> Do you own any Amazon stock after having worked there for that period of time
Amazon pays SDEs about 1/4 of their income in the form of RSUs, vesting twice a year. I joined at $187, and sold my shares over time to cover various expenses (wedding, house downpayment, sold the last ones for an upcoming kitchen renovation).
> Queue someone telling me how awful an idea that is, and to just keep throwing into my 401K
Here's the thing... when you buy and sell stocks directly, you are implicitly competing with professionals at the game of 'what is the stock actually worth?'. The professionals you play against do nothing all day but analyze the stocks they've made bets on, build models, look at data, read reports. You might beat them by luck in the short term, but they'll beat you in the long-term at this game. You're both gambling, but they know the true odds better than you do.
My recommendation: Use a robo-advisor to spread your money over a diverse set of ETFs and auto-rebalance them. My friends are early employees over at WealthSimple (google them), a start-up that does this. Or read what it is their robo-advisor does, and do that yourself to save the 0.5% fee.
Didn't see this over the weekend, I wish I had. I did look into some different investing tools a couple months ago, but got intimidated by them, especially the ones that round up your purchases as you have to give them access to your checking. I really just wanted to get my feet wet with something smart and small at first. I'm not wealthy, but given the chance to learn I feel that I could be successful at it. I'll give your recommendation a chance.
If you don't want to do yourself but still want the benefits of rebalancing (and tax-loss harvesting), suggest checking out Wealthfront (https://www.wealthfront.com/) instead.
Amazon pays SDEs about 1/4 of their income in the form of RSUs, vesting twice a year. I joined at $187, and sold my shares over time to cover various expenses (wedding, house downpayment, sold the last ones for an upcoming kitchen renovation).
> Queue someone telling me how awful an idea that is, and to just keep throwing into my 401K
Here's the thing... when you buy and sell stocks directly, you are implicitly competing with professionals at the game of 'what is the stock actually worth?'. The professionals you play against do nothing all day but analyze the stocks they've made bets on, build models, look at data, read reports. You might beat them by luck in the short term, but they'll beat you in the long-term at this game. You're both gambling, but they know the true odds better than you do.
My recommendation: Use a robo-advisor to spread your money over a diverse set of ETFs and auto-rebalance them. My friends are early employees over at WealthSimple (google them), a start-up that does this. Or read what it is their robo-advisor does, and do that yourself to save the 0.5% fee.