I have been trying to get my head around investing in funds lately. My bank allows me to buy into funds directly from my online banking so I have been experimenting a bit with small amounts (that I dont need access to). Last month I put 100 euro into a fund based on high yielding bonds. This month I put a small bit more into a climate and energy fund.
Is this a stupid thing to do? Should I be saving up larger amounts and investing them in one go_? I have 15K in a bank account doing nothing but I dont want to invest it until I have a better idea of what I am doing. I also dont want to invest in something like philip morris. And I want to get a good idea of how much it will cost.
(btw this would be saving for a long term time horizon and I am open to high risk right now, I have short term savings going into savings accounts)
I cant link to the bank but its nordea finland and investments.
the good news is that people with little to no knowledge of the markets can still benefit , the only condition is that they have patience and do not panic sell , the market is full of traders who cause even the best companies to sometimes sell off , reasons often have nothing to do with the fundamentals of the companies
the biggest priority for someone investing should be to keep costs to a minimum ,as such you should not touch any funds which banks are selling , they will cost at least 1% per anum and all the bank will do ( in most cases ) is stick it in an ETF index fund
you are better to simply open an account with a stock broker and put the money in either a global index etf or a combination of an s+ p ( americas biggest index ) or a rest of world index fund , the s + p etf has a fee of .05% if you buy through vanguard and buy in dollars , if you buy a euro denominated s+ p etf , the fee is .09% per anum with vanguard
i would wait another six months to buy however , the s + p is at an all time high and a 10 to 15% correction is quite likely , this is one of the longest bull markets in history , began in april 2009 and is up more than 150 %
when you do eventually buy , be prepared to stay in long term , you should receive an anual dividend of around 2% on an s+p etf , nothing special but hardly any worse than whats bank savings accounts are paying and your capital wont grow there