The Intelligent Investor_ The Definitive Book on Value Investing - Benjamin Graham [56]
You can also buy individual stocks straight from the issuing companies. In 1994, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission loosened the handcuffs it had long ago clamped onto the direct sale of stocks to the public. Hundreds of companies responded by creating Internet-based programs allowing investors to buy shares without going through a broker. Some helpful online sources of information on buying stocks directly include www.dripcentral.com, www.netstock direct.com (an affiliate of Sharebuilder), and www.stockpower.com. You may often incur a variety of nuisance fees that can exceed $25 per year. Even so, direct-stock purchase programs are usually cheaper than stockbrokers.
Be warned, however, that buying stocks in tiny increments for years on end can set off big tax headaches. If you are not prepared to keep a permanent and exhaustively detailed record of your purchases, do not buy in the first place. Finally, don’t invest in only one stock—or even just a handful of different stocks. Unless you are not willing to spread your bets, you shouldn’t bet at all. Graham’s guideline of owning between 10 and 30 stocks remains a good starting point for investors who want to pick their own stocks, but you must make sure that you are not overexposed to one industry.6 (For more on how to pick the individual stocks that will make up your portfolio, see pp. 114–115 and Chapters 11, 14, and 15.)
If, after you set up such an online autopilot portfolio, you find yourself trading more than twice a year—or spending more than an hour or two per month, total, on your investments—then something has gone badly wrong. Do not let the ease and up-to-the-minute feel of the Internet seduce you into becoming a speculator. A defensive investor runs—and wins—the race by sitting still.
Get some help. A defensive investor can also own stocks through a discount broker, a financial planner, or a full-service stockbroker. At a discount brokerage, you’ll need to do most of the stock-picking work yourself; Graham’s guidelines will help you create a core portfolio requiring minimal maintenance and offering maximal odds of a steady return. On the other hand, if you cannot spare the time or summon the interest to do it yourself, there’s no reason to feel any shame in hiring someone to pick stocks or mutual funds for you. But there’s one responsibility that you must never delegate. You, and no one but you, must investigate (before you hand over your money) whether an adviser is trustworthy and charges reasonable fees. (For more pointers, see Chapter 10.)
Farm it out. Mutual funds are the ultimate way for a defensive investor to capture the upside of stock ownership without the downside of having to police your own portfolio. At relatively low cost, you can buy a high degree of diversification and convenience—letting a professional pick and watch the stocks for you. In their finest form—index portfolios—mutual funds can require virtually no monitoring or maintenance whatsoever. Index funds are a kind of Rip Van Winkle investment that is highly unlikely to cause any suffering or surprises even if, like Washington Irving’s lazy farmer, you fall asleep for 20 years. They are a defensive investor’s dream come true. For more detail, see Chapter 9.
Filling in the Potholes
As the financial markets heave and crash their way up and down day after day, the defensive investor can take control of the chaos. Your very refusal to be active, your renunciation of any pretended ability to predict the future, can become your most powerful weapons. By putting every investment decision on autopilot, you drop any self-delusion that you know where stocks are headed, and you take away the market’s power to upset you no matter how bizarrely it bounces.
As Graham notes, “dollar-cost averaging