It's easy; find a good broker and trust him. The problem, obviously is finding a good broker. That's tough because depending on the type of client you are you will have access to different types of brokerage services.
Now if you don't have a lot, then there are a few things you can do, if you know little about the market you can invest in ETF. ETF can be great because the fees are minuscule. If you have a regular brokerage account and they charge a 1% fee over 10 years it's 15% of your total return that has gone away, if you bought a ETF, where fees can be as low as 1 tenth of a percent, then it is worthwhile. Now there are two types of ETF...
You see where I am going with this. Investing is hard work, finding a good broker is also hard because their interests are not aligned with yours. Some brokers like to trade a lot, which will cost you as an investor. You are not Warren Buffet, but WB would buy stock and hold it for years, decades even. Now he did a lot of other stuff too, despite talking shit about derivatives he was one of the biggest derivatives players on Wall Street.
Investing takes time and energy. Because I worked for a fund manager most of my money was managed internally, but I still had to read brokerage reports on my portfolio companies, I had to understand the "ride I was taking with them". I am always amazed that guys will read car magazines every day for hours but will only spend 10 minutes a month to understand what they bought as investments.
The reason I am discussing this today is that at lunch today I spent three hours with my broker, he has been my broker for 30 years. We started at the company at the same time, we were both in the trainee program. I went one way, he went the other! Bernard is now thinking of retiring and we started the long process of finding his replacement. It's not easy, we had talked about several up-and-coming new brokers that could replace him, but neither he nor I were convinced. Funny enough he came up with a new idea. Years ago there was this young broker who was excellent, but at one point she wanted to have children...yes she started in the early 00s in the City, to put it mildly, a tough gig. She's now been back for about three years and is looking to expand her book. She took a 15-year sabbatical to have her kids.
Bernard is up for the weekend, and we spent lunchtime at the local over a few pints (we walked from the farm). He's also a great source of gossip, always a lot of fun to hear about old colleagues. The reason it took three hours is that over the past 12 months, he has been shifting the emphasis of our portfolios, and wanted to talk about the new stuff he had purchased. The reason he was doing this exercise is that this broker was the inspiration for his strategy. Bernard will remain for another 3-4 years but I would not be the only one shifting, several of my ex-colleagues also use Bernard's services, so his book is very large
The trick to investing well is easy....do the hard work.
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