Hi, I am a young Italian (I guess the "poste Italiane" gives it away uh) and I plan to make my fist small experiments to understand how buying stoks and ETFs works.
I tried to look around what all those acronyms and big words mean but usually the definition and explanations I found use other acronyms and big words and end up being mentally exhausting to follow.
As far as I understand An ETF is a group of companies that share a market and by shoving money in there (investing in the found is the right phrase I guess)
you either buy stocks
(which are just money you give the company to spend and after the profit is made it should give it back with a certain interest I think, right? How much interest and how often is a great mystery I have yet to solve)
or fractions of stocks
(what is the point of a stock being a certain price then???? If i can just buy a small piece of it???)
from one of the companies in the found
(randomly I guess, or according to a broker whims maybe idk)
and when the dividends are paid you can either get some money back or reinvested in the found.
Those ETFs are apparently more secure because they spread your money around multiple companies within multiple fields and I feel like I should invest more in those then in singular companies, is that right?
Also I'm planning to start with 50€ each month but if I feel comfortable enough I plan to rise the investment to maybe 300€ monthly, but I often see people saying that for those amounts of money (which are a fuckton to me) you should just dump in a single ETF and forget about it for like 10 years, but it feels so wrong to put so much money into something with risks attached to it and then ignoring it, is there something else I'm not getting? (As opposed to all the other things I'm understanding perfectly, right?)
Imo this is good advice, the only other thing i'd mention is Dollar Cost Averaging, basically budgeting to put a similar amount of money into something over a longer period of time. If you were to put $10,000 into something today, and the market has a routine crisis, it would sting a lot more than if you put the same amount of money in chunks of $200 over several months. Good to find something with low brokerage fees local to you.
Another thing worth mentioning, ETF or indexed funds will have lists of what they contain, if you can't find them, then you can ask for them (but they're normally easy to find). I say this because my money sat in a fund for a really long time that was filled with weapon companies and bonds in imperialist governments. You can find things labeled 'ethical', they're normally not that ethical (how is 20% of a fund being tied up in US tech stocks - google, apple, etc - ethical?), but it's better than having a direct stake in Lockheed Martin and Israeli Government bonds.
Oh and you will not time the market, do not try. I've never sold anything outside of an emergency when I needed the cash, and it generally takes about a week to organise.
I've had to look into this a lot because the government takes a portion of my pay and makes me invest it in superannuation.