I’m married here in Taiwan and having the cultural propensity to save and invest for the future I thought I would start off with some Mutual Funds. I was just told by Cathay Bank (Xinyi) that they wont/can’t sell any investing instruments in to Americans because they don’t want to upset the US government. (They are worried that the investor wont report their profits and might have the US government inching in)
So, as an American here in Taiwan what are my options to invest? Where can I comfortably purchase stocks, bonds and mutual funds?
Open an account with a brokerage house directly, interactive brokers is a good one but there are several others if you have a certain preference. They may ask you to open an international account if you have residence in Taiwan, but that’s easy enough. All you need is a passport and one other piece of ID proving your address. From there you can buy / sell any securities you like. I’d recommend staying away from mutual funds and sticking to ETF’s, but what you buy is another conversation altogether. For now just open an Interactive Brokers account so you can start trading. Good luck
Brent makes some very good points, but you should be aware that you will need a minimum $10 000, and it will be at great risk if you dont know what you are doing.
That being said. If you dont have the cash -save. And use the time between to educate yourself - you can open a practice trading account. It’s better than giving your money to someone else to invest.
My experience with mutual funds has been 50% just a little better than OK, 2% good, and 48% bad.
well if I could I would say that 100% of mutual funds are bad. That doesn’t mean they all lose money because many of them don’t, and some of them even outperform the indexes they are tracking. But it does mean that since they all have higher management fees than their ETF counterparts, by very design they will underperform compared to something that does the exact same thing with lower fees. The only time a mutual fund wouldn’t by design underperform is if you actually couldn’t find an ETF counterpart that does the same thing. In that event, maybe the mutual fund would be worth considering. But since in this day in age there is a low expense ratio ETF to match pretty much every mutual funds stated goals as well, there’s really no place for them.
Depends. If you could get 5% on your own, or someone else can get you 8% while charging 2% in fees, that 6% is better than the 5 right? If that “someone” can’t outperform you on your own plus their fees, then it’s worse. It’s really just a math equation, pick the larger number. Now granted, finding people in the financial industry that can return 8% to clients is very difficult to do so I almost always tell people the same thing, you’re better off investing your money yourself. Index funds and low expense ETF’s are a great place to start your research.
I would say that 100% of mutual funds are bad. That doesn’t mean they all lose money because many of them don’t, and some of them even outperform the indexes they are tracking. But it does mean that since they all have higher management fees than their ETF counterparts, by very design they will underperform compared to something that does the exact same thing with lower fees. The only time a mutual fund wouldn’t by design underperform is if you actually couldn’t find an ETF counterpart that does the same thing. In that event, maybe the mutual fund would be worth considering. But since in this day in age there is a low expense ratio ETF to match pretty much every mutual funds stated goals as well, there’s really no place for them.