Stock (as in NYSE) Advice

Why would anyone be in stocks at this time? Run away.

now is a good time to buy. Not as good as 6 mth ago or even 1 year ago, but still good.

You always buy when the market is down and sell when its up. why do you think its called 'buy low sell high'?

Index funds

This.

+1

SmartMoney and Kiplinger's are great magazines for advice...IMO

What prompted you to leave your broker? (broker or financial adviser?)

Only if you really believe the worst is really over.

Generally speaking, you get what you pay for. Personally, I'd recommend you check the Lipper averages. One thing to bear in mind is that almost all brokers will have access to information you won't have, or can't get easily for free.

Good luck going it alone, I sure wouldn't risk it myself though.

You can always open an account with one of the discount brokerage house (Scott, TDAmeritrade, etc) and see how comfortable you are with doing your own investing. Or you can move some of your money to another broker and have them compete with/monitor one another.

I have noticed that for example, with most of the online brokerage house, I have no access to institutional class or institutional only funds unless I put up some serious money (multimillion minimum), or really good corporate/muni bonds because the good ones have already been snatched up way ahead of individual investors.

I do like the idea of using online brokerage for purchasing individual stocks, ETF, or index funds and you can certainly build an all-ETF asset allocation portfolio. Again, the question remains which ETF, how to allocate and when to rebalance between your allocations.

However, I don't think ETFs, by themselves, is the holly grail. ETFs certainly can give you wide exposure to an entire sector of business (again you would have to know the particulars about sector ETFs) or market, but as with all indexes, its not very flexible, it does not anticipate, it does not give you any exposure to other asset classes or give you any way to hedge against systematic risk.

My advice: don't rely on any single financial instrument. Have some ETF, have some index funds, use some active-managed funds, have some bond/bondfund, do some real estate investing. Perhaps professional help is not unwarranted in today's economy. Of course, it all comes down to how much investable assets you have; you may or may not have access to the really good people. To be honest, I would venture to guess most top fund managers, traders, and wall-street gurus don't do their own investing.

Check out Motley Fool too.

Do yourself a favor and read this first.

X2

Check out where Option-ARM, ALT-A and commercial mortgages are right now. Things are going to get ugly in 2012 and into early 2013. Nothing is going to "recover" until real property prices stabilize. I think they're still overvalued as much as 75% in some markets. That's also when a lot of corporate bonds come due.

The bailout funds sure haven't gone to increase credit or build businesses. Most recipients used the funds to go right back to the casino.

I'm dumping my stock holdings for cash and real property in markets where rents are covering mortgage payments. And a few tangible assets, too.

If you must buy stocks, I'd go with utilities and heavy industries. Anything else is a gamble.

Also, stay the hell away from state bonds.

Don't even bother to look at past performance - we're in for a rough ride the next three years. It ain't over.

I'm looking more at capital preservation and hedges against fluctuation in currency value.

My opinion, of course. The tea leaves are particularly black in my view.

My professors told me the same thing, except in mid 2011 and forward.