In recent years, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) have been growing in popularity when building an investment portfolio. You can buy them from any discount broker, they have no minimum purchase amounts, and offer lower expense ratios than their mutual fund equivalents. Here are some sample ETF portfolios. On a case-by-case basis, I’ve been switching over some of my holdings from mutual funds to ETFs. But a practical question arises – Do you buy them with market orders or limit orders? This is in the context of buying and holding ETFs for a certain asset allocation, not for active traders.

Briefly, a market buy order is a request to buy an ETF at the best price available at that instant that someone else is selling it for. It will usually execute virtually instantaneously. On the other hand, a limit buy order is an order to buy a specific price or lower. If you can’t get that price, it will not execute. (There are more order types, but these are the only ones I use on a regular basis.) Limit orders are useful in IRA or 401k accounts when you have a set amount of money to work with.

Why I Always Use A Limit Order

Let’s say you want to buy an ETF like Vanguard Total US Market (Ticker VTI). If you pull up a quote, the big number they will show you is the last traded price along with a bid/ask. Let’s assume the last trade is $60 a share, and the bid/ask is $59.90 and $60.40. That means at that instant, someone says they will buy X shares at $59.90 (bid), and someone else will sell their shares at $60.40 (ask).

If you put in a market order and nothing changes in the meantime (computers are constantly trading every millisecond), then you’d end up buying shares at $60.40. However, there is a chance that those shares will be sold already, and nobody else is selling at that moment except for someone who wants $75. Not a high chance, but not zero. Then you’d be stuck buying at $75.

Alternatively, you can put your limit order for whatever price you like, and see if it hits. Now, what if you put a limit order above even the current ask? You’re basically saying, I want to make a purchase right now, and I’m willing to pay a certain amount more if absolutely required. Let’s say you use a limit order at $61, a small 1% premium to the last ask. My fear would be, would someone out there see that and sell me shares at $61, even if I could get them at $60.40 or even lower? According to this Schwab.com article, you won’t be taken advantage in such a way of because such action would be illegal:

Markets are not allowed to fill orders at a price worse than the market price, even if your limit order allows for it. Building in a little extra room to ensure your order is filled will not cause you to overpay—you should still be filled at the prevailing market price when your order comes to the front of the line.

This is called “best execution”. According to this SEC article, the quality of trade executions are constantly being monitored, even on a stock-by-stock basis.

In my own personal experience, I have entered many limit orders above the market price, and my fills are usually shy of my limit price and the same as market or lower. Even though I could have easily been ripped off, I wasn’t. As a result, I don’t bother with market orders. I just use a limit order, usually with a buffer, and I get protection from a price spike or “flash crash” situation and being stuck with a horrible fluke price, while at the same time my order is likely to be filled quickly at a price no worse than a market order.

How To Choose Your Your Limit Order Price
Okay, some how much buffer do you put in? It depends on what your personal requirements are. Maybe you only want to buy at a set price, so you don’t need a buffer at all. If you really want to make a purchase today and just want to enter one order and be confident you’ll get the shares, you could add anywhere from 0.5% to 5% on top of the current market price. If you really want to make sure you get the best possible price at the exact moment you’re staring at the ticker, you can simply enter a limit order somewhere between the bid/ask spread. However, you run the risk of the price inching higher and ending up having to pay more later. According to the Schwab article above, your chances change with the size of the spread:

The wider the spread, the greater your chance of order execution between the bid and ask. The reason a market maker may be more willing to lower the ask or raise the bid in order to trade with you is that he or she knows that investors are less willing to trade at the market price when the spread is wide. By contrast, when the spread is $0.05 or less, it will be more difficult to trade between the bid and ask. In such cases, you may want to consider a limit order at the bid or ask, since shaving a penny may not be worth the risk of the order not getting executed.

Finally, the time of day matters. The time periods right when the market opens and right before the market closes are known to have higher volatility. For buy-and-hold investors, you may wish to avoid this time if possible.

Whether you invest your hard-earned money in passive index funds or actively-managed funds, the more important thing is that costs matter. Every penny you pay in mutual fund expense ratios, sales loads, trade commissions, and financial advisor fees reduces your return. Even Morningstar, a company famous for their proprietary star rating system, looked at their data and admitted that expense ratios are the “most dependable predictor of performance” and should be the “primary test in fund selection”. I like to visualize high expenses as a constant, relentless drag that is almost impossible to overcome over long periods of time. You can play with this cost widget to see how much costs eat into returns over time.

Here comes more proof. I invest a huge chunk of my money in Vanguard funds, because they offer the best selection of low-cost mutual funds around. Every year, as they get more successful, my costs actually go down as they advantage of economies of scale. However, they also offer a large selection of actively-managed funds, one of which has been around since 1928.

Data from Lipper Ratings shows that over 80% of Vanguard funds (both active and passive) have outperformed peer funds in the same categories over the last 5- and 10-year period ending 6/30/11.

You’ll find that T. Rowe Price also touts the returns of their group of funds:

Not by accident, one of their tenets of investing is low costs:

Low-Cost, Active Management
We believe in actively managing our funds and pursue a disciplined process to individually evaluate every stock and bond we invest in. But we don’t believe it should cost a lot. We keep our expenses low, so your investment can go even further. We offer over 90 funds with no loads, no sales charges, and expense ratios below their Lipper category averages.

Survivorship Bias
Making the case even stronger, by hovering over the the Vanguard chart, you can see how many peer funds there were. Let’s just take the stock funds. For the 1-year comparison, there were 10,644 funds in their peer category. For the last-3 years, that drops to 9,207 peer funds. Last 5 years, 7,562 peer funds. Over the last 10-years, only 4,035 peer funds existed.

Where did all the funds go? Sure, some funds are new, but there were lots of new funds back in 2000 as well. The fact is that many older funds are unable to be compared today because they never lasted 10 years. Most likely, their performance was so low that they quietly closed down or merged with another fund. This is called survivorship bias, and means that existing funds did even better than these charts might indicate because of the dead funds that aren’t even included.

After major stock market movements, sometimes I get asked to throw out my own commentary. Now, obviously I am not a market expert and CNBC doesn’t ever ring me up for interviews to argue with another talking head. There are also plenty of articles out there about why you should not panic and sell stocks. I can only offer what’s rattling around in my own head. A head that wears glasses from Costco and a haircut from Fantastic Sams. 🙂

Stocks provide ownership in companies, and by extension ownership of a piece of all future profits. Those profits can be either given back as dividends or reinvested in the company to try and make it even bigger (and ideally even bigger dividends eventually). Look at Microsoft, it’s finally paying a dividend after many years of share price growth. Apple, on the other hand, is still growing with no dividend. When things are uncertain, then you don’t know what those future profits are. This is why prices can vary so much. Any individual company most likely hasn’t gotten 10% worse since a week ago, but all those years and years of future profits might have been affected. People want more margin of safety now, and aren’t willing to pay as much as last week.

As someone still in the accumulation phase, I realize that I have no control over these day-to-day fluctuations. Some people look at stock charts like tea leaves and see patterns. I just tell myself that 20 years from now, the chances that the S&P 500 is still at 1200 is quite low. Actually, I focus on the overall ingenuity of the world these days, but I don’t have a handy reference number for them. So when stocks drop, I quietly keep on accumulating a larger and larger portion of these companies, which again is a larger and larger portion of all future profits. Focus on the fact that you are buying more shares, and not your actual balance down to the penny. To smooth out the ride, I keep 25% of my money in still-safe nominal and inflation-linked Treasury bonds. Ironically, after the credit downgrade, the value of US Treasuries actually went up. (See my target asset allocation & most recent portfolio update.)

If I was in the withdrawal phase of retirement, and trying to live off my portfolio, then hopefully I’d have only a much smaller portion of my portfolio in stocks. My risk tolerance would definitely be much lower. I would own more income-producing investments like dividend-paying stocks and bonds, and in this case focus on the income instead of the balance.

Pssst… did you hear? Standard & Poor (S&P) downgraded the US credit rating from the highest AAA to one notch down at AA+. Let’s remember what these guys are famous for. The ratings agencies missed Enron a decade ago – they didn’t reduce Enron from investment grade to junk until days before they shut down. Then they missed the Worldcom accounting scandal and the Global Crossing meltdown, marking them investment grade months before bankruptcy. Then they missed Bear Stearns, only cutting their rating one business day before they never opened again. Oh, and all those mortgage-backed securities rated AAA when they were stinking piles of poo.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the S&P is necessarily wrong. I just smell a ton of politics, and I hate politics. Also, how often have they sounded an alarm that actually helped small investors? As in “Watch out, you thought this was safe but it really isn’t! Look what we figured out with our in-depth analysis!” As opposed to “Yup, we read a newspaper last week.”

I was looking through some old posts looking for writing inspiration, when I found this one that I had completely forgotten about:

S&P 500 at 750: Thoughts From A Market Timer – Published 11/21/2008

I still remember that night rather vividly. I was on a business trip in yet another bland hotel, stuck watching CNN. The S&P 500 index had closed at 752.44, a number I though I’d never see. I logged into my Vanguard account from my laptop and watched my account values dropping, but I also sensed an opportunity. Investing gurus were always saying to buy when people were most scared. This Hussman fellow made a convincing argument that the odds were in my favor. I actually had another draft of that post with the alternate title “S&P 500 at 750: Time to Back the Truck Up?” I tentatively put in a buy/sell order to move all my money into stocks.

But I didn’t execute it. Why? I was scared. And if you read the comments on that 2008 post above, lots of other people were scared too. And it did get worse for a while. I managed not to sell everything in a panic. In fact, I didn’t sell any stocks at all. I just kept with my asset allocation and rebalanced, which meant that all my new paycheck money went into stocks. Here’s the chart of the S&P 500 since I graduated college:

Not exactly a smooth ride! Today, my portfolio is bigger than ever, but I still feel the some uncomfortableness investing with the S&P 500 at 1300. Is it too high now?

Buy, hold, rebalance. This method will always have its doubters, but I believe in it more strongly as the years have passed. This means that I’ll never be able to brag on the internet how I was “100% cash right before the crash” or “Moved all my money into stocks right before the big boom”. However, I do feel it has improved my investment returns, and that’s the real goal.