Author Topic: Invest monthly or quaterly?  (Read 1860 times)

DaKini

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Invest monthly or quaterly?
« on: February 14, 2014, 01:43:54 AM »
Hi there,
as already mentioned elsewhere, i currently follow a quarterly investment scheme.
My savings from each month are currently stockpiling at a 3% account (a depot moving deal), the 3% will fall back to 1% as of September.
Currently each month there is an savings inflow of about 1k € (~1300$ currently).

The main motivation for stockpiling and investing quarterly is to save on brokerage fees: the minimum fee im able to grab per investment is about 10€. One of my brokerages offers a fixed fee of 10€ for values between 0-10k. This gives me a break even point of about 2300€ (~0,43% cost) which i curently exceed by 700€ per quarter.
So if i stockpile i would only incur about 40€ fees (at less than 0,40% per transaction) per year, compared to 120€ (at more than 0,40% per transaction).


The question is, if it would be better to incur the 80€ extra of fees to be able to participate on the possible two months capital gains (or losses!) or to stick with stockpiling because short term prices dont matter so much in the long run; especially as quarterly investments would save me about 2 hours time each quarter. However, having ~2k idle on an account is something that i dont like very much, especially after sepember when the rate drops below the CPI rate.
What would you do? Am i pushing too hard an saving fees with monthly investments?

Cyrano

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Re: Invest monthly or quaterly?
« Reply #1 on: February 14, 2014, 05:07:18 AM »
If your quarterly stockpile account has an average balance of 1,000, then your investments need to be returning on average 8 percentage points more than your savings to pay for the additional brokerage fees.

If you are a market optimist and think 9% annual returns are normal, those are the numbers.