Automatic investments for cheap
Almost all major no-load mutual fund families allow you to do the kind of thing you are talking about, however you may need an initial investment of between $1000 to $3000 depending on the fund.  Once you have it however, annual fee's are usually very little, and the fees to buy that companies funds are usually zero if it's a no-load company (Vanguard, TRowPrice, etc)  With the larger companies that means you have a pretty large selection of funds, but generally EACH fund has a minimum initial purchase, once that's met then you can buy additional amounts in small quantities without a problem. For someone on a smaller budget, many low cost brokers (ETrade as mentioned by Litteadv, Scottrade as mentioned by myself in another similar question today) allow you to start with smaller initial balances and have a small selection of funds or ETF's that you can trade from without commission.  In the case of Scottrade, they have like 15 ETF's that you can trade comission free.  Check with the various low cost brokerages such as ETrade, Scottrade, and TDAmeritrade, to see what their policies are, and what if any funds/ETF's they allow you to trade in without commissions. Keep in mind that for Mutual funds, there may still be a fund minimum initial investment that applies, be sure to check if that is the case or not.  The lack of any minimum investment makes ETF's a slightly more attractive option for someone who doesn't have the 'buy in' that many funds require. For your purposes, I would recommend using direct investment in a no-load mutual fund.  I mostly use Vanguard and would recommend them.  They just about invented index funds, usually have the lowest (internal) expenses for index and many other funds, if you take electronic instead of paper statements there is no maintenance fee, have no transaction commission, can do periodic automatic investment from a bank account etc.  A typical index fund there would require an initial $3000 investment and would have a minimum of $100 for each additional investment.  If you can't come up with an initial sum of that size, you might be able to find a broker with a lower minimum and suitable free ETFs trades as others have suggested. ETrade allows this without fees (when investing into one of the No-Load/No-Fees funds from their list). The Sharebuilder plan is better when investing into ETF's or stocks, not for mutual funds, their choice (of no-fees funds) is rather limited on Sharebuilder. "Previously (prior to Capital One acquisition -- it's kind of like K-Mart buying Sears) Sharebuilder offered 12 automatic (i.e. pre-scheduled) stock purchases per month if you subscribed to their $12/mo ""Advantage"" plan. So, 12 trades for $1 a trade. Great deal. Except then they flattened their pricing to everyone's acclaim (that is, everyone except for the non-millionaire casual investors) and jacked it up to $4 per automatic investment. As far as I know, Sharebuilder's 12 no-fee investments for $12/mo was rather unique in the online trading world -- and now it's very sadly extinct. They do have no-fee mutual fund investing, however, for what it's worth." "If you are not worried about timing the market and want to buy primarily ""blue chip"" stocks to hold for a while, consider using Loyal3. They don't charge any commission. The downside is that trades are executed at the end of the day and there's only about 60 companies currently available (but there are some really good ones currently available)."
There's a few options you may want to look into. First, I'm writing from an US point of view, I do not know if these are available in Russia.  First look into DRIPS (Dividend Reinvestment Plans). These seem tailor made for your request. They are plans set up by companies that pay dividends. If you own at least one share (costing no more than say $100 often less), then these companies will take the dividends paid on these shares and automatically buy more shares as the income from the dividends pile up. This is a low cost of entry way of getting in on many high quality stocks. Stalwart stocks such as GE and many utility and real estate stocks (REITs) offer this.  Check out these links: Secondly you can look at brokerages that specialize in buying smaller amount of stocks on a regular basis to simulate a DRIP, ShareBuilder will allow you to invest say $50 or $100 a month into one or more stocks. However, at smaller amounts, their commission fees can eat in to your returns.  Folio investing does the same thing as Sharebuilder. It's worth looking at them both and comparing their commissions and other features Do not use a stop loss order as a long-term investor.  The arguments in favor of stop losses being presented by a few users here rely on a faulty premise, namely, that there is some kind of formula that will let you set your stop such that it won't trigger on day-to-day fluctuations but will trigger in time to protect you from a significant loss in a serious market downturn.  No such formula exists.  No matter where you set your stop, it is as likely to dump you from your investment just before it begins climbing again as it is to shield you from continued losses.  Each time that happens, you will have sold low and bought high, incurring trading fees into the bargain.  It is very unlikely that the losses you avoid in a bear market (remember, you still incur the loss up until your stop is hit; it's only the losses after that that you avoid) will make up the costs of false alarms. On top of that, once you have stopped out of your first investment choice, then what?  Will you reinvest in some other stock or fund?  If those investments didn't look good to you when you first set up your asset allocation, then why should they look any better now, just because your primary investment has dropped by some arbitrary[*] amount?  Will you park the money in cash while you wait for prices to bottom out?  The market bottom is only apparent in retrospect.  There is no formula for calling it in real time. Perhaps stop loss orders have their uses in active trading strategies, or maybe they're just chrome that trading platforms use to attract customers.  Either way, using them on long-term investments will just cost you money in the long run.  Forget the fancy order types, and manage your risk through your asset allocation.  The overwhelming likelihood is that you will get better performance, and you will spend less time worrying about your investments to boot. [*] Why are the stop levels recommended by the formulae invariably multiples of 5%?  Do the market gods have a thing for round numbers? I recommend you two things: I like these investments because they are not high risk. I hope this helps. There are legitimate multi currency mutual funds/efts. But I don't think their rate of return will produce the extra money you're looking for any faster than any other kind of investment with comparable risks. To make money fast, you have to accept nontrivial risk of losing money fast, which isn't what you seem to have in mind. The reason it's not automatic is that Questrade doesn't want to force you to convert in margin accounts at the time of buying the stock. What if you bought a US stock today and the exchange rate happened to be very unfavorable (due to whatever), wouldn't you rather wait a few days to exchange the funds rather than lose on conversion right away? In my opinion, Questrade is doing you a favor by letting you convert at your own convenience. Your idea is a good one, but, as usual, the devil is in the details, and implementation might not be as easy as you think.  The comments on the question have pointed out your Steps 2 and 4 are  not necessarily the best way of doing things, and that perhaps  keeping the principal  amount invested in the same fund instead of taking it all out and re-investing it in a similar, but different, fund might be better. The other points for you to consider are as follows. How do you identify which of the thousands of conventional mutual  funds and ETFs is the average-risk / high-gain mutual fund into which you will place your initial investment?  Broadly speaking, most actively managed mutual fund with average risk are likely to give you  less-than-average gains over long periods of time.  The  unfortunate truth, to which many pay only Lipper service, is that  X% of actively managed mutual funds  in a specific category failed  to beat the average gain of all funds in that category, or the  corresponding index, e.g. S&P 500 Index for large-stock mutual funds, over the past N years, where X is generally between 70 and  100, and N is 5, 10, 15 etc.  Indeed, one of the arguments in  favor of investing in a very low-cost index fund is that you are effectively guaranteed the average gain (or loss :-(, don't forget the possibility of loss). This, of course, is also the argument used against investing in index funds.  Why invest in boring index funds and settle for average gains (at essentially no risk of not getting the average performance: average performance is close to guaranteed) when you can  get much more out of your investments by investing in a fund that is among the (100-X)% funds that had better than average returns?  The difficulty is that which funds are X-rated and which non-X-rated (i.e. rated G = good or PG = pretty good), is known only in hindsight whereas what you need is foresight. As everyone will tell you, past performance does not guarantee future results.  As someone (John Bogle?) said,  when you invest in a mutual fund, you are in the position of a rower in rowboat: you can see where you have been but not where you are going.  In summary, implementation of your strategy needs a good crystal ball to look into the future. There is no such things as a guaranteed bond fund. They also have risks though not necessarily the same as in a stock mutual fund. You need to have a Plan B in mind in case your chosen mutual fund takes a longer time than expected to return the 10% gain that you want to use to trigger profit-taking and investment of the gain into a low-risk bond fund, and also maybe a Plan C in case the vagaries of the market cause your chosen mutual fund to have negative return for some time. What is the exit strategy? "I got started by reading the following two books: You could probably get by with just the first of those two. I haven't been a big fan of the ""for dummies"" series in the past, but I found both of these were quite good, particularly for people who have little understanding of investing. I also rather like the site, Canadian Couch Potato. That has a wealth of information on passive investing using mutual funds and ETFs. It's a good next step after reading one or the other of the books above. In your specific case, you are investing for the fairly short term and your tolerance for risk seems to be quite low. Gold is a high-risk investment, and in my opinion is ill-suited to your investment goals. I'd say you are looking at a money market account (very low risk, low return) such as e.g. the TD Canadian Money Market fund (TDB164). You may also want to take a look at e.g. the TD Canadian Bond Index (TDB909) which is only slightly higher risk. However, for someone just starting out and without a whack of knowledge, I rather like pointing people at the ING Direct Streetwise Funds. They offer three options, balancing risk vs reward. You can fill in their online fund selector and it'll point you in the right direction. You can pay less by buying individual stock and bond funds through your bank (following e.g. one of the Canadian Couch Potato's model portfolios), but ING Direct makes things nice and simple, and is a good option for people who don't care to spend a lot of time on this. Note that I am not a financial adviser, and I have only a limited understanding of your needs. You may want to consult one, though you'll want to be careful when doing so to avoid just talking to a salesperson. Also, note that I am biased toward passive index investing. Other people may recommend that you invest in gold or real estate or specific stocks. I think that's a bad idea and believe I have the science to back this up, but I may be wrong." Some other suggestions: Index-tracking mutual funds. These have the same exposure as ETFs, but may have different costs; for example, my investment manager (in the UK) charges a transaction fee on ETFs, but not funds, but caps platform fees on ETFs and not funds! Target date funds. If you are saving for a particular date (often retirement, but could also be buying a house, kids going to college, mid-life crisis motorbike purchase, a luxury cruise to see an eclipse, etc), these will automatically rebalance the investment from risk-tolerant (ie equities) to risk-averse (ie fixed income) as the date approaches. You can get reasonably low fees from Vanguard, and i imagine others. Income funds/ETFs, focusing on stocks which are expected to pay a good dividend. The idea is that a consistent dividend helps smooth out volatility in prices, giving you a more consistent return. Historically, that worked pretty well, but given fees and the current low yields, it might not be smart right now. That said Vanguard Equity Income costs 0.17%, and i think yields 2.73%, which isn't bad. "I think you're on the right track with that strategy. If you want to learn more about this strategy, I'd recommend ""The Intelligent Asset Allocator"" by William Bernstein. As for the Über–Tuber portfolio you linked to, my only concern would be that it is diversified in everything except for the short-term bond component, which is 40%. It might be worth looking at some portfolios that have more than one bond allocation -- possibly diversifying more across corporate vs government, and intermediate vs short term. Even the Cheapskate's portfolio located immediately above the Über–Tuber has 20% Corporate and 20% Government. Also note that they mention: Because it includes so many funds, it would be expensive and unwieldy for an account less than $100,000. Regarding your question about the disadvantages of an index-fund-based asset allocation strategy:" Why is that? With all the successful investors (including myself on a not-infrequent basis) going for individual companies directly, wouldn't it make more sense to suggest that new investors learn how to analyse companies and then make their best guess after taking into account those factors? I have a different perspective here than the other answers.  I recently started investing in a Roth IRA for retirement. I do not have interest in micromanaging individual company research (I don't find this enjoyable at all) but I know I want to save for retirement. Could I learn all the details? Probably, as an engineer/software person I suspect I could. But I really don't want to. But here's the thing: For anyone else in a similar situation to me, the net return on investing into a mutual fund type arrangement (even if it returns only 4%) is still likely considerably higher than the return on trying to invest in stocks (which likely results in $0 invested, and a return of 0%). I suspect the overwhelming majority of people in the world are more similar to me than you - in that they have minimal interest in spending hours managing their money. For us, mutual funds or ETFs are perfect for this. I've used prosper for a while and have a pretty good return based purely on shotgun approach.  I recently invested a few thousand with their automated tool.  Some people will default, but that's expected and part of their expected return calculation. What the automation mostly does is make short-term trading that much more difficult. Day trading is a zero-sum game, so if they win more, everyone else wins less.  Long term trading (years to decades) is a positive-sum game; the market as a whole tends to move upward for fairly obvious reasons (at its basis it's still investing, which in turn is based on lending, and as long as folks make fairly rational decisions about how much return they demand for their investment and the companies are mostly producing profits there will be a share of the profit coming back to the investors as dividends or increased share value or both. Day-to-day churn in individual stocks gets averaged out by diversification and time, and by the assumption that if you've waited that long you can wait a bit longer if necessary for jitters to settle out. Time periods between those will partake of some mix of the two. I know of no way to answer your question without 'spamming' a particular investment.  First off, if you are a USA citizen, max out your 401-K. Whatever your employer matches will be an immediate boost to your investment.  Secondly, you want your our gains to be tax deferred. A 401-K is tax deferred as well as a traditional IRA.  Thirdly, you probably want the safety of diversification. You achieve this by buying an ETF (or mutual fund) that then buys individual stocks.  Now for the recommendation that may be called spamming by others : As REITs pass the tax liability on to you, and as an IRA is tax deferred, you can get stellar returns by buying a mREIT ETF.  To get you started here are five: mREITs  Lastly, avoid commissions by having your dividends automatically reinvested by using that feature at Scottrade. You will have to pay commissions on new purchases but your purchases from your dividend Reinvestment will be commission free.  Edit: Taking my own advice I just entered orders to liquidate some positions so I would have the $ on hand to buy into MORL and get some of that sweet 29% dividend return. "If you want a Do-It-Yourself solution, look to a Vanguard account with their total market index funds.   There's a lot of research that's been done recently in the financial independence community.  Basically, there's not many money managers who can outperform the market index (either S&P 500 or a total market index).  Actually, no mutual funds have been identified that outperform the market, after fees, consistently.  So there's not much sense in paying someone to earn you less than a low fee index fund could do.  And some of the numbers show that you can actually lose value on your 401k due to high fees. That's where Vanguard comes in.  They offer some of the lowest fees (if not the lowest) and a selection of index funds that will let you balance your portfolio the way you want.  Whether you want to go 100% total stock market index fund or a balance between total stock market index fund and total bond index fund, or a ""lazy 3 fund portfolio"", Vanguard gives you the tools to do it yourself.  Rebalancing would require about an hour every quarter. (Or time span you declare yourself). jlcollinsnh A Simple Path to Wealth is my favorite blog about financial independence.  Also, Warren Buffet recommended that the trustees for his wife's inheritance when he passes invest her trust in one investment.  Vanguard's S&P500 index fund.  The same fund he chose in a 10 year $1M bet vs. hedge fund managers.  (proceeds go to charity).  That was about 9 years ago.  So far, Buffet's S&P500 is beating the hedge funds.  Investopedia Article" "The process of borrowing shares and selling them is called shorting a stock, or ""going short.""  When you use money to buy shares, it is called ""going long."" In general, your strategy of going long and short in the same stock in the same amounts does not gain you anything.  Let's look at your two scenarios to see why. When you start, LOOT is trading at $20 per share.  You purchased 100 shares for $2000, and you borrowed and sold 100 shares for $2000.  You are both long and short in the stock for $2000.  At this point, you have invested $2000, and you got your $2000 back from the short proceeds.  You own and owe 100 shares. Under scenario A, the price goes up to $30 per share.  Your long shares have gone up in value by $1000.  However, you have lost $1000 on your short shares.  Your short is called, and you return your 100 shares, and have to pay interest.  Under this scenario, after it is all done, you have lost whatever the interest charges are. Under scenario B, the prices goes down to $10 per share.  Your long shares have lost $1000 in value.  However, your short has gained $1000 in value, because you can buy the 100 shares for only $1000 and return them, and you are left with the $1000 out of the $2000 you got when you first sold the shorted shares.  However, because your long shares have lost $1000, you still haven't gained anything.  Here again, you have lost whatever the interest charges are. As explained in the Traders Exclusive article that @RonJohn posted in the comments, there are investors that go long and short on the same stock at the same time.  However, this might be done if the investor believes that the stock will go down in a short-term time frame, but up in the long-term time frame.  The investor might buy and hold for the long term, but go short for a brief time while holding the long position. However, that is not what you are suggesting.  Your proposal makes no prediction on what the stock might do in different periods of time.  You are only attempting to hedge your bets.  And it doesn't work.  A long position and a short position are opposites to each other, and no matter which way the stock moves, you'll lose the same amount with one position that you have gained in the other position.  And you'll be out the interest charges from the borrowed shares every time. With your comment, you have stated that your scenario is that you believe that the stock will go up long term, but you also believe that the stock is at a short-term peak and will drop in the near future.  This, however, doesn't really change things much.  Let's look again at your possible scenarios. You believe that the stock is a long-term buy, but for some reason you are guessing that the stock will drop in the short-term.  Under scenario A, you were incorrect about your short-term guess.  And, although you might have been correct about the long-term prospects, you have missed this gain.  You are out the interest charges, and if you still think the stock is headed up over the long term, you'll need to buy back in at a higher price. Under scenario B, it turns out that you were correct about the short-term drop.  You pocket some cash, but there is no guarantee that the stock will rise anytime soon.  Your investment has lost value, and the gain that you made with your short is still tied up in stocks that are currently down. Your strategy does prevent the possibility of the unlimited loss inherent in the short.  However, it also prevents the possibility of the unlimited gain inherent in the long position.    And this is a shame, since you fundamentally believe that the stock is undervalued and is headed up.  You are sabotaging your long-term gains for a chance at a small short-term gain."