Now Is the Best Time Ever to Be an Individual Investor
Money For the Rest of Us
J. David Stein
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What are the advantages and disadvantages individual investors have relative to professional investors. How individual investors can capitalize on their advantages without being overwhelmed by too many choices.
Topics covered include:
- How much have fees and commissions dropped for individual investors in the past two decades
- How the overall objective of individual investors differs from professional investors
- Why the smaller scale at which individual investors operate provides an advantage relative to professional investors
- What are some advantages that professional investors have relative to individual investors
- How having constraints and rules of thumb allow individual investors to generate better returns and be less overwhelmed
- What are some examples of rules of thumb that collectively form an investment philosophy and process
Thanks to Streak CRM for sponsoring the episode.
For more information on this episode click here.
Show Notes
How to Invest in Closed-End Funds—Money For the Rest of Us
The Beauty of Everyday Things by Soetsu Yanagi
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein
Related Episodes
313: No One Is Entirely a Buy and Hold Investor
332: What Is Tail Risk and Are You Taking Too Much Of It?
341: How to Overcome Investing Fears
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal financial show on Money, how it works, |
| 0:06.0 | how to invest it and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein, |
| 0:11.2 | today is episode 354. It's titled, The Advances and Disadvantages Individual Investors |
| 0:18.4 | Have Relative to Professional Investors. I spent just over 15 years as an institutional investment |
| 0:26.8 | advisor and capital allocator, including time managing overall portfolios for endowments |
| 0:33.0 | and foundations in what is known as outsourced CIO services or OCIO. I was our firm's chief |
| 0:40.6 | portfolio and chief investment strategist. I also co-led a research group that conducted due |
| 0:46.1 | diligence on asset managers across numerous market segments, including stocks, bonds, real estate, |
| 0:51.9 | private equity, energy timber and hedge funds. I held numerous manager meetings, many at these |
| 0:57.5 | firms offices. I've spent a lot of time with asset managers. I've also been an asset manager, |
| 1:04.4 | but I've also been an individual investor as I stepped away from institutional asset management |
| 1:10.0 | about a decade ago. There's a difference between being an institutional, professional investor |
| 1:16.0 | and a retail individual investor. There are advantages and disadvantages to each, but there has |
| 1:22.4 | never been a better time to be an individual investor. Product fees for ETFs and funds have never |
| 1:29.8 | been lower. ICI reports that in 1996, the average equity mutual fund expense ratio was just over |
| 1:38.1 | 1%. As of 2020, it had fallen to a half a percent. Expense ratios of target date mutual funds |
| 1:46.5 | are 45% lower today than they were in 2008. Morningstar reports that the acid weighted average |
| 1:53.3 | expense ratio across all US, open-end mutual funds and ETFs has been cut in half over the past two |
| 2:00.7 | decades. That average acid weighted expense ratio is now about 0.45%. Commissions are free |
| 2:09.9 | for many trades on stocks and options. One of the first trades I did back in the early 90s, |
| 2:16.1 | the commission itself was $40. As an institutional investor, I envied institutions that could trade |
| 2:23.1 | at one to two cents per share while we, as retail investors, were paying five to ten dollars per |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from J. David Stein, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of J. David Stein and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.