Todd,
I don’t advise anyone on where they should be investing for the very simple reason that, contrary to the assumptions made by our dear forum hosts and by nearly every financial adviser, each person is totally unique in how he or she understands and processes information and how they choose to avoid or to manage risk.
What one person can make a success of another will mash and mangle. This is the point that Jack Schwager makes in his series of books on ‘market wizards’. One chapter will profile a very successful trader who is doing the exact opposite of another and making it work for him or her.
And if you want a personal example, my daughter and I frequently talk about investing and trading. A couple years back, when she had the time and inclination, she used her Schwab IRA account to do 90 round-trip trades over a nine-month period, 89 of which were winners, and her one loss, she says, was because she had misread something. Her method was simplicity itself. She’d buy at her price, and she’d sell at her price. Period. Total, ruthless discipline.
She’d share with me what she was doing, and I’d just shake my head and knew I couldn’t do the same. And this, mind you, was a person whom I raised and whom I knew well. But she knew herself even better, and she did her trading the way she knew it would work for her. These days, she’s rotated onto other things like gardening. But when she retires, she says she’ll get back to it, because it was a fun game. Meanwhile, like most Americans, she’s plowing money to her retirement account, but really regretting having to do so, because she knows the US market is so over-bought and so overdue for a crash.
What I will do for you is suggest some reading and some websites that you might find useful.
#1. Ben Graham’s intro to value investing, The Intelligent Investor. That’s my investing bible and trading manual.
#2, Justin Mamis, The Nature of Risk, whose key idea is the tradeoff one is constantly making between ‘information risk’ and ‘price risk’.
#3. If it’s bonds you want to explore, nobody writes a better intro than Sharon Wright and her Getting Started in Bonds.
As for websites, Bar Chart and FinViz are easy to use and all one needs. For a bit of money, Simply Wall Street can’t be beat for fast summaries of a company’s financials and growth prospects. For macro-economic chit-chat, Zero Hedge is good. Also, surprisingly, there are some thoughtful YouTubers such as Lena Petrova (really understands the banking racket) or someone who calls himself ‘the Asian Guy’ (who really understands what happening right now with silver). For brokers, I use Firstrade a lot whose fills are good and whose order types are plenty adequate, or Schwab’s TOS platform.
Turn off the TV and stop all financial newsletters and subscriptions. Total waste of time. If you want investing ideas, just do the Peter Lynch thing and start looking at the products and services you use in your own life and ask how they came to be available to you. Very quickly that will connect you to the wider world that most Americans take for granted, but are often better places to put money to work. Lastly, no matter what market conditions might be, there are always more opportunities to turn a profit than anyone has the time or money to explore. So keep things simple and pick just a few. The only thing that matters is one’s own goals. Or as the poet said,
"Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar.
[Roughly, “There are no roads but by walking.”]