Which forex brokerage should I choose if I want to fund my account with over a million dollars?
Oanda.com is a very respectable broker. They don't offer ridiculous leverage options of 200 to 1 that prove the downfall of people starting out in Forex. When I used them a few years back, they had good customer service and some nice charting tools. With your experience, I think you'd agree that trading over a standardized, regulated exchange is much more practical with the amount of capital you plan to trade with. That said, I'd highly advise you to consider FX futures at CME, cause spot forex at the bucket shops will give you a ton of avoidable operational risks.
This is just an addition to base64's answer.  In order to maximize your overall wealth (and wellbeing) in a long run, it is not enough to look only at the expected value (EV). In his example of always keeping $9850 or having $10000 99% of the time, EV in the second case is greater ($9900 > $9850) and if you are Bill Gates than you should not take an insurance in this case. But if your wealth is a lot less than that you should take an insurance. Take a look at Kelly criterion and utility functions. If I offer you to take 100 million dollars (no strings attached) or to take a risk to get 200 million dollars 60% of the time (and $0 40% of the time), would you take that risk? You shouldn't but Bill Gates should take that risk because that would be a very good investment for him. Utility functions can help you choose if you want an insurance or not. Maybe you want to insure your house because the value of the house is a large percentage of your wealth but on the other hand you don't need to insure your car if it is very easy for you to afford another one (but not easy to afford another house). Lets calculate what your wealth should be in order not to take this $150 insurance on a $10000 item. If you pay $150 for an insurance you have guaranteed $9850. But choosing not to take an insurance is the same as betting $9850 in order to gain $150 99% of the time. By using Kelly criterion formula fraction of the wealth needed to make this bet is: [p*(b+1)-1]/b = [0.99*(150/9850+1) -1]/ (150/9850) = 1/3.  That means that if your wealth greater than $29950 you don't need an insurance. But if you want to be sure it is advised to use fractional Kelly betting (for example you could multiply fraction by 1/2) and in that case if your wealth is more than $59900 you don't need an insurance for this item. "This is a tough question, because it is something very specific to your situation and finances. I personally started at a young age (17), with US$1,000 in Scottrade. I tried the ""stock market games"" at first, but in retrospect they did nothing for me and turned out to be a waste of time. I really started when I actually opened my brokerage account, so step one would be to choose your discount broker. For example, Scottrade, Ameritrade (my current broker), E-Trade, Charles Schwab, etc. Don't worry about researching them too much as they all offer what you need to start out. You can always switch later (but this can be a little of a hassle). For me, once I opened my brokerage account I became that much more motivated to find a stock to invest in. So the next step and the most important is research! There are many good resources on the Internet (there can also be some pretty bad ones). Here's a few I found useful: Investopedia - They offer many useful, easy-to-understand explanations and definitions. I found myself visiting this site a lot. CNBC - That was my choice for business news. I found them to be the most watchable while being very informative. Fox Business, seems to be more political and just annoying to watch. Bloomberg News was just ZzzzZzzzzz (boring). On CNBC, Jim Cramer was a pretty useful resource. His show Mad Money is entertaining and really does teach you to think like an investor. I want to note though, I don't recommend buying the stocks he recommends, specially the next day after he talks about them. Instead, really pay attention to the reasons he gives for his recommendation. It will teach you to think more like an investor and give you examples of what you should be looking for when you do research. You can also use many online news organizations like MarketWatch, The Motley Fool, Yahoo Finance (has some pretty good resources), and TheStreet. Read editorial (opinions) articles with a grain of salt, but again in each editorial they explain why they think the way they think." "What you seem to want is a dividend reinvestment plan (DRIP).  That's typically offered by the broker, not by the ETF itself.  Essentially this is a discounted purchase of new shares when you're dividend comes out.  As noted in the answer by JoeTaxpayer, you'll still need to pay tax on the dividend, but that probably won't be a big problem unless you've got a lot of dividends.  You'll pay that out of some other funds when it's due.  All DRIPs (not just for ETFs) have potential to complicate computation of your tax basis for eventual sale, so be aware of that.  It doesn't have to be a show-stopper for you, but it's something to consider before you start.  It's probably less of a problem now than it used to be since brokers now have to report your basis on the 1099-B in the year of sale, reducing your administrative burden (if you trust them to get it right). Here's a list of brokerages that were offering this from a top-of-the-search-list article that I found online: Some brokerages, including TD Ameritrade, Vanguard, Scottrade, Schwab and, to a lesser extent, Etrade, offer ETF DRIPs—no-cost dividend reinvestment programs. This is very helpful for busy clients. Other brokerages, such as Fidelity, leave ETF dividend reinvestment to their clients. Source: http://www.etf.com/sections/blog/23595-your-etf-has-drip-drag.html?nopaging=1 Presumably the list is not constant.  I almost didn't included but I thought the wide availability (at least as of the time of the article's posting) was more interesting than any specific broker on it. You'll want to do some research before you choose a broker to do this.  Compare fees for sure, but also take into account other factors like how soon after the dividend they do the purchase (is it the ex-date, the pay date, or something else?).  A quick search online should net you several decent articles with more information.  I just searched on ""ETF DRIP"" to check it out." You are suggesting something called dollar cost averaging (or its cousin, dollar value averaging) - http://www.investopedia.com/articles/stocks/07/dcavsva.asp  This is certainly a valid investment strategy, although personally, I feel that for long term investment, it is not necessary unless you plan on being an active trader. I still strongly encourage you to research these two methods and see if they would work well for your personal investment strategy and goals. As far as what sorts of investments for a taxable account, I have three general recommendations: As far as which company to use for your brokerage, I personally have accounts at Voya, TRowe Price and Fidelity. I would strongly recommend Fidelity out of those three, mostly due to customer service and quality and ease of use of their website. Vanguard is a great brokerage, but you don't have to choose them just because you plan to mostly invest in Vanguard funds. I also recommend you research how capital gains and dividend taxing works (and things like lost harvesting), so that you can structure your investments with taxes in mind. Do this ahead of time, don't wait until April of 2016 because it will be too late to save on taxes by then. "The other option apart from the above which I feel is quite good is ""Travel Card"" [also called Forex Card] issued in USD. These cards are like prepaid debit cards. They are available from almost quite a few Indian Banks like HDFC / ICICI / UTI. The limit for students is around 100 K USD per year.  http://www.hdfcbank.com/personal/cards/prepaid_cards/forexplus_card/pre_forex_elg.htm The card can be reloaded by any amount [i think the minimum is USD 100] by visiting the Branch or certain Forex agents. There loading fee is INR 75. The Fx is typical Card Rate prevailing on the day. In US this card can be used as a credit card for almost everything [I have used this without any hassel]. Avoid using the card for blocking anything [at Hotel for room booking, or initial block at car rentals]. Although its mentioned that there is a withdrawl fees, i was never charged anything for withdrawls. The card comes with an internet based login to monitor account balance and transactions. Any unused funds can be withdrawn in India. The payment will be make in INR." "@sdg's answer is spot-on with the advice to avoid repeated conversions, but I'd like to provide some specifics on the fees involved: Each time you round-trip Canadian dollars (CAD) through a U.S.-dollar (USD) priced security at TD Waterhouse and leave your proceeds in CAD, you're paying a total foreign exchange fee – implied in their rate  spread – of about 3%, give or take. That's ~3% per buy & sell combination, or ~1.5% on each end. You can imagine if you trade back & forth frequently, you can quickly lose a lot of money.  Do it back and forth ten times in a year and you're out ~30% on the fees alone! The TD U.S. Money Market Fund (TDB166) that TD Waterhouse is referring to has no direct commission to buy or sell, but it does have a Management Expense Ratio (MER) of 0.20% per year – basically a fee which is deducted from the fund's returns (which, today, are also close to zero.)  Practically speaking, that's a very slim fee to hold some USD in your Canadian dollar TFSA. While 0.20% is cheap, a point to keep in mind is if you maintain a significant USD balance, you are maintaining currency risk:  You can lose money in CAD terms if the CAD appreciates vs. USD. Additional references: Canadian Capitalist describes TD Waterhouse and the use of TDB166 and ""wash trades"" at How to ""Wash"" Your Trade?  He's referring to RRSPs, but the same applies to TFSAs, which came out after the post was written. Canadian Couch Potato has two relevant articles: Are US-listed ETFs Really Cheaper? and Lowering Your Currency Exchange Fees." "There is a site that treats you like a fund manager in the real market, Marketoracy, http://marketocracy.com/. Each user is given 1 million in cash. You can have multiple ""mutual funds"", and the site allows use to choose between two types of strategies, buy/sell, short/cover. Currently, options are not supported. The real value of the site is that users are ranked against each other (of course, you can op out of the rankings). This is really cool because you can determine the real worth of your returns compared to the rest of investors across the site. A couple years back, the top 100 investors were invited to come on as real mutual fund managers - so the competition is legitimate. Take a look at the site, it's definitely worth a try. Were there other great sites you looked at?" Here is another choice I like, iShares JPMorgan USD Emerging Markets Bond (EMB) Here is the world ETFs