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Originally Posted by Righteous1
^^I'm a full on noob, but just opened up a self-directed TFSA through my financial institution. Any information, tips, advice would be greatly appreciated!
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Nobody can you give you advice, without knowing your full financial picture, your return expectations, your willingness and ability to take risk, anything unique to you. You are on the right track IMO, open a direct brokerage account and educate yourself.
My personal opinion in regards to investing for those who aren't in the industry (and most that are), is to use ^ strategy and buy broad-based, low cost ETFs. The only things that you can control in investing are your asset allocation, your emotions and fees/taxes. ETFs are the best vehicle to manage all of these things and typically over long periods of time outperform any active strategies anyways. Stay away from bank funds. The classes of funds that you would access are designed to part you from your money with high costs and commissions to their sales people. Not only that, the funds banks recommend typically under-perform the market anyways so you're losing on all sides. You can own direct stocks, but given that you're a rookie, and that even the pros have a hard time outperforming with access to the best research and teams of analysts, you are outgunned. You could get a broker to assist you obviously but how are you going to determine what to do when he/she calls you and says "hey, you should sell CP Rail and buy CN Rail"? The commissions-based system is designed with an obvious inherent conflict of interest in that the broker needs to generate trades to stay in business even if it's not in the best interest of their client. I saw someone post earlier in this thread that using a passive strategy is "leaving money on the table", I'd be really interested to hear the rational behind that for the average retail investor. Maybe leaving money on the table for the advisors who want to recommend higher cost products that under-perform.
Educate yourself, use Google. Look up ETFs, passive vs. active, asset allocation, modern portfolio theory.
EDIT: The poster above me is definitely the direction you want to go. And educate yourself along the way. Keep it simple.