How To Manage Your Own Investments
If you’ve decided to take charge of your finances and manage your own investments for optimum return, congratulations! Self-management involves a long-term commitment and deep understanding of investment knowledge and strategies like the Snider Method. There are many benefits to using an advisor, but if you’ve been using one successfully for a while, you’ve likely become familiar with some of the terms and procedures involved in managing your portfolio. Feel ready to step out on your own? To help you decide if this is the right path for you, here are some tips on how to manage your own investment portfolio.
Learning To Self-Manage Investments
Investment management is not an occasional commitment. It requires dedication, patience, research, and understanding of long-term goals. Research, reading financial news, and watching the markets are good places to start, but a level head is necessary for a calm approach in what can be a volatile journey.
Snider Advisors offers helpful investment courses to completely prepare you to take the reins and manage your own investment portfolio. Before you do, it’s important to understand what advantages there are—and the potential disadvantages—to handling your investments yourself.
Managed Portfolio vs. Self-Managed
There are pros and cons to both managed portfolios vs. self-managed. Understanding these differences will help guide you to the best choice for your investments:
Managed Fund Pros and Cons
- Pro: Access to a broader array of investment instruments and more buying power, including avenues not available to individual investors.
- Pro: Experience of a dedicated professional—or group of professionals—who manage people’s money for a living. They keep abreast of changes, legislation, and trends.
- Pro: Time. You may have other things you want to do with your time than spend hours figuring out and monitoring the ins and outs and constant changes in investment management, whereas for investment firms like Snider Advisors, this is our business.
- Pro: Diversification of your investments is likely to be better with managed funds. The Snider Investment Method offers a long-term, specific-sequenced strategy to manage your funds for maximum potential income.
- Pro: Paperwork. Investment advisors generally take care of all of your reporting and tax paperwork. The massive paperwork involved in reporting and taxes is often underestimated.
- Con: Trust. With managed funds, the advisor or firm decides what to invest in, how much and when, based on their own calculations, experience, and research. You must trust others to make the best financial decisions for you.
- Con: Fees. When you place your funds with an investment professional, they garner a fee for the services they provide.
Self-Managed Portfolio Pros and Cons
- Pro: No advisor fees. When you manage your own portfolio, you are your own advisor and you control the investments.
- Pro: Shareholder privileges. If you have a large amount of money to invest, you may be able to take advantage of special privileges only available to significant investors. These can include discounts on products or services a company provides, attending shareholder meetings, and more.
- Pro: Control. You are never in the dark about what your investments are doing, and you make the choices of when to buy, sell, or hold. You can invest in non-traditional spaces like real estate, and choose only to invest in companies or funds that align with your personal beliefs.
- Con: Research. If you’re handling your portfolio yourself, you’ll need to invest significant time researching the investment choices available to you.
- Con: Rules. This is big. If you aren’t 100% clear on IRS regulations, such as what you can and can’t do as an investor, you can suffer significant tax consequences and financial penalties.
- Con: Trading Fees. Trading fees alone can wipe out your entire portfolio.
- Con: Overreaction or underreaction. Constant up-and-down movement by an overeager individual can kill your long-term strategy. Conversely, “set it and forget it” folks may be missing changing nuances that experienced wealth management professionals use to maximize investments.
Risk and Rewards With Self-Management
Balancing the risks and rewards of self-management vs. a managed portfolio can be intimidating. Whatever path you choose, Snider Advisors offers strategic, thoughtful advice customized to your particular life circumstances and goals. If you do Unlike most advisors, Snider Advisors can teach you the exact strategy we use to manage our clients’ funds. This gives you some of the many benefits of self-management while also having an experienced professional in your corner for guidance. Whether you need assistance with taking over your own investments, or want to utilize our experience, skills, and resources to maximize your investments while you spend your time in more enjoyable ways, we are here to help.
