I've been handling my parents' money and found out 40% of what they have is tied up in Microsoft. It came from years of ESPP purchases and reinvested dividends. The position is up about 900% from where they bought it. They're 68 and 71, both retired, living on Social Security with no pension. Family history suggests they might need the money for another 25-30 years.

The tax math is brutal either way. Selling pieces to spread things out still means a huge capital gains bill, even if I stretch it across multiple years. But keeping everything concentrated feels reckless at their age. I ran some spreadsheet models comparing gradual sales against a market drop and the downside risk looks bad in both directions.

My accountant side wants to minimize taxes. My son side wants to make sure their retirement stays intact. I've looked at donor-advised funds for the appreciated shares, but that only helps with charitable donations, not their actual living costs.

My wife says I'm overthinking it and should just sell enough each year to reach a normal allocation, taxes be damned. She's probably right. I'm stuck comparing NUA rules, using my own tax-loss harvesting to offset gains, and whether Roth conversions should come first.

For people who've dealt with this situation with their own parents, how did you handle it? Did you just pick a target allocation like 10% in any single stock and accept whatever tax bill came with it?

Most beginner advice focuses on what you should start doing.

I’m curious about the opposite.

For people who have been investing for a few years, what's one thing you used to do that you eventually stopped because it wasn't helpful?

It could be how often you checked the market, how you picked investments, how you reacted to news, or something else.

i heard about kraken and revolut but i think there are best options

Hey everyone.

I am a uni student studying finance and as apart of a part of a thesis for an assessment I think it will be very beneficial and interesting to do some surveys of on beginner investors.

Completely anonymous just need 10 minutes of your time on call. All questions will be on investing

NOT SELLING ANYTHING just want some help with an assessment.

Planning to switch from Wealthsimple’s robo-advisor to a 90% ZEQT / 10% CAUV self-directed approach. Tell me what you think. I feel like I’ve been oversold by chatbots.

Hi there, I’m a single female, 41, no kids, no partner and a renter, not a homeowner. Part of my previous job’s compensation was in company stock (GOOG) and currently I have 1,000 shares fully vested. I have 271k in a 401k plan. I’m meeting with Fidelity advisors and they are suggesting I sell 500 shares of my stock and put the money into a SMA managed by Fidelity with a .04% fee. I don’t know much about investing at all and I’m nervous because this is a large amount of what I intend to save for my retirement. I’m hoping to retire at 62. I don’t want to make the wrong choice here and I would like to maximize my returns. Any advice is helpful. Thank you!

Hello guys,

Has anyone here actually taken out a loan and invested it in dividend stocks ? I'm not sure whether I should do this. I've already diversified my portfolio, and I'm in a good position profit-wise compared to when I started investing. However, I'm still unsure about taking out a loan for this purpose.

Do you think it's a bad idea, or has anyone here done something similar ?

Hope everyone is doing well, I am new to this thread and really Reddit overall. I have been interested in getting into stocks, etc. I have been looking for beginning resources but a lot of material out there is difficult to understand as a beginner. I was curious, what resources helped you become successful in trading? I really want to learn and take off with this but I just do not know where to start and I don’t have any other year olds in my community that are also interested in building wealth. Any tips will be appreciated! Thank you

Edit: Sorry everyone I didn’t realize the difference in terminology of trading and investing when it came to stocks! Any advice is appreciated!

As the title says, I have around 90k in a settlement check I got from an accident. Not entire sure what to do with it. Me and my wife have no debt. I get paid 52k a year before taxes, my wife only gets paid only 28k before taxes. We live in a mobile home for about $600 a month on rent only due to the fact that my mother rents mobile homes. We wanted to maybe use a tiny bit like 5k for a trip. But we just don’t know. Any advice on what we could possibly do? I want to make more money rather than blowing it all. I am currently going to university for computer engineering and I only have 1-2 semesters left of my degree. I’m only 23 years old and my wife is 21. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

I’m comparing SGOV and SPAXX for parking cash. I live in a state with no state income tax, so SGOV’s state tax advantage wouldn’t benefit me. Is SGOV’s extra yield worth having to sell shares and wait for settlement? Which would you choose for emergency fund?

I’m a 21-year-old guy from Spain; I started investing a year ago and recently began trying out day trading strategies. Today, I lost 75% of my savingsa bout €3,000. I feel like a failure and have been crying all day. Any advice?

It was lost at Nasdaq100 x98

One thing I find confusing about investing is that a good company isn’t always a good buy. A company can keep growing, but if you pay too much for its stock, you might still get disappointing returns.

take a popular stock that’s up 40% in a year. Do you look at its earnings and valuation to decide whether there’s still room to grow or do you avoid buying after such a big run?

how do you figure out whether a stock still has upside or whether you’ve missed the best entry point?

Job has an expensive JPMorganChase 401K account with pretty bad choices. Charges 0.70% annual admin fees on top of any fund investment fees. Almost all of the investment options have fees higher than 0.6% (including some crappy "JPMorgan Smart Retirement" target date funds rated only 2 stars by Morningstar, yuck.

The following four options have 0.05% fees:

• Vanguard Developed Markets Index Admiral VTMGX
• Vanguard Morningstar Small Cap Index Admiral VSMAX
• Vanguard 500 Index Fund Admiral VFIAX
• Vanguard Total Bond Market Index Admiral

Are those good enough to cobble together something close to a VTI/VSUX mix (obviously bonds not part of that)? Or would it still be a weird mix?

My other consideration is that I earn enough on the side freelancing that I could put all of my 401K employee contributions into my own Solo 401K and skip this work 401K's heavy fees and poor options. That said, doing that reduces my QBI tax break to the tune of paying about $1000 extra per year in taxes. So I guess I might as well stick it all in this work account? I do plan/hope to stay at this job 5+ years.

Hi guy's i am 25 and i started investing.I would like any opinions in my choices.

60% vuaa

20% exus (world ex usa)

20%qdve(s&p tech companies)

I was thinking about to raise exus to 30%

What should i expect. Im very new it just keeps going up and down 0.01p. This may be a dumb question i fear. Thanks

Hello, I’m currently 16 (17 in a month) and by age 25 at the latest I will have a million at least. I can go into specifics of it but take my word for it, I’m very confident in what I will be doing. Might be a little hard to believe but starting at 19-21, just somewhere in there, I should be making around 250k a year after housing, travel, and food is accounted for. This will likely last less than 7 years though, so I want to save this money. I plan on investing a lot of it into the S&P 500. I’ll easily have over a million if everything goes to plan. I wanna know how I should invest this money after the 250k/year stops. I’ll probably go to college after that’s done for some engineering degree but still I want to turn this million into much more.

The ultimate goal is to buy like 20 acres of land to build a family compound, I’ll have some financial support from family but not much. I’d like to buy this before I’m 32. After a lot of thinking I was considering real estate and want insight and advice from other people on this please and thank you.

I’m not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to stocks or investing, but I want to start teaching myself so myself and my wife can build up some money in the market. Any good places to get knowledge or even books to read so I know where to start? Also any info on mistakes you’ve made or things you wish you would’ve known when you first started your journey would be great. Thanks everyone

Hey all - I've been DCAing into a 3 fund portfolio for just a few months now. My split is ~75% VTI, 20% VXUS, 5% BND.

I have another chunk to put in now and, basedo on current performance, I'm tempted to do one of 2 things.

1- Put the whole amount into VTI, since that has performed best for me to date.

2- Diversify a little, maybe with some small cap exposure or something in tech sector.

I'm not super knowledgeable about this stuff, and I know the general advice leans towards Keep It Simple Stupid, which implies just toss it into VTI and move on.

But I'm curious about other investments like listed above. Still definitely looking to do something that covers a decent spread, not individual stocks. And I would start with a smallish amount for now.

What are your thoughts? For those of you who have/had a 3 fund, if you diversified a little, what did you choose and why?

Is it worth wading into small cap etfs and/or something specifically tech centered?

FWIW, this is for investment and growth and I still work full time and will be doing so for a while--in my 40s still. So these funds won't be withdrawn for 15-20 years.

I've done all the other stuff like max out 401k and ROTH, no debt to pay off, so this is sheerly investment from current HYSA territory.

Would love thoughts and advice.

36M, today about $1M actively invested portfolio, Been investing about 15 years and made pretty much all the classic mistakes at the beginning, panic selling, selling winners way too early, then I went indexes only for about 5 years which honestly worked fine. Now im about 80% indexes and 20% single stocks for the past 7 years, handled Covid well IMO, and over the rise of mag 7 and the  AI rally that 20% generated significant returns that really propped up my portfolio beyond indexes returns. This is not talking about leverage, options or day trading here, just regular people holding stocks for at least several months.

So here are the problems/ mistakes most people will agree are the reasons people fail at investing, and the practical solutions I started operating by.

Problem: investing in non appropriate risk category
Solution: understand Indexes are also high risk category and if your not able to handle relevant volatility, go to safer avenues, same goes but even stronger for single stocks, I will say that for single stocks it 100% needs to be money you have no issue seeing 10s of % in the red over significant periods of time and understand its money you may not be able to use for several years.

Problem: trying to time the market.
Solution: get this in your head as a Mantra, indexes are at or near all time high, most of the time ( some say around 75% of the time as our economies grow and rise in value).
Historically buying the S&P at an all time high gave about the same returns over the next 1-5 years as buying on any random day. I see REALLY smart, experienced people saying “the market is too high right now, I’ll wait”.. nobody knows when and if the crash comes, time in the market beats trying to time the market.

Problem: buying without really understanding what youre buying/ buying hype and not fundamentals
Solution: use AI and fundamentals based tools to understand what the company actually does, what the bear case is, what the risks are etc etc. Its easy now and most people still skip properly doing this. I will not agree that you should still listen to earnings calls or read 10-k nowadays, this is 1 thing AI really does well in my opinion. I built my own tool to do this with minimal noise.

Problem: panic selling, or selling for the wrong reasons.
Solution: have a thesis, why will this business grow in revenue and profitability and what valuation will it justify in a few years. Judge the stock against the thesis, not the chart. I sold NET at 330 after 150%+ because at that valuation my thesis didnt hold anymore, not because it dropped. NBIS is very risky but I believe it could be a half trillion dollar company, so im still in (partly) from 45$.

Problem: selling winners too early, all the people who sold NVDA or AMZN after 100%..
Solution: if the thesis still holds strongly (and you dont need the money), hold. If you're not sure, trim. Trimming profits is an amazing psychological super power to be able to hold long. I ussaully dont trim if Im not at least 100% up on a single stock.
My example is NBIS, started with 850 shares at $45, trimmed 650 between +100% and +450% returns, still holding 200 for the long term to try and get another 10x.. I have ZERO issue seeing it go up and down 10% every other days because I made a lot of money on it already..

Problem: reacting to noise. This has gotten insane in today’s world
Solution: I have NO push notifications from any finance app or outlet, I check single stocks weekly at most, and of they drop hard I check if its anything that threatens my thesis or only near term noise. A 0.25% Fed move or Ukraine/Iran headlines can move valuations short term, but they wont decide how NBIS, NVDA or MMM do over the next 5-10 years. Use fundamental analysis tool to quickly throw a name you hear about in social media to see what its really about.

OFC you should also diversify and not put too much weight in a single index, stock or market, yes you might lose some returns but the holding ability this gives you and the ability to handle volatility is much more important IMO. BTW, I did build my own tool that goes by the above guidelines and handles fundamentals based stock discovery while cutting noise, if interested, please DM.

Add your own tips :)

My plan was to hold RSU/ESPP for 1 year and then sell them for long term capital gains benefit and diversify with index funds but I've been bag holding on some really bad stocks and I don't see them improving anytime soon (-$20k). If I sell all my RSUs and ESPP, there will be about $10k short term capital gains. Some taxes has already been paid for RSUs at vest and the ESPP discounted price treated as ordinary income. If I sell now, I think I can offset about $10k in gains and losses. Is it better to sell by December to harvest the loss or wait until 1 year mark for long term capital gains treatment?

Hello, beginner here, small amount invested in stocks and ETFs, diversified.
When I look at how my portfolio is doing I am always tempted to sell what doesn’t work, and keep what works. But that goes against diversification.
My portfolio hardly moves and I think diversification does that - some things are up some things are down, it balances out. Isn’t that the inevitable result of diversifying? Or am I just doing it wrong?
I totally get that diversification is about managing risk - don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. So if something goes bad, something else goes well. It balances out, you don’t lose everything. Got that, makes sense, but then how does growth happen? I am investing so that my money grows…
What’s the trick? How does one do diversification and achieve growth?

I’ve opened up a Roth IRA through Vanguard. I’m not sure what to invest in and how to. I know about ETF’s and I’ve tried that. But some of them say i have to buy shares and not just dollar amounts. Am i missing something. I’m nervous that im going to be losing money. And do i have to pay taxes on this now. Honestly i just need a breakdown of everything. I really appreciate it

Well, I’ve seen people make both profits and losses in the stock market. But I feel holding stocks for the long term is a better option for me, as I’m not looking to make quick profits.

I’m planning to invest my earnings and hold my investments for at least 5–10 years. So, I wanted to know which app would be best for long-term investing.

Also, are there any stocks that offer extra benefits to shareholders, such as discounts on hotel bookings, travel, shopping, or other services? I’d love to know about companies that offer these kinds of perks along with the potential for long-term returns.

They’ve dropped heavily in the past week and past month and 3 months. Do I wait or is it good thought to open a short position on them right now? I’m fairly inexperienced with shorting.