Hi,
My wife and I invested some money through a broker, which we split between between “conservative/safe” and “aggressive/risky”. It is actually doing quite well - up about 13% in 6 months.
We are looking into investing more funds (other than the monthly contributions we make to our Roth IRAs), and are debating if to continue investing through the broker or just go for indexes or something like Betterment.
The downside of investing through the broker is the fees we pay for buying/selling stocks, and the fact that they don’t have automatic investment of dividends and we need to pay for that transaction.
The portfolio is built from the following:
-
GBAB (Guggenheim taxable municipal bond fund) - 20% of the portfolio . GBAB is a large basket of taxable municipal bonds that is paying an annual return of 6.10%.
-
HPF (John Hancock Preferred income fund) - 30% of the portfolio. It’s paying about 8% dividend.
-
SPYD (S&P 500 High Dividend Fund) - 20% of the portfolio. It’s paying about 4% dividend.
-
QQQ - 20% of the portfolio.
-
EEM (iShares Emerging Market ETF) - 10% of the portfolio.
Thoughts?
Thank you very much!