I'm 29 now, but when I was younger (18-19), I started investing as I could into various mutual funds and stocks. Initially, my father's financial advisor suggested a few things, and I wanted to get Apple. And I was young and dumb and just decided to do what the guy told me to do.
Fast forward to now.. I just today decided to starting research various funds, ETFs, etc... and I found a website that allows you to backtest various portfolios.
My mutual fund holdings (ABALX,CAIBX,CWGIX, AGTHX) have seems to underperform as far as I can tell. So I go and look at a number of other funds, mostly Vanguard funds like PrimeCap, Health Care, and a few others.. (Ex. VGHAX,VIGAX,VSMAX,VEXAX).. I compare those two portfolios against the S&P500 and holy hell. Aside from the much higher fees from my current holdigs, it seems both these Vanguard funds and the general S&P500 index greatly outperform me.
Is there any reason my financial advisor would have told me to stay in these funds? I've said to him multiple times that I'm noticing there's other funds that have done much better both short term and long term, and he kind of brushed me aside. This is the same guy who didn't want me to transfer a large chunk of money from a CNB checking accounts (money I wasn't using for the whole year) to an Ally 1% savings account.
I'm kicking myself for taking this long to realize I need to really pay attention and get knowledgable about these things, but the financial people I know are all tried into weird relationships with companies and it makes me question them.
Any advice would be awesome. I do realize some of those Vanguard funds are closed to new investors, but I was just giving an example. A big question - are my current mutual fund holdings better than I'm thinking they are? Am I misreading information?
Submitted April 14, 2017 at 02:48AM by maxiedaniels http://ift.tt/2pduKlC
