Best advices for how to multiply your money. It’s a basic rule of investing that to improve your chance of a better return you have to accept more risk. But you can manage and improve the balance between risk and return by spreading your money across different investment types and sectors whose prices don’t necessarily move in the same direction – this is called diversifying. It can help you smooth out the returns while still achieving growth, and reduce the overall risk in your portfolio.
While large short-term profits can often entice market neophytes, long-term investing is essential to greater success. And while active trading short-term trading can make money, this involves greater risk than buy-and-hold strategies. Many great companies are household names, but many good investments lack brand awareness. Furthermore, thousands of smaller companies have the potential to become the blue-chip names of tomorrow. In fact, small-caps stocks have historically shown greater returns than their large-cap counterparts. From 1926 to 2001, small-cap stocks in the U.S. returned an average of 12.27% while the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (S&P 500) returned 10.53%. This is not to suggest that you should devote your entire portfolio to small-cap stocks. But there are many great companies beyond those in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).
The answer is by buying an index fund. Index funds are the best friend of the passive investor who want an easy way to invest in the market. An index fund is a type of fund with a portfolio constructed to track a certain index. Index funds can track the return of the S&P 500, Dow Jones, or NASDAQ. Index funds can either be exchange traded funds or mutual funds that hold securities in a given market. A S&P 500 index fund will buy shares of the 500 largest companies in the United States and will track the movements of the Standard and Poor’s 500 index. This fund will replicate the performance of the S&P 500 index. If the S&P 500 index is up 10 percent for the year then a fund like the Vanguard S&P 500 index or the iShares S&P 500 index should be up approximately 10 percent as well. Read more on Easiest Way to Invest Money.
If you’re on a tight budget, even the simple step of enrolling in your 401(k) or other employer retirement plan may seem beyond your reach. But there is a way that you can begin investing in an employer-sponsored retirement plan with amounts that are so small you won’t even notice them. For example, plan to invest just 1 percent of your salary into the employer plan. You probably won’t even miss a contribution that small, but what makes it even easier is that the tax deduction that you’ll get for doing so will make the contribution even smaller. Once you commit to a 1 percent contribution, you can increase it gradually each year. For example, in year two, you can increase your contribution to 2 percent of your pay. In year three, you can increase your contribution to 3 percent of your pay, and so on.
One of the best investment tips from Warren Buffett is to not put too much stock (no pun intended) into each and every news headline that you see. Buffett believes in the 99-1 rule. Most investors take actions based on 1% of the financial news they consume. Doing so, they quickly sell their stocks whenever bad news comes up – e.g. a company’s revenues have fallen by 10%. If the company in this particular example has been in business for, say, 100 years, then Buffett says that it’s definitely capable of withstanding such events. In other words, people often tend to overreact.
About MultiplyMyMoney : I have more than 12 years of experience as an independent and personal financial and investment consultant. I used to run a financial blog called BuylikeBuffett which provided insight on investing, saving, money management, and all things finance. I am also the author of Your Financial Playbook: A Guide To Navigating The World Of Personal Finance a financial guide written to inform the beginning investor about the basics of the market. I decided to start a new site because I receive a great number of questions about financial topics on a daily basis. I figure that this would be a great way to answer those questions and increase financial literacy. I also figured it would be a good platform to write articles on everything from teaching how to get rich, explaining the basics of cryptocurrency, to detailing ways of rebuilding your credit score. I was the founder and president of New Horizons Financial Management, LLC, and was a registered investment advisor. New Horizons was an independent investment advisory asset management and personal financial consulting firm offering investment advisory services to high net worth individuals. See more details on Multiply My Money.