Reddit reviews Bogle On Mutual Funds: New Perspectives For The Intelligent Investor (Wiley Investment Classics)

Buy and read these books (first):

Bogle on Mutual Funds https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/111908833X/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o07_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Bogleheads Guide to Investing
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1118921283/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o06_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The Four Pillars of Investing
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071747052/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

After reading those, download Robinhood and put $100 in (no more) and play around for like 6 months before even thinking about trying to play with larger amounts.

-- OR - skip Robinhood and download "Betterment" and just slowly put money in there and build some wealth.

Happy Learning.

I tend to think the r/investing crowd is too negative on many of the qualify closed end and open ended mutual funds out there. While the range of ETFs is exploding the mutual funds still offer a lot of diversity of product that just doesn't exist (yet?) for ETFs. That being said what you are describing here is a strategy called "performance chasing". An investor jumps into funds with really strong track records and stays in them while they continue to outperform. That sounds appealing and it sounds like it should work. In reality however that literally is one of the worst possible investing strategies around. It was a proven failure from the 1960s (gogo fund era) when open ended mutual funds became the primary non-real estate mainstream investment vehicle till the early 2000s when indexing and passive really came into vogue. As an aside for closed end funds it didn't work out well in the 1920s either.

That's not to say you have to use cap weighted indexing exclusively. That's not to say you can't buy mutual funds from quality houses that specialize in particular skills. But the reason you are going to get a lot of negative feedback on the approach you are considering is that it a genuinely terrible strategy, though one that sounds initially appealing.

What makes a mutual fund rack up a terrific record are often properties that can't or won't be repeated once the fund becomes popular. There are spectacular managers. The first no load open ended mutual fund manager, Thomas Rowe Price, being a terrific example. John Neff, Peter Lynch, Bill Nygren,Marty Whitman, Edward Johnson ... exist. But for every one of those there is a ton of Gerald Tsai's who crush the market using a strategy, accumulate a lot of assets and watch the strategy horrifically underperform because it just perfectly fit a certain point in time. The investors who performance chase, because they don't have an ideological commitment, get the later far more than the former. All the guys with the tremendous lifetime records had many years of underperformance. They were rarely the top 10 fund in any given year they just were consistently excellent across longer time periods. The investors who profited did so because they believed in the fund's strategies even when they didn't work out that year.

Since performance chasing is a 1990s strategy I'll give you what at the time was probably the best first investing book at the time: Bogle on Mutual Funds. The book is a bit dated but he talks at length about why performance chasing is a terrible strategy providing lots of data and examples. While you probably aren't going to listen I'd strongly suggest you read this book before you try what you are about to try.

Bogle On Mutual Funds: New Perspectives For The Intelligent Investor (Wiley Investment Classics) https://www.amazon.com/dp/111908833X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GJfACb92QTX4V

A Random Walk down Wall Street: The Time-tested Strategy for Successful Investing

Bogle On Mutual Funds: New Perspectives For The Intelligent Investor