Do It Yourself Stock Investing

When it comes to investing in and picking stocks to buy many rely on financial advisors, fund managers or brokers, but a new wave is coming in and bringing with it people who are going down the do it yourself investment path. It's much cheaper to make investment decisions yourself because you avoid a heap of fee's and you also get a sense of accomplishment when your stocks payoff.

The experts don't always get it right anyway so with a bit of research, patience and courage we can all save on fee's and do it ourselves.

Go it alone
"Australia's biggest online broker, CommSec, now has 1.4 million accounts. Online information service The Intelligent Investor - by way of example - has gone from nothing to 10,000 subscribers in eight years.

The typical DIY investor is 50-plus, nearing retirement and probably has a self-managed superannuation fund. But Mark Johnston of researcher InvestmentTrends says there's an emerging group of younger DIY investors.

These investors tend to be male, 30-plus and on good incomes. "What they have in common is a high level of engagement and interest in their finances," he says.

CommSec general manager Matt Comyn sees the same trend. "Over the last 10 years, we've seen people getting into direct investing younger ... there's also more women becoming involved than you would have seen a few years ago," he says.

What's behind this interest in self-directed investing? Johnston says of the younger investors: "They tend to DIY because they don't think financial planners add value necessarily ... they don't necessarily see them as independent. I'm not saying they aren't, but that's the perception in this group - it's a common view." Money Manager

# Wealth News, Stock Market News