When you own an individual stock, your focus is simply on that one company. That is to say, the company you own the stock in. Your interest is in how it is performing, the quality of the management team, financial standing and performance, etc. But when you are invested in an exchange traded stock fund [...]

With the large up and down swings of the stock market over the past year, many stock investors have concerns about risk to their stock portfolio. Of course, stock investing always carries risk, but there are a number of ways to reduce it.  We’ve written about some of these in the past, like using position [...]

You frequently hear about the DOW and the S&P 500 in the news.  And when they are up, as pictured above, the commentators say the stock market is up and things are good. But recently, they’ve been showing red numbers, because the market has been down.  And people worry as the newscasters frown and report, [...]

One way to reduce your stock investing risk is to own a number of different company’s stocks.  That is to say, to diversify the stocks in your portfolio. And a great advantage of Exchange Traded Stock Funds (ETF’s) is they make diversified stock investing possible, by making it more affordable. RISK OF NOT DIVERSIFIED To [...]

Another great feature of Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) is diversification.  This is important because one common mistake many stock investors make is to concentrate too much of their money into just one or a few stocks.  In other words, they are not diversified. This is actually pretty easy to do if you aren’t paying attention.  [...]

Another great feature of Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) over traditional mutual funds is transparency.  By this we mean you can see the different stocks held in an ETF. Contrast that to some stock mutual funds which are not so transparent.  Because often, the mutual fund managers are not so up front about the investments they [...]

One of the benefits to investing in Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) is that many of them have lower expenses than other types of funds.  And these fund expenses are important to you as an investor.  Because the lower the expenses, the better your return from your stock fund. For example, let’s say you were invested [...]

In our last post we talked about Funds overall, and what they were.  And how we’re going to look at a specific type of fund in this series of posts, called an Exchange Traded Fund (or ETF for short). ETF’s are one of my favorite types of funds to invest in, as opposed to the [...]

When you invest in the stock market you can do it a number of ways. One way, of course, is to just go out and buy an individual stock. For example, you could buy some Microsoft stock, if you were interested in investing in technology. But there’s another way too. And that would be to [...]

There are any number of ways you can invest in the stock market.  And two of the more common ways are through individual stocks and stock funds.  Not surprisingly, both ways have their own advantages and disadvantages. One of the clear advantages of investing in stock funds is diversification.  That is to say,  since a [...]