For example, if you wanted.to build a Dog’s of the Dow portfolio, and you only have $10K to do it with, you could do so now with no trading commissions , by buying just a few shares of each company making up that portfolio.

There is no real “Dogs of the Dow” mutual fund, or at least not to my knowledge. And before if you had cash off to the side, it probably wouldn’t be enough to entertain the idea since many of the components that make up of the Dogs are really expensive and dealing with sub 100 shares and trading commissions would not make it worthwhile if you had to buy 20 different stocks with just a few shares. But now you can do that. Since trading commissions are now more or less $0.

So rather than parking so much in cash, maybe the strategy is to carve a tiny portion out, and to build your own fund. BYOF. increase the risk slightly, for increasing your chances of doing better than that 2% money market.

I am waiting for Schwab to update their trading platform so you can do just that. Specify you want to invest $10k across a basket of stocks, distributed by specified percentages…and do this at the end of every month….this gives regular people a huge upper hand. or I should say regular non-lazy people who are willing to do their own homework. Aim small, miss small.