Sunday, September 26, 2010

Dollar cost averaging and ETF

Mr Tan,
Hi! Thanks for organizing last saturday's invest for the long term talk. I have never invest before. It was informative indeed. However, I have a few questions for you on ETF.

1) I want to invest an initial amount of $20,000 in STI ETF and continue to invest for the long term (20 years). I do not want to constantly monitor and track my investment. Do you think I should adopt dollar cost averaging (DCA) or invest in a lump sum?
2) If I am investing for the long term using DCA, should I care about the buying price (buy low)?



REPLY
If I were to take this decision, I would invest this sum in 1,000 units (about $3,000) every 3 months over the next 2 years to gain some dollar cost averaging. The reason for this decision is that the market is somewhat on the high side and the global economy is still uncertain (in my view), but we do not know if it will continue to go up or may correct downwards over the next two years. So, it is better to do some averaging. However, it is a difficult decision to take.