Investment Tuesday

My Roth IRA retirement account is handled by Sharebuilder.com (now E*Trade). One of the quirky features of using Sharebuilder is the fact that they restrict your automatic investment purchases to Tuesdays. While this may seem like a negative to those of you who (foolishly) try to time to market to buy at the lowest possible price point, Sharebuilder's reasoning is that, from their point of view, placing all trading orders in one lump sum significantly reduces trading costs; savings can then be passed on to their clients. (Besides, one should not be concerned with trying to time the market when investing for the long-term.) While I have thought about switching my Roth IRA over to Zecco.com (now Ally Invest), due to Zecco's zero-fee trading platform, I have actually been rather pleased with the user-friendliness of Sharebuilder's site and its orientation towards beginning investors who wish to dollar-cost-average their investments.

So tomorrow is my investment Tuesday, and I will be purchasing $271 worth of iShares MSCI EAFE Index Fund (EFA). $271 may seem like the very antithesis of a nice, round number, but often I will make random, extra contributions to my IRA to satisfy my urge to splurge without wasting my money on frivolous things. Up until a couple of months ago, I had been dividing my regular Roth IRA contributions equally between the four funds that make up my portfolio (EFA, IWM, PEY, and SPY). I recently began trying to purchase only one fund a month, in order to reduce trading costs. It has been a while since I purchased any EFA, since that fund has had the highest growth of my four funds, and I am trying to buy more of those investments that are lagging behind (buy low, sell high, remember?). But this month it is EFA's turn to be on the bottom and get its monthly "top off," so to speak.