I am a daytrader myself so don’t really know much about long-term investments. Buy-n-hold of SnP index seems a bit oversimplified. Trends change.
I’ve noticed Trade.com is one of the few licensed brokerages that offers some investment programs apart from being a mere intermediate on the market. So far AI and Water resources technologies portfolios overperform SnP significantly. So I wonder whether it’s better to consider such thematic portfolios and find appropriate stocks myself to invest. Or is it easier to trust broker’s specialists to do this job?
Has anyone tried using this particular or similar services? Any reviews? Do you lose much paying for service? Is it worth it? Is it too difficult to find nice stocks to invest in if I want to try DIY approach?
DIY approach works same everywhere. You pay more, your suffer a lot, you gain something creaky in the end as the final product only resembles the work of a master. The only positive thing about DIY is that you learn something new and you can’t start a new profession without being a DIY-level guy first. From what you’ve said looks more like you should trust professionals. Unless you want to become a professional investor yourself instead of daytrading.
Hahah, yeap, I once tried making a writing table myself. Looked as if it was begging for mercy: “kill me please”. So I know what you mean. I simply has some doubts whether it is really that difficult to appraise the stocks potential? I’m ok with numbers and more or less I am familiar with what to look at in company’s reports. On the other hand, professionals at companies like Trade.com definitely have got more experience and I hope they weren’t wasting their time at universities. If the risks were very little, I would have tried a do-it-yourself portfolio, but there is no point investing less than 1K long-term, so I tend to go for a professional advice here. Thanks for your help!
I think we should be talking about 10K at least here. Better 20K. Stock investments are begging for a long-term approach in any case, but if we speak of thematic portfolios, it becomes even more important to invest enough and hold the portfolio long enough. Its a totally different approach from most people do when they start trading. Very different from speculations.
Hmm, I’ve had the same feeling about the amount of investments, but I don’t agree that it will take ages to taste the success of such investments. I mean ok, realistic expectations would be to get 10-50% of annual return on thematic portfolios. Artificial Intelligence, water resources, clean energy - these are some of the directions that Trade.com offers to think about and I doubt they can yield over 100% yearly ROA. So investment must be sufficient enough to be glad you’ve got 20%. I don’t believe SnP can keep growing this fast any more, so it’s time to get picky.
All these directions that you’ve mentioned - they are fascinating exactly because in worst case you will probably get an average SnP500 result if investing in these particular industries. BUT! There is a chance that at certain point humanity will feel a great need in these technologies and the industry will boost quickly. The problem is that we don’t know when this will happen and actually even whether it will happen at all. Dot-coms were growing little by little for many years and then gave 4-5X return in just couple years. If you don’t want to miss the point when your AI or green investments, you better start thinking really long-term and we are speaking of decades here. So better make sure your brokerage is really reliable 
Not only you should care about brokerage reliability. IMHO Tradecom does seem quite trustworthy in this light. However, such alternative investments face the risks to go through some major ups and downs before they finally calm down. I think this is related to human psychology - people tend to either have too much expectations and then too little faith, and then only they find the balance and charts start looking normal again. So no much leverage for such investments will be a good idea.
I know, and I plan to leave the money there for at least 5 years to begin with. And this is exactly the reason why I don’t quit daytrading so far.
Do you plan to keep daytrading with the same broker you’ve got now or plan to transfer everything to Trade. com?
I wish they will transfer
Ahaha, good point. But I’m quite optimistic about it. My CFD broker is not the nicest one in the world when it comes to executions, but so far all was fine with withdrawals. But you are right, transferring the whole account you never know…
I’m yet unsure. As I said, I trade CFDs with the other brokerage and can’t say I’m totally satisfied with the service. But I think for now I’ll just leave it as it is and use Trade.com for long-term only. Possibly will transfer the rest of the account later. Or maybe just a small part of it for daytrading to give it a try with Trade.com first.
With all this situation with the rapid market drop, don’t you think that starting long-term investments might not be the best idea in the world? I know your idea is not SnP buy-n-hold but some thematic portfolios based on more perspective fields of economy. However, as far as I understand, when the economy goes deep in recession - all fields of it go in the same direction.
Exactly! Alternatives suffer most usually, when the true recession starts. Alternatives are meant to be a bigger risk - bigger potential reward kind of thing. When economy gets the coronavirus, smart money representatives take the cash out of alternatives first place. When smart money are out - you don’t wanna stay there and breath in the dust of their moneybags.
I disagree. I mean, yeah, potentially you can be right. This might not be the right time to start investing. BUT!! You will never know whether this is the start of a new recession circle or yet another retracement, which is exactly a nice opportunity to enter the market with a discount.
Moreover, not all the companies went down along with SnP 500 index. Dollar Tree Stores did well, obviously because they helped people calculate taxes which was twice as important in 2008, when the reports were not that optimistic at all. Anheuser-Busch InBev also did well. I have no other explanation to this other than “people always like beer, especially when things go wrong”. Also some pharmaceuticals outperformed the market significantly. And this I think is because the essence of their earning lies in the field of new technologies and inventions. This is exactly what I’m stacking on. New technologies that can outperform the market. Water resources I also think to have a nice potential. Water is essential for survival. That’s what people think about when they panic. Water and beer LOL
Actually, I’ve read in one of the analytical researches that economists in 2019 suggested investing in AquaVenture Holdings along with the few other stocks in case the recession starts. But probably you’ve heard of it already.
No, I didn’t know that. Thank you indeed for sharing. Not that I trust these economists a lot, but this does sound optimistic for me and my thematic portfolio investments with trade.com.
SnP really is doing quite fine at the moment. And I guess all the negative expectation of total quarantine of the business has already been reflected in the price. In this case I’m taking back my opinion about the current inappropriateness of alternative investments. Don’t know exactly about tradecom’s min limits, but normally its recommended to invest no more than 10% of your total capital in alternatives. And considering its a supposedly long-term venture, it would be nice to consider at least 5-10K deposits.
Thanks, that’s about what I expected to hear. Yeah, I’ve contacted the representative. Water starts with 12K, AI with 29K.
But you know what? These guys are rather quick and they are offering ““contactless delivery”” portfolio right now. And also ““biopharma””. Both start with only 1K investment and I guess both are risky as hell. The stake is on grabbing the moment, rather than considering long-term perspectives - at least it looks like that.
I’ve chosen water personally, and the reason is that it’s something that people will always need (unlike contactless delivery and a specific vaccine) and therefore the risks are lower.
However, the point about these two new portfolios is that you can’t really tell at the moment whether all this virus crisis can leave a long-term impact on human behavior or not. If it can, than drone-operated deliveries will grab the market soon enough. Moreover, even its all not about the bio-safety, contactless deliveries can really be about efficiency and costs optimization. In this case they will still grab the market. Probably later. So the risk of such investments is not that much about the field of investments (the service is of a high demand anyway), but about who is going to take the leadership position in the business. I bet hundreds of nice stratups are working on it at the moment. And you never know who is going to be the winner in this Game of Drones 
Tradecom analysts can be right in their choice or they can choose wrong companies to invest in. I don’t know how much time they’ve spent on analysis. This is the highest risk of these portfolios and this is why my bet is on Water Technologies.