The Investment Thread (stocks, bonds, real estate, retirement, just not gold)

[wazoodog]

You are a winner.

Don't get me wrong - those are just 3 of the good ones. Over the past 10 years, I've had less than 10 winners (2 or 3 of which were 10 baggers). I've had many more losers and missed gains but was fortunate to offload the losers early. The worst were from biotech. Lesson is don't trade biotech unless you want to pick numbers on the roulette table - just work for one instead.

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[owlegrad]

I have some shares of AAPL dating back 10 years ago with cost basis of 35.82. Also, V from 9 years ago at cost basis 105. Those 2 total less than 40k in value after I sold a lot of shares early during the pandemic - also sold SHOP pretty near its peak after holding for a couple of years and experiencing 10x. Over the past 2 years, ive slowly divested from almost all individual stocks in this account and moved to index funds - after a certain point i guess it grew enough where I chose to gamble less, but didn't want to move it to my main brokerage account (which is AUM with a CFP - yes, im aware its an unpopular and ill-advised thing with bogleheads and many). But yeah, in my fun money account now I only have 3 individual stocks and I've held them all for 7 years or more.

A milestone since I first started was to have it grow enough to pay off my mortgage (which i wouldn't since it's under 3%). It's more or less there as of this week and a pretty nice feeling.

Personally I am not against paying for financial advice but that AUM (1.5% I assume?)…yikes. But it sounds like you know what you are doing so hopefully you are getting value for the money. I have a “legacy” brokerage account my mom setup for me as a kid and I let the manager do whatever he wants in that account (it’s worked well enough so far) so I understand not wanting to change something if it’s worked for you well enough so far.

I am curious how your CFP feels about you having other accounts where you do whatever you want. Surely the value of a CFP is trusting them to do what’s best for you? If not, why have them at all? Perhaps I am missing something or misunderstanding?

 

[wazoodog]

Personally I am not against paying for financial advice but that AUM (1.5% I assume?)…yikes. But it sounds like you know what you are doing so hopefully you are getting value for the money. I have a “legacy” brokerage account my mom setup for me as a kid and I let the manager do whatever he wants in that account (it’s worked well enough so far) so I understand not wanting to change something if it’s worked for you well enough so far.

I am curious how your CFP feels about you having other accounts where you do whatever you want. Surely the value of a CFP is trusting them to do what’s best for you? If not, why have them at all? Perhaps I am missing something or misunderstanding?

Pretty much hit the nail on the head - I've gone back and forth over the past few years of whether to discontinue the AUM services but I always come back to thinking if it's not broken, don't fix it. Of course, that lends itself to asking what's the opportunity cost I'm missing out on. At the end of the day, its worked well for me in so many different ways besides just looking at it from the angle of how much more my managed accounts could have been. I want to emphasize a lot of this is specific to me and certainly doesn't apply to others. I think of it as hiring a trainer but for finances instead of fitness. Everyone can go out and work out and eat right on their own, access resources on reddit or YouTube and happily achieve their goals. In my case, we have a mutually understood goal, we are on track, and I'm satisfied with the benefits of his service. I don't dwell on whether i could exceed the goal or reach it sooner if I just did it all on my own.

As for how he feels about me having my fun money account - we established from the beginning that I wanted to keep it and he encouraged it. That said it was only around 6% of my total investments at the time. Its grown quite a lot since then but the the vast majority is still AUM.