Thanks all for the swift and thoughtful replies. I had thought that maybe the price would rise as my order was filled up and didn't want to miss out, but apparently neglected to notice in each instance that the top asking price was for more units than I was purchasing. Lesson learnt!
With the time for buying VTS/VEU I was meaning more whether there was an ideal time of day for liquidity considering that the markets of the underlying securities don't line up very much if at all with the ASX hours, but maybe this doesn't matter? Next time I buy a chunk I will definitely keep my eye on the NAV in particular with the cross-listed ETFs.
If you are going to put a buy order at slightly above the offer price, it will get filled instantly.
I would suggest opening a commsec account so you have access to live data. You can even take advantage of some sign on free brokerage.
Good idea with the live data access, I was wondering recently if I had signed up to Commsec and gotten the $600 free brokerage whether I would be able to easily transfer the shares over to a different, cheaper, broker if the need arose to sell them. Of course, having a buy and hold strategy makes that a bit irrelevant but if I could claim a capital loss on VTS+VEU and purchase VGS or something it could be useful.
I also signed up to the Sharesight portfolio tracking and I feel like that had much more recent (or at least different) price data when looking at it side-by-side with CMC. Anyone know whether it has live pricing? I'm sure its in the documentation somewhere but if someone knows off the top of their head and can save me using mine :)
If I was 21 again with 20k starting again I would find the best value stock and put it all into that, with a little leverage to add some more on top if possible. 20k is a small proportion of my future earnings and expected wealth, no need to waste potential return with diversification. That's not advice though, just me. You've done the right thing according to conventional wisdom here, I would have gone with VGS over VEU/VTS. Slightly more expensice mer but better tax implications and less brokerage. Hopefully vanguard can lower the Australian based etfs costs over time as more people buy them.
Interesting choice, and a very useful mindset when thinking about my net worth at this early stage.. Thanks for that perspective. Out of curiosity, how would you go about determining the best value stock? Shiller P/E?
My mentality for choosing VTS+VEU over VGS was mainly based on MER and diversification, as the tax benefits of getting franking credits for a 4% dividend yield of the 3% cap of Australian shares in VGS isn't a huge bonus. Of course, over a lifetime these little things add up to large differences but I've only ever seen the decision made one way or another out of personal preference.
Typically though (or I guess conventionally), VGS would need pairing with VGE to keep the Emerging Market share that makes up about 18% of VEU, which adds more MER and brokerage, not to mention the fact that VTS+VEU covers 6300 securities to VGS's ~1500 and VGE's ~1000 (of course, 98% of those extra securities are probably worth 2% of the fund so it isn't going to make an enormous difference). I'd be interested in hearing what everyone's ETF choices are in this area, and your relative allocation to VTS/VEU or VGS/VGE. I think the world-cap equivalent is roughly 45% VTS/55% VEU or 90% VGS/10% VGE.
Speaking of 90% VGS/10% VGE, I was doing some asset allocation thinking a short time ago, and came up with the exercise of determining an allocation for a 1, 2, 3...9 fund/ETF portfolio. I think I had a Vanguard Growth LifeStrategy Fund for the 1 fund portfolio, VAS+VGS for the 2 fund, etc etc. and obviously as the number of fund/ETFs went up, individual allocations fell quite fast. Looking at the 9 ETF portfolio makes me question the benefit of adding many (significantly more expensive) ETFs in small proportions to a portfolio:
25% IHD 0.30%
15% VGE 0.48%
15% VEU 0.18%
15% VAF 0.20%
10% VAP 0.25%
5% VTS 0.05%
5% IJR 0.16% (US Small Cap 600)
5% IXJ 0.48% (Healthcare)
5% IXI 0.48% (Consumer Staples)
Obviously some people end up with lots of little parts of their portfolio as remnants of previous allocations, but does anyone have any thoughts on the point at which adding x% of something to your portfolio becomes a meaningless attempt at optimisation/diversification?
In this case it was wishful thinking that instead of 20% VTS I could overweight myself in US smallcaps, healthcare and consumer staples in order to get higher growth/more recession-proof/whatever (Note that I have not gone through with this or most of the numerous other complex portfolios I devised), which I guess is sector-picking rather than stock-picking.
Sorry for the ramble, but over the past few months I've been adding to a very long-winded document/diary with new thoughts on asset allocation, questions, and other investment stuff (totalling about 34 pages at the moment) and looking back I think a lot of what I came up with, like that 9-fund portfolio (and worse!), was overcomplicating something that really should be as simple as possible and as cheap (MER and brokerage-wise) as possible. I'd hate to be rebalancing a 20-ETF portfolio with my ~6 yearly chunks..