On Mon, 19 Apr 2021 09:36:36 -0400, Ralph Mowery
wrote:

In article ,
says...

Excellent approach. When dealing with mutual funds, it always pays to be
aware of the fees. In the last year or two the big brokerage houses have
eliminated the fees related to buying and selling stocks, so that
simplifies things a bit. Fidelity, and possibly others, also do 'by the
slice' now so that small investors can buy partial shares of stocks. If a
particular stock is valued at $600 a share and you only want to invest $50,
you can do that now. That doesn't benefit us, but it's good for the little
guys.



I have been using TD Ameritrade for the stocks I play with. They used
to charge under $ 10 per trade, but now do not charge anything. Many
years ago I looked at trading stock with the savings and loan company I
was dealing with. Forgot what they wanted but it was way out of line to
use them for trading. I much perfer just to do the trading on line.
Most of the time I will just tell the computer to buy or sell a stock at
a certain ammount. There are other ways to do it. I have set it to
sell or buy if the stock moved a certain dollar or percentage ammount.

We used to have stuff scattered around in a dozen or so brokerage houses,
but we've consolidated everything at Fidelity. It's not better than the
others, it was just more convenient to transfer there.

We do 100% of our trading online. Like every other financial institution of
that type, they have advisors on staff but there are two big problems with
using them.

1. They seem to know less than we do, so they just agree with everything we
say. At first that comes off as being friendly and supportive, until we
realized they were just agreeing with everything, even things that we knew
better than to do.

2. This is a big one - They are usually not a fiduciary, meaning by law
they are allowed to serve their own priorities even when those priorities
do not benefit us. So when they make suggestions or recommendations, we
just ignore them.