3 Investing Takeaways Before I See Ya in September!
/We have a few weeks left before it’s “back to school” and “back to work,” and thus I’m saying goodbye for the remaining weeks of summer. Yup, I work hard to play hard and it’s break time.
I told you that I’m all about an Olympian attitude, and it’s time to finish strong.
So, I figured I’d leave you with 3 takeaways before I head out:
Stock Trifecta – Last week, all three major indices reached new heights on the same day last week. And, by major, I mean the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Nasdaq Composite, and the S&P 500 Index. Forget what these mean? No worries – check out my video on the stock market.
Why should you care? Because you should be thinking about how your portfolio has been doing and whether you should rebalance or taking profits somewhere. Remember, stocks don’t continue to go up forever. Most people, including myself, are horrible at timing the market and thus, staying disciplined on rebalancing is key.
Is Facebook Really Worth an Investment? Yes, Zuckerberg has been all over the news for his desire to put an Oculus on all 1.7 BILLION Facebook users. If you missed the Bloomberg article about it, check it out here. I spent some time with my mother’s investment club over the last month and they weighed the pros and cons of investing more money into this one (Don’t worry – I got permission to write about it).
Before you start pondering whether you want to invest in the individual stock, check out your current mutual funds or ETFs and see if you already own Facebook shares. Many people want to own the stock outright, but you might benefit from the diversification that comes with owning Facebook as part of a larger portfolio.
My Roboadvisor Account Disappointed. In last week’s post on the Rio Olympics, I told you that I would let you know the results of my 1-year use of the roboadvisor Betterment. I analyzed the results and it is clear that I underperformed the S&P 500 Index over the same time period even though I held 90% stocks and 10% bonds.
When I dug deeper, a big reason that I didn’t keep up is that my portfolio had some international stock exposure (shall I remind you of Brexit???). More alarming is that account FEEs ate up some of my returns. Because I only invested $50 per month, I had to pay $3 per month in fees. While that doesn’t seem like a lot, it’s 6% ($3 divided by $50) of my monthly investment – Yikes! I have yet to get a hold of Betterment’s customer service, but when I do, we will walk through the details.
My recommendation? If you’re going to use Betterment, auto-deposit at least $100 per month so that the annual fee is 0.35% on assets.
Well, it’s been real this summer. I hope you get your break on and enjoy time with family and friends. And, if you have a good money book that you want to recommend to me, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below. I’m going to need lots to reading material on long my trip to Japan in a few weeks.
Enjoy Labor Day, and I’ll be back in mid-Setpember!
