For taxable accounts, the same rules apply only more so.
1. Passive investing wins eight times out of 10 over long time horizons.
2. Active funds perform even worse in taxable accounts than tax preferred accounts because of capital gains drag from increased transactions.
3. Owning a broad index fund is generally superior to stockpicking because individual stocks or under diversified portfolios are subject to uncompensated list. (The type of risk that you don't get paid for taking.)
So I would focus on passive ETFs and index mutual funds.
In terms of brokerages I would recommend:
Vanguard: if you're only going to buy Vanguard funds this is probably the cheapest option.
TD Ameritrade: with 100 fee free ETFs including Vanguard favorites like VTI, and VOO there is literally no lazy portfolio that you cannot put together with fee free trades.
Betterment: if you have over $50,000 in your taxable account, I would say that this is your best option because of the tax loss harvesting feature which should more than cover the additional 0.25% fees on top of the ETF fees imposed by Betterment. In addition this is also the easiest method which requires no rebalancing, has an excellent user interface, and is a very transparent product.
Motifinvesting: A reasonable option which lets you put together any portfolio of up to 30 stocks/ETFs. Each time you purchase the portfolio, or rebalance, all trades are covered by a single $9.99 fee. The chief advantage of Motif is that it opens up the entire universe of ETFs for purchase, and has cheap trading costs.
Hope that helps.
