Do you have any to share?

I was sitting on the phone ?

It works better if you put it up to your ear.

It works better if you put it up to your ear.

But didn't you tell me my brain was in my ass? Or was that Sini?

I'll pray for your bank accounts.

Multiple bank accounts! Things are looking up.

Well there are limits to FDIC insurance per institution, you know.

You should get a financial adviser if that is true.

On a serious note, sound investing has some simple principles. First, you're biggest source of long term costs comes from taxes and transaction fees. Those need to be minimized to extract return. And research shows that about 85% of your long term return comes from asset allocation not individual asset selection (i.e. stocks vs bonds rather than Microsoft vs. IBM). Dollar cost averaging and diversification are the final key points.

Since very few investment houses/advisers have shown an ability to beat the market (so-called alpha) over any material time horizon, I'll take my chances with low cost mutual funds. My trading portfolio is just educated gambling mostly for fun.

They play this little game where they put you on hold and pretend like they are figuring out the answer to your question. What they are really doing is running around like chickens with their heads cut off to find someone who actually knows what they are doing.

Agree in full. A six month liquid reserve is prudent. Anything more than that is the an opportunity cost. I've always stayed fully invested even in the depths of the dot com bust and subprime crisis.

On a serious note, sound investing has some simple principles. First, you're biggest source of long term costs comes from taxes and transaction fees. Those need to be minimized to extract return. And research shows that about 85% of your long term return comes from asset allocation not individual asset selection (i.e. stocks vs bonds rather than Microsoft vs. IBM). Dollar cost averaging and diversification are the final key points.

Since very few investment houses/advisers have shown an ability to beat the market (so-called alpha) over any material time horizon, I'll take my chances with low cost mutual funds. My trading portfolio is just educated gambling mostly for fun.

Some sound advice. Much that I have read shows most advisers actually net you a negative return after fees. The reason for you to have a complex portfolio is to make it complex to make you believe it shouldn't be done on your own. Simple is better. A great resource if you want to take a stab at DIY https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/index.php

Investment management should be viewed as a service. If you have the time you can learn how to do everything yourself well but sometimes it's good to just pay someone else in a smart way.

Most of the big time firms are designed to slowly extract money from you in many ways you don't even know. They'll offer comparable options in their own company and have fees built in to what you pay and also with your investments.

We found a fee only adviser that isn't associated with one of the big time firms who simply gets a fairly low percentage of our total investments. Obviously I have to make up the difference with that to make it totally worthwhile but I also don't have to spend hours a month managing it and instead I can monitor what they are doing in real time.