New To Investing? Vincent Chan Says Low-Cost Index Funds Are the Easiest Way to Get Started
Not only is it easy to start investing based on Chan's advice, but his strategy has a proven track record of multiplying your money in the long run.
The Easiest Things To Invest In Are Low-Cost Index Funds' Chan explained in the video.
It sounds basic, but that doesn't make it a bad suggestion. Here's why index funds remain one of the most popular ways for people to invest.
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Index funds offer investors exposure to a basket of companies. Some index funds contain a few dozen companies, while other index funds contain hundreds of publicly traded corporations. A couple of index funds even have well over 1,000 stocks, offering broad exposure to the market.
You don't have to get the most diversified index fund to get good results. Some funds with 100 stocks perform better than funds with 500 stocks. The main strength of index funds is that they enable automatic portfolio diversification and streamline investing.
You don't have to research a bunch of stocks, know what to look for in a good stock or follow the news every day. A portfolio manager can do all of those things for you as your money grows in an index fund.
You can accumulate index funds in any investment account that lets you trade stocks. However, Chan suggests giving preference to tax-advantaged accounts like your 401(k), HSA, and Roth IRA when you make investments.
These accounts let you reduce your tax bill as you grow your investments. Traditional retirement accounts let you reduce your taxes right now, while you won't have to pay any taxes on withdrawals from your Roth IRA.
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Chan suggests investing any remaining money into a brokerage account once you have maxed out your tax-advantaged accounts. Investors should also monitor any changes the IRS makes to the maximum amount they can contribute to retirement accounts. You also get to make catch-up contributions to your retirement accounts the moment you turn 50.
Chan recommends looking for index funds that have low expense ratios. This ratio reflects the cost of holding the fund and having an investment firm manage it on your behalf. Passively managed ETFs that mirror benchmarks like the S&P 500 typically have low expense ratios. It's realistic to find passively managed ETFs that have expense ratios below 0.10%.
Investors can further explore index funds by analyzing their total returns. You can look at how much a fund has returned over the past five and ten years to gauge if it's consistent or volatile. It's also good to look at a fund's asset allocation to see if most of the stocks are in the tech sector or another industry.
Some investors also look at a fund's yield to see how much cash flow they will receive just by holding on to shares. While most investors shouldn't prioritize a fund based on its yield, receiving passive income from investments becomes more valuable as you get closer to retirement.
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This article New To Investing? Vincent Chan Says Low-Cost Index Funds Are the Easiest Way to Get Started originally appeared on Benzinga.com
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This growing nonresponse problem will also exacerbate the volatility BLS has committed to releasing the nonfarm payroll number as fast as possible. Each month's number is issued on the first Friday of the following month. Sometimes this means the release can occur on the very first day of the next month (as happened when the July 2025 numbers were issued on August 1). It is the fastest regular cycle for the production and release of any major economic indicator. It sets up what The Wall Street Journal calls 'a difficult trade-off between speed and accuracy.' The time period for data collection ranges between 10 and 16 days, and some businesses may not be able to report within that period. For example, businesses that pay employees monthly instead of biweekly may not be able to report their data ahead of the deadline. In recent cycles only about 2/3rds of businesses surveyed have been able to respond in time. The BLS seems to believe that timeliness is paramount, even though the result is an incomplete (and often half-baked?) product. Mainstream Critiques The problems cited here are well-known in the profession. Just two days before McEntarfer's firing, a bipartisan group of 88 top-tier economists, representing most of the leading universities in the U.S., as well as many former top government officials and heads of several prominent think-tanks, submitted a letter to Congress which was politely but openly critical of the BLS. An influential financial blogger agreed. In May, Science magazine addressed the subject in its lead editorial. Mohammed El-Erian, a prominent economic pundit, reviewed the furor, and acknowledged the institutional Sum Deplore all political motives, and ignore the histrionics on both sides. Stipulate, for clarity, that the data is not 'rigged.' (That would be organizationally impossible.) Allow that the firing of a career bureaucrat may have been unfair and unproductive. Discount for all of that, and you still have a half-broken system that generates grossly inadequate and misleading information on the state of the labor market – creating risks for investors and policy-makers. The theme of the non-partisan critics of the BLS is the need for modernization of its processes. It is long overdue. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is the classic Old Dog that hasn't been able to learn the New Tricks. It began gathering statistics on employment and labor conditions in the United States when Grover Cleveland was President. It is still using data collection strategies and techniques that were developed decades ago in a very different technological era, and which no longer work very well. As the economists' letter suggests, the BLS has failed to keep pace with the digital transformation of the economy – citing especially the 'advent of artificial intelligence [which] promises to revolutionize how data are both produced and consumed.' 'Revolutionizing the BLS' is a hopeful goal – but Bureaucracy and Revolution are two words that are not generally found in the same sentence. Perhaps the impetus for change will have to come from outside rather than from within. In any case, the reckoning is timely and necessary.
