If you are looking for modest, respectable market returns, you can look at perhaps in investing in a passive index fund or ETF that tracks the standard and poor 500, which is an index that is weighted according to the market capitalisation (basically total share value) of the company. Why many famous investors such as john c. bogle or warren buffet recommends such broad passive index funds for investments for a regular joe investor is because for regular joes like us who do not work as investment professionals, investing in the entire market :
1) diversifies your portfolio intensively, so the ups in one sector offsets the down in others
2) based on the assumption (and prediction) that the market (in this case us market) will constantly grow,
3) allows you to mitigate costs of trades, since the only cost you need to pay is the first time you buy everything, the cost of maintenance of such a fund/etf (which should be relatively much lower compared to an active fund, perhaps about 0.1 ~0.3%) and the cost of selling everything - you basically give no money to managers to do constant trades that may erode the potential earnings from a good old fashioned "buy and hold everything" strategy.
And most of all, the fact that most other funds and/or active management is proven to not consistently beat the market - you are in fact instead of picking stocks, to change to picking managers - an equally difficult task in my honest opinion.
Hence tldr: passive index fund (look up vanguard index fund) for lt plans for investments, ETFs if you don't have the current amount of investment capital to meet the min. requirement of such index funds.
Just make sure to check their costing, choose the most cost effective and least costing ones to maximize investment potential. good luck.
If you are looking for modest, respectable market returns, you can look at perhaps in investing in a passive index fund or ETF that tracks the standard and poor 500, which is an index that is weighted according to the market capitalisation (basically total share value) of the company. Why many famous investors such as john c. bogle or warren buffet recommends such broad passive index funds for investments for a regular joe investor is because for regular joes like us who do not work as investment professionals, investing in the entire market :
1) diversifies your portfolio intensively, so the ups in one sector offsets the down in others
2) based on the assumption (and prediction) that the market (in this case us market) will constantly grow,
3) allows you to mitigate costs of trades, since the only cost you need to pay is the first time you buy everything, the cost of maintenance of such a fund/etf (which should be relatively much lower compared to an active fund, perhaps about 0.1 ~0.3%) and the cost of selling everything - you basically give no money to managers to do constant trades that may erode the potential earnings from a good old fashioned "buy and hold everything" strategy.
And most of all, the fact that most other funds and/or active management is proven to not consistently beat the market - you are in fact instead of picking stocks, to change to picking managers - an equally difficult task in my honest opinion.
Hence tldr: passive index fund (look up vanguard index fund) for lt plans for investments, ETFs if you don't have the current amount of investment capital to meet the min. requirement of such index funds.
Just make sure to check their costing, choose the most cost effective and least costing ones to maximize investment potential. good luck.