What is the best, low risk investment I can make now?
"TL;DR - go with something like Barry Ritholtz's All Century Portfolio: 20 percent total U.S stock market 5 percent U.S. REITs 5 percent U.S. small cap value 15 percent Pacific equities 15 percent European equities 10 percent U.S. TIPs 10 percent U.S. high yield corp bonds 20 percent U.S. total bond UK property market are absurdly high and will be crashing a lot very soon The price to rent ratio is certainly very high in the UK.    According to this article, it takes 48 years of rent to pay for the same apartment in London.  That sounds like a terrible deal to me.  I have no idea about where prices will go in the future, but I wouldn't voluntarily buy in that market. I'm hesitant to invest in stocks for the fear of losing everything A stock index fund is a collection of stocks.  For example the S&P 500 index fund is a collection of the largest 500 US public companies (Apple, Google, Shell, Ford, etc.).  If you buy the S&P 500 index, the 500 largest US companies would have to go bankrupt for you to ""lose everything"" - there would have to be a zombie apocalypse. He's trying to get me to invest in Gold and Silver (but mostly silver), but I neither know anything about gold or silver, nor know anyone who takes this approach. This is what Jeremy Siegel said about gold in late 2013: ""I’m not enthusiastic about gold because I think gold is priced for either hyperinflation or the end of the world.""  Barry Ritholtz also speaks much wisdom about gold.  In short, don't buy it and stop listening to your friend.   Is buying a property now with the intention of selling it in a couple of years for profit (and repeat until I have substantial amount to invest in something big) a bad idea? If the home price does not appreciate, will this approach save you or lose you money?  In other words, would it be profitable to substitute your rent payment for a mortgage payment?  If not, you will be speculating, not investing.  Here's an articles that discusses the difference between speculating and investing.  I don't recommend speculating." "First of all, bear in mind that there's no such thing as a risk-free investment. If you keep your money in the bank, you'll struggle to get a return that keeps up with inflation. The same is true for other ""safe"" investments like government bonds. Gold and silver are essentially completely speculative investments; over the years their price tends to vary quite wildly, so unless you really understand how those markets work you should steer well clear. They're certainly not low risk. Repeatedly buying a property to sell in a couple of years time is almost certainly a bad idea; you'll end up paying substantial transaction fees each time that would wipe out a lot of the possible profit, and of course there's always the risk that prices would go down not up. Buying a property to keep - and preferably live in - might be a decent option once you have a good deposit saved up. It's very hard to say where prices will go in future, on the one hand London prices are very high by historical standards, but on the other hand supply is likely to remain severely constrained for years to come. I tend to think of a house as something that I need one of for the rest of my life, and so in one sense not owning a house to live in is a gamble that house prices and rents won't go up substantially. If you own a house, you're insulated from changes in rent etc and even if prices crash at least you still have somewhere to live. However that argument only works really well if you expect to keep living in the same area under most circumstances - house prices might crash in your area but not elsewhere."
"A good question -- there are many good tactical points in other answers but I wanted to emphasize two strategic points to think about in your ""5-year plan"", both of which involve around diversification: Expense allocation: You have several potential expenses. Actually, expenses isn't the right word, it's more like ""applications"". Think of the money you have as a resource that you can ""pour"" (because money has liquidity!) into multiple ""buckets"" depending on time horizon and risk tolerance. An ultra-short-term cushion for extreme emergencies -- e.g.  things go really wrong -- this should be something you can access at a moment's notice from a bank account. For example, your car has been towed and they need cash. A short-term cushion for emergencies -- something bad happens and you need the money in a few days or weeks. (A CD ladder is good for this -- it pays better interest and you can get the money out quick with a minimal penalty.) A long-term savings cushion -- you might want to make a down payment on a house or a car, but you know it's some years off. For this, an investment account is good; there are quite a few index funds out there which have very low expenses and will get you a better return than CDs / savings account, with some risk tolerance. Retirement savings -- $1 now can be worth a huge amount of money to you in 40 years if you invest it wisely. Here's where the IRA (or 401K if you get a job) comes in. You need to put these in this order of priority. Put enough money in your short-term cushions to be 99% confident you have enough. Then with the remainder, put most of it in an investment account but some of it in a retirement account. The thing to realize is that you need to make the retirement account off-limits, so you don't want to put too much money there, but the earlier you can get started in a retirement account, the better. I'm 38, and I started both an investment and a retirement account at age 24. They're now to the point where I save more income, on average, from the returns in my investments, than I can save from my salary. But I wish I had started a few years earlier. Income: You need to come up with some idea of what your range of net income (after living expenses) is likely to be over the next five years, so that you can make decisions about your savings allocation. Are you in good health or bad? Are you single or do you have a family? Are you working towards law school or medical school, and need to borrow money? Are you planning on getting a job with a dependable salary, or do you plan on being self-employed, where there is more uncertainty in your income? These are all factors that will help you decide how important short-term and long term savings are to your 5-year plan. In short, there is no one place you should put your money. But be smart about it and you'll give yourself a good head start in your personal finances. Good luck!" "Aggressiveness in a retirement portfolio is usually a function of your age and your risk tolerance. Your portfolio is usually a mix of the following asset classes: You can break down these asset classes further, but each one is a topic unto itself. If you are young, you want to invest in things that have a higher return, but are more volatile, because market fluctuations (like the current financial meltdown) will be long gone before you reach retirement age.  This means that at a younger age, you should be investing more in stocks and foreign/developing countries. If you are older, you need to be into more conservative investments (bonds, money market, etc).  If you were in your 50s-60s and still heavily invested in stock, something like the current financial crisis could have ruined your retirement plans.  (A lot of baby boomers learned this the hard way.) For most of your life, you will probably be somewhere in between these two.  Start aggressive, and gradually get more conservative as you get older.  You will probably need to re-check your asset allocation once every 5 years or so. As for how much of each investment class, there are no hard and fast rules.  The idea is to maximize return while accepting a certain amount of risk.  There are two big unknowns in there: (1) how much return do you expect from the various investments, and (2) how much risk are you willing to accept.  #1 is a big guess, and #2 is personal opinion. A general portfolio guideline is ""100 minus your age"".  This means if you are 20, you should have 80% of your retirement portfolio in stocks.  If you are 60, your retirement portfolio should be 40% stock.  Over the years, the ""100"" number has varied.  Some financial advisor types have suggested ""150"" or ""200"".  Unfortunately, that's why a lot of baby boomers can't retire now. Above all, re-balance your portfolio regularly.  At least once a year, perhaps quarterly if the market is going wild.  Make sure you are still in-line with your desired asset allocation.  If the stock market tanks and you are under-invested in stocks, buy more stock, selling off other funds if necessary.  (I've read interviews with fund managers who say failure to rebalance in a down stock market is one of the big mistakes people make when managing a retirement portfolio.) As for specific mutual fund suggestions, I'm not going to do that, because it depends on what your 401k or IRA has available as investment options.  I do suggest that your focus on selecting a ""passive"" index fund, not an actively managed fund with a high expense ratio. Personally, I like ""total market"" funds to give you the broadest allocation of small and big companies.  (This makes your question about large/small cap stocks moot.)  The next best choice would be an S&P 500 index fund. You should also be able to find a low-cost Bond Index Fund that will give you a healthy mix of different bond types. However, you need to look at expense ratios to make an informed decision.  A better-performing fund is pointless if you lose it all to fees! Also, watch out for overlap between your fund choices.  Investing in both a Total Market fund, and an S&P 500 fund undermines the idea of a diversified portfolio. An aggressive portfolio usually includes some Foreign/Developing Nation investments.  There aren't many index fund options here, so you may have to go with an actively-managed fund (with a much higher expense ratio).  However, this kind of investment can be worth it to take advantage of the economic growth in places like China. http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2009/04/27/how-to-create-your-own-target-date-mutual-fund/" There is little advantage to waiting or combining accounts.  If it makes sense to put money into a Roth now (which I can easily believe because your current tax rate is crazy low) go ahead and do so.  Your later opportunities for investment in a 401(k) do not affect your optimal decision today. There's nothing wrong with having multiple types of retirement accounts and many people do.  Over time the best place to put money can change.  After retirement you can roll all your Roth style investments into a single Roth IRA and your traditional investments (IRA and 401k) into a single traditional IRA. Firstly, I think you need to separate your question into two parts: If you are Chinese, live in China and intend to stay in China for most of your life then the default answer to question 1 should be Renminbi.  Question 2 is not as important, you can hold USD in almost any country in the world. Any investment you hold has risk, which may include market risk, credit risk, liquidity risk, inflation risk etc. Holding USD will expose you to exchange rate fluctuations as well.  If the Renminbi rises in value against the dollar your returns in USD will be reduced by the same amount (remember that for currency fluctuations you have to multiply the percentages, see here for a good explanation). The first thing you probably want to do is find out exactly what the assets are in the 理财 you have invested in.  The fact that there is a 'risk level' (even if it is only 2) would suggest to me that the fund is investing in some combination of bonds and stocks which means that your returns are not guaranteed and could make a loss. Interest rates on deposit accounts are mandated by the government in China, and the current 12 month deposit rate on RMB is 3%.  To earn over 3%, GEB must be investing your assets in something else (I'm guessing bonds).  Bear in mind that 1.5 years is a very short amount of time in investments, so don't assume this return will continue!  I'm afraid I've only been studying Chinese for a year, so I can't really help you much with the link you've sent through - you may want to check if there is any guaranteed minimum return, which can be the case in more complex structured products. Ultimately you will need to pick an investment which you feel gives you the best combination of risk and return for your situation, there are a huge amount of options to choose between.  The 4-5% you are earning right now is not a huge risk premium on the 3% you could earn in China from a time deposit, but in the current environment you may struggle to beat it without taking on more risk.  Before considering that though - understand how much risk you already have with GEB. "The question should read: ""Borrow huge money for speculating"". This is a bad idea on many levels. The lowest rates available will be from time-limited credit card offers, followed by broker margin accounts. Personal loans are going to be higher. My advice: if you insist on throwing your money away, go to Vegas with $40k. At least you'll get some complimentary food and drink." "I'd question whether a guaranteed savings instrument underperforming the stock market really is a risk, or not?  Rather, you reap what you sow. There's a trade-off, and one makes a choice.  If one chooses to invest in a highly conservative, low-risk asset class, then one should expect lower returns from it.  That doesn't necessarily mean the return will be lower — stock markets could tank and a CD could look brilliant in hindsight — but one should expect lower returns.  This is what we learn from the risk-return spectrum and Modern Portfolio Theory. You've mentioned and discounted inflation risk already, and that would've been one I'd mention with respect to guaranteed savings. Yet, one still accepts inflation risk in choosing the 3% CD, because inflation isn't known in advance.  If inflation happened to be 2% after the fact, that just means the risk didn't materialize.  But, inflation could have been, say, 4%. Nevertheless, I'll try and describe the phenomenon of significantly underperforming a portfolio with more higher-risk assets.  I'd suggest one of: Perhaps we can sum those up as: the risk of ""investing illiteracy""? Alternatively, if one were actually fully aware of the risk-reward spectrum and MPT and still chose an excessive amount of low-risk investments (such that one wouldn't be able to attain reasonable investing goals), then I'd probably file the risk under psychological risk, e.g. overly cautious / excessive risk aversion. Yet, the term ""psychological risk"", with respect to investing, encompasses other situations as well (e.g. chasing high returns.) FWIW, the risk of underperformance also came to mind, but I think that's mostly used to describe the risk of choosing, say, an actively-managed fund (or individual stocks) over a passive benchmark index investment more likely to match market returns." "First off, monozok is right, at the end of the day, you should not accept what anyone says to do without your money - take their suggestions as directions to research and decide for yourself.  I also do not think what you have is too little to invest, but that depends on how liquid you need to be.  Often in order to make a small amount of money grow via investments, you have to be willing to take all the investment profits from that principle and reinvest it.  Thus, can you see how your investment ability is governed by the time you plan to spend without that money?  They mantra that I have heard from many people is that the longer you are able to wait, the more 'risk' you can take.  As someone who is about the same age as you (I'm 24) I can't exactly say yet that what I have done is sure fire for the long term, but I suggest you adopt a few principles: 1) Go read ""A Random Walk Down Wall Street"" by Burton G. Malkiel.  A key point for you might be that you can do better than most of these professional investors for hire simply by putting  more money in a well selected index fund.  For example, Vanguard is a nice online service to buy indexes through, but they may require a minimum.  2) Since you are young, if you go into any firm, bank, or ""financial planner,"" they will just think you are naive and try to get you to buy whatever is best for them (one of their mutual funds, money market accounts, annuities, some flashy cd).   Don't.  You can do better on your own and while it might be tempting because these options look more secure or well managed, most of the time you will barely make above inflation, and you will not have learned very much. 3) One exciting thin you should start learning now is about algorithmic trading because it is cool and super efficient. quantopian.com is a good platform for this.  It is a fun community and it is also free. 4) One of the best ways I have found to watch the stock market is actually through a stock game app on my phone that has realtime stock price feed.  Seeking Alpha has a good mobile app interface and it also connects you to news that has to do with the companies you are interested in." $23,000 Student Loans at 4% This represents guaranteed loss. Paying this off quickly is a conservative move, while your other investments may easily surpass 4% return, they are not guaranteed.  Should I just keep my money in my savings account since I want to keep   my money available? Or are there other options I have that are not   necessarily long term may provide better returns? This all depends on your plans, if you're just trying to keep cash in anticipation of the next big dip, you might strike gold, but you could just as easily miss out on significant market gains while waiting. People have a poor track record of predicting market down-turns. If you are concerned about how exposed to market risk you are in your current positions, then you may be more comfortable with a larger cash position. Savings/CDs are low-interest, but much lower risk. If you currently have no savings (you titled the section savings, but they all look like retirement/investment accounts), then I would recommend focusing on that first, getting a healthy emergency fund saved up, and budgeting for your car/house purchases.  There's no way to know if you'd be better off investing everything or piling up cash in the short-term. You have to decide how much risk you are comfortable with and act accordingly.