Things have never been better!

Isn’t it the greatest time ever to be a small investor!!? Decades ago, the game was rigged against the small investor, it seemed.

An investor wanting to plunge into the stock market was plagued by high trading costs, and limited portfolio diversification. The game was geared to the “big boys”, it seemed, with their ability to withstand the relatively high fixed portion of the trading costs, and their financial ability to be able to buy a wide enough slice of the stock market to avoid having one or two company’s nasty surprises nearly destroy a lifetime of savings.

Now however, we’ve got internet-based trading to lower your trading costs, a huge variety of regular mutual funds whose costs of ownership have been generally falling over the past few years, index funds, ETFs of growing varieties so you can slice and dice your portfolio any which way, enhanced index funds so you can take advantage of new ways to passively "beat the index", hedge funds - once the domain of the uber-wealthy - some with minimum investments of only $2,500, levered mutual funds - both bear and bull funds, fractional share purchase and sale at nominal cost, the free flow of information such as SEC filings available over the internet, great market newsletters and commentary, stock screens and finance sites to help to help you make better investment decisions. And of course, we have a plethora of blogs – like mine – to add a little spice and help you make some sense of it all.

In short, the list of significant market improvements for the small investor goes on and on.

I think it’s just the greatest time ever to be a small investor – don’t you?


JW

The Confused Capitalist