Investing even relatively small amounts of money monthly or weekly into an indexed mutual fund or similar at a young age should result in substantial growth and returns over 30 years or so.
Financially speaking, yes, absolutely. It’s “easy” and rather low risk. Yet… being on Lemmy I assume a lot of people reading this advice do care both about technology and privacy. Such funds often support, rationally, “winners” which right now would include e.g Meta, Microsoft, Google, etc. They could also include big banks with questionable practices, e.g HSBC, or “energy” company that basically stick to oil. This kind of companies might be at odd with what people want to support. I would thus suggest to check “how the sausage is made” by understanding which stocks are actually part of the fund.
Do not allow humans to pick your stocks. I recommend ETF index funds as opposed to Mutual funds. Mutual funds, or any fund that is controlled by humans, could morph into something else, i.e., whatever gets them the highest return. In an extreme example, you could buy a Green mutual fund only to find out later that it shifted a lot of its investments to fossil fuel companies. Index Funds pick a sector and follow it brainlessly. No broker or manager f#ckery.
If it weren’t for Musk, yeah, Tesla would be a great bet. Unfortunately, he’s made everything he touches radioactive, and a company that should be selling huge numbers are seeing sales cool because people don’t want to buy a product sold by Musk.
Yeah, I can’t argue with that. I try to avoid funds that have significant investment in weapons manufacturers. If a person’s needs require a minimum level social and/or environmental awareness, there are tools in the Fidelity research system that show that kind of thing. This may be limited to specific stocks and not funds though. I can only speak about Fidelity since that is my only point of experience.
Investing even relatively small amounts of money monthly or weekly into an indexed mutual fund or similar at a young age should result in substantial growth and returns over 30 years or so.
Financially speaking, yes, absolutely. It’s “easy” and rather low risk. Yet… being on Lemmy I assume a lot of people reading this advice do care both about technology and privacy. Such funds often support, rationally, “winners” which right now would include e.g Meta, Microsoft, Google, etc. They could also include big banks with questionable practices, e.g HSBC, or “energy” company that basically stick to oil. This kind of companies might be at odd with what people want to support. I would thus suggest to check “how the sausage is made” by understanding which stocks are actually part of the fund.
Do not allow humans to pick your stocks. I recommend ETF index funds as opposed to Mutual funds. Mutual funds, or any fund that is controlled by humans, could morph into something else, i.e., whatever gets them the highest return. In an extreme example, you could buy a Green mutual fund only to find out later that it shifted a lot of its investments to fossil fuel companies. Index Funds pick a sector and follow it brainlessly. No broker or manager f#ckery.
Maybe a company making greener solutions like electric cars could be a safer bet?
looks at tesla stock
Oh shit
If it weren’t for Musk, yeah, Tesla would be a great bet. Unfortunately, he’s made everything he touches radioactive, and a company that should be selling huge numbers are seeing sales cool because people don’t want to buy a product sold by Musk.
Yeah, I can’t argue with that. I try to avoid funds that have significant investment in weapons manufacturers. If a person’s needs require a minimum level social and/or environmental awareness, there are tools in the Fidelity research system that show that kind of thing. This may be limited to specific stocks and not funds though. I can only speak about Fidelity since that is my only point of experience.
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It might be helpful to your long term financial health to find out what that is.