I see similar questions being asked in investing forums all the time. Heck, at one point in my life, I pondered over this too! If you can afford to set aside just $100 every month towards investing, the most common advice given is not to invest at all, but save up till you have a [...]
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Vanguard offers funds that have some of the lowest expense ratios in the industry. Offering funds at-cost was a novel idea that made Vanguard the world’s largest mutual fund company, with about $1.6 trillion in assets. It took a while for competition to take notice, but now there are fund companies that offer funds that [...]
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Vanguard funds have some of the lowest expense ratios in the industry. Almost all of Vanguard’s ETFs have a corresponding mutual fund that either track an asset class or an index. But then, for an investor, deciding between a Vanguard ETF and mutual Fund is just not a trade-off between convenience and flexibility, although it [...]
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Zecco put an end to their free trades last week enraging a lot of users in the bargain. Zecco was a relatively new entrant to the highly competitive discount broker space and had a number of users switch to their system due to their hard-to-beat offering of unlimited free trades with a minimum balance of [...]
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Last month Vanguard’s Emerging Market ETF, VWO overtook BlackRock iShares’ ETF, EEM in total assets to become the largest Emerging Market ETF in the US. Both the funds have been swelling in size due to the popularity of this asset class among investors. BlackRock cut the fees of EEM from 0.72% to 0.69% last week. [...]
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If you are looking to invest in passively managed Mutual Funds, look no further than Vanguard. Vanguard offers a wide range of funds with very low overheads. Thanks to Vanguard, more and more fund companies are offering low cost mutual funds. Before Vanguard, funds with 0.18 expense ratios were unheard of. I recently opened an [...]
Continue reading →So you’ve been thinking of switching your online broker. But how does this work? What happens to the stocks you hold? Do you have to sell and re-purchase them? Are there fees involved? Taxes? How to transfer stocks from one broker to another? If you’ve never switched a broker before, fear not. It isn’t that [...]
Continue reading →Thanks to Schwab and Fidelity, Vanguard had no choice but to offer commission free trades! Not exactly as free as Schwab or Fidelity… Here’s the fine print: If you have a balance of less than $50,000, you will incur an annual fee of $20 This amount must be invested in Vanguard funds or ETFs. If [...]
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Vanguard announced today that it is offering its entire range of ETFs commission free to its clients! This is huge, since Vanguard has some of the lowest expense ratios and Fidelity and Schwab were slowing eating away Vanguard’s market share by offering commission free trades on their range of ETFs. For example Fidelity offers EEM [...]
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I recently opened a Roth IRA account. But the decision making process wasn’t an easy one! Here’s how I went about choosing a Roth IRA custodian. The most fundamental rule of smart investing is to keep taxes and expenses low. A Roth IRA account by its very nature is tax efficient like a 401K. But [...]
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