons.

This is questionable. In my opinion, the market never shed its toxic debt; there weren't any write offs on anything. What happened was that the government dumped loads of free money into the market in hopes of jump starting it again. It has worked and we've recovered to a certain extent, but there are still a lot of debt lying around that could rear up and poison well.

Some examples of potential major crisis.
China's real estate bubble and stock market: This could implode, but it hasn't since the government is trying to stop it from doing that.

US Student Debt: Student debt sits at about $1 trillion. There is a lot of it out there. Most students have at least $50k in debt and many are delinquet. The government owns a lot of this, but I'm sure there are a lot of banks and hedge funds that have their finger in this pie believing its safe because you can't get out of this debt through bankruptcy.

US Real estate: Is kind of back at where it was, but there are more safe guards in place. Still hasn't stopped the amount of mortgages from growing though. If you believe the job markets aren't that secure really, then this is another potential domino.

US Startups: There was a glut of investment in US startups; huge over evaluations, etc. This sector has soft landed in the past few months, but its worth keeping an eye out to see how investment firms move in comings years. This still could come back to bite us in the ass just like the DotCom bubble.

Euro zone: Greece is still kind of in the fire. Most countries that were close to the fire on this have already moved funds out of the country so that they won't get burned if Greece finally goes under. There is still a possibility though that if Greece does go down, that there might actually be some other hidden dominos that fall that no one realized.

Realize that all of these are dominos and that one crisis could easily trigger another one of these and cause some trouble. That said, there are always problems in the markets and there are always signs of major problems, but I don't think you should avoid investing. Just be smart with your money and don't invest anything you can't afford to lose.

(2016-01-20, 8:22 am)vix86 Wrote: That said, there are always problems in the markets and there are always signs of major problems, but I don't think you should avoid investing. Just be smart with your money and don't invest anything you can't afford to lose.

Also, don't invest money you think you'll need within five years or so. If the market dips but you can leave the money in there you'll get the benefit when it starts to go up again; if you have to pull it out for some urgent need you'll end up making a loss. Having enough 'cushion' in a straightforward short-notice access savings account or similar is important.

(2016-01-20, 8:22 am)vix86 Wrote:

(2016-01-19, 5:11 pm)yogert909 Wrote: Nobody is seriously considering another worldwide recession like happened ~2008, but the stock market is historically quite high at the moment and overbought by a number of comparisons.

This is questionable. In my opinion, the market never shed its toxic debt; there weren't any write offs on anything. What happened was that the government dumped loads of free money into the market in hopes of jump starting it again. It has worked and we've recovered to a certain extent, but there are still a lot of debt lying around that could rear up and poison well.

Oh sure, I'm sorry that I didn't write that very well. What I meant to say was that I don't expect a meltdown in the next year or two, but there is good reason to suspect there are major time bombs ticking (like the ones you mention) out there from all of the easy money of the last 8 years. I believe it strongly enough that 1/3 of my retirement portfolio has been in cash for the last year - just in case. I'll take more off if the market starts making significant new highs again, but it seems to be going the opposite direction the last few weeks.

I agree that an index fund should be fine for funds that you won't need for at least 5 years. One thing you will learn is that someone always is predicting the market will crash horribly sometime soon, no matter what the market looks like. The first lesson is to avoid listening to people like that. I have a friend who has been predicting that the stock market is about to crash horribly for at least 15 years. He thinks he's been a brilliant analyst. It gets old.

That list of books looks good to me. There's also a series of books about Warren Buffett that are good. Here's one:

http://www.amazon.com/Warren-Buffett-Int...en+buffett

It's by one of his daughters in law.

Seems a bit misinformed but very well. If anything the world could benefit from improving the economy in ways which do not simply sidestep economic crashes. Maybe removing or reducing the cyclical nature of the economy itself, which is designed in a way where an economic downturn is inevitable.

@Aspiring
A globally planned economy, huh... Sounds a bit too much like a new world order to me...

(2016-01-20, 10:05 pm)sholum Wrote: @Aspiring
A globally planned economy, huh... Sounds a bit too much like a new world order to me...

You wouldn't need global planning in order to have a more stable economy.  Actually global planning wouldn't make much sense as you would have to have too many disparate governments agreeing with each other. It would be a larger scale version of all the troubles the euro has been causing the club med countries for the last half decade.

We already have some safeguards in place via the federal reserve, various national banks, and the IMF.  There were some pretty bad crashes and bank runs in the bad old days before the federal reserve banking system was set up.  I've often fantasized about a scheme where congress would approve certain infrastructure projects in advance that would be triggered when unemployment hit a certain level.  Realizing how politics works, I'm not holding my breath.

(2016-01-20, 10:17 pm)yogert909 Wrote:

(2016-01-20, 10:05 pm)sholum Wrote: @Aspiring
A globally planned economy, huh... Sounds a bit too much like a new world order to me...

You wouldn't need global planning in order to have a more stable economy.  Actually global planning wouldn't make much sense as you would have to have too many disparate governments agreeing with each other.  It would be a larger scale version of all the troubles the euro has been causing the club med countries for the last half decade.

We already have some safeguards in place via the federal reserve, various national banks, and the IMF.  There were some pretty bad crashes and bank runs in the bad old days before the federal reserve banking system was set up.  I've often fantasized about a scheme where congress would approve certain infrastructure projects in advance that would be triggered when unemployment hit a certain level.  Realizing how politics works, I'm not holding my breath.

I see, that sounds pretty interesting (better than the options we have now), but the question remains: where does the money come from?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of putting people to work to get the economy on track (rather than just printing worthless greenbacks as a stimulus, which actually worsens the economy in the long run by speeding up inflation), but for large countries that rely on international and domestic debts, public works programs seem to only help the people feel like things are getting better. That's an important thing (optimistic consumers purchase more), but it seems to ignore the root of the problem.

Anyway, I haven't studied economics much (I care about personal finance more), so all I have are concerns, rather than theories or proven facts. (This is the fancy way of saying: 'I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I have some kind of opinion anyway')
My comment to Aspiring came from the portion of their comment saying that the cyclical nature of the economy needed removing. Cushions and works programs are just their to soften the blow of downturns; they don't actually do anything to the direction of the economy itself. That's why it sounded like a call for a planned economy to me; I guess I read wrong.

From what I remember, though, the long term trend of the market has always been up; I don't know if this is because more and more people were trading (and thus, going to be limited eventually) or if it's just the nature of the market.

Anyway, to keep it somewhat on topic:
The most important point for growing your personal wealth is to avoid purchasing with debt. It kind of works on large scale because corporations have a lot available for collateral, and can usually ensure they'll increase their wealth beyond their debt over a given time frame, especially if they have multiple, varying businesses.

An individual has no real collateral unless they own land. Playing with debt is dangerous unless you can (and remember to) pay it off immediately (I know people who do this with hotel point cards and cash back cards).
For most things, it's best to pay cash instead of taking on debt. Every bit of personal finance advice I've seen says that the only debt that's remotely acceptable is for a house or medical emergency.

(2016-01-20, 10:05 pm)s holum Wrote: @Aspiring
A globally planned economy, huh... Sounds a bit too much like a new world order to me...

Or, minor modifications which improve consistency throughout the entire economy.

One possible change: decrease competition and reigns on trade
Multiple currencies brings about inflation through micro-changes in value and competition in the day-to-day market. A single currency or even two or three would make market activity more smooth and possibly lead to deflation. Reducing barriers to trade would also improve market spread / diversification and decrease market reliance on single currencies or individual countries performing well.

Countries as isolated economies tend to look for loopholes or policies which ensure they one-up one another. And as mentioned many would disagree with a single regulatory organization. Maybe multiple economies could harmonize(?) their economies to strengthen the global economy, but this would risk alliances and could lead to poorer countries straggling, so every country would need to be involved. So we either retain a competition based isolationist market economy or band together globally without becoming North Korea (communism) and avoiding monopolies.

Imperialism still lingers and affects how our economies run, a mindset of every country for themselves. On the other hand, many resist changes which hint at a totalitarian world government, or a New World Order, precisely because of the power dynamics which keeps countries separated and 'independent'. Presumably, if the world were to work together on the premise of helping each other instead of deciding which country is most powerful, a New World Order is improbable. Finding a balance between independence-nationalism and cooperation-communism between countries is certainly possible and would probably be one of the major factors in stabilizing world economies.

(2016-01-16, 1:58 am)Dudeist Wrote: Random walk down wall street is a pretty good book.

I second the motion. This advice is to invest in mutual funds with the greatest diversification and lowest fees.
I followed the advice and I'm much richer now than I was 10 years ago.

(2016-01-20, 11:43 pm)sholum Wrote: Anyway, to keep it somewhat on topic:
The most important point for growing your personal wealth is to avoid purchasing with debt. It kind of works on large scale because corporations have a lot available for collateral, and can usually ensure they'll increase their wealth beyond their debt over a given time frame, especially if they have multiple, varying businesses.

An individual has no real collateral unless they own land. Playing with debt is dangerous unless you can (and remember to) pay it off immediately (I know people who do this with hotel point cards and cash back cards).
For most things, it's best to pay cash instead of taking on debt. Every bit of personal finance advice I've seen says that the only debt that's remotely acceptable is for a house or medical emergency.

This is generally great advice if you are talking about high interest revolving(credit card) debt for consumer goods. But if your cost of capital(interest rate) is lower then your rate of return, then taking on debt is an excellent idea. This is the general principal that the majority of businesses operate under and some make it their sole business (banks, mortgage reits, etc).

An example of how it might be a good idea for you or I to take on debt would be buying a second home as an income property. As long as you can be sure your revenue from the rent payments are greater then the interest on your loan + expenses, you are making money - even it doesn't cover the entire loan payment. Of course you want to make sure that the rent checks cover your costs by a comfortable margin to account of vacancies and unexpected repairs and so on. But that's one instance where taking on debt makes economic sense. Another example would be a medical or law degree provided you graduate. I should also mention that when considering taking on debt, make your plans based on the worst case scenario, not the best case because debt multiplies the effect of mistakes.

(2016-01-21, 11:42 am)jcdietz03 Wrote:

(2016-01-16, 1:58 am)Dudeist Wrote: Random walk down wall street is a pretty good book.

I second the motion. This advice is to invest in mutual funds with the greatest diversification and lowest fees.
I followed the advice and I'm much richer now than I was 10 years ago.

Got some ideas on what companies to look into that offer these types of funds? This is where I don't know how to begin. I'm more than happy to just get a mutual fund and save that way. Not interested in getting into deep and being that guy at work with a stock ticker always open.

(2016-01-21, 3:39 pm)TheVinster Wrote:

(2016-01-21, 11:42 am)jcdietz03 Wrote:

(2016-01-16, 1:58 am)Dudeist Wrote: Random walk down wall street is a pretty good book.

I second the motion. This advice is to invest in mutual funds with the greatest diversification and lowest fees.
I followed the advice and I'm much richer now than I was 10 years ago.

Got some ideas on what companies to look into that offer these types of funds? This is where I don't know how to begin. I'm more than happy to just get a mutual fund and save that way. Not interested in getting into deep and being that guy at work with a stock ticker always open.

I believe Blackrock offers some ETFs that offer very low MER [yearly fees] You can buy and sell them as stocks.
They might go under the name Ishares, it's been a while since I went there. Might be better out there.
I know they are offered on the Canadian Exchanges and they have funds that cover loads of sectors and more global funds.