The Simple Path To Wealth is great.
I would hold off on the Bogle book, though. While the essence of his advice is good, and the book has a lot of memorable quotes, I feel it falls into an awkward place where it's too technical for newbies (he gets into the weeds with statistics pretty fast and makes a lot of assumptions that the reader knows what mutual funds are, and so on) and probably doesn't have much new to tell someone experienced.
I think The Bogleheads's Guide to Investing is much more appropriate for most beginners. Easy read, very pragmatic advice, is clearly written for people who don't know anything about investing and, more to the point, don't want/need to know the gritty details of Sharpe ratios or beta or covariance, and just need to learn how to set up automatic deposits into a three-fund portfolio in an IRA and then not doing anything more for the rest of their life.
when people throw terms out like "growth, aggressive growth" I think dave ramsey. in the 80's and 90's growth, aggressive growth, and growth and income were used to categorize mutual funds. today the terms are used a bit differently and when it comes to grouping funds, we now utilize the morningstar stylebox to generally categorize products.
First decide if this is a journey you want to take on your own. If so you need a bit more education than the advice you'll likely receive here. many brokerages have "investing universities" if you will that will walk you through the ins and outs to the best of their ability. Their are countless books available. https://www.amazon.com/Mutual-Funds-Dummies-Eric-Tyson/dp/0470623217 is a great place to start.
Otherwise look for a fiduciary, fee based advisor to help you put together or manage a portfolio for you. Its likely expensive to begin.
If you DIY choose a brokerage, create the retirement account applicable to you (depending upon the country you live in, your income, etc....google this)
You want the bulk of your stocks to be just one or two low cost index funds. The most popular index mutual fund is probably VTSAX from Vanguard.
I’d read this book:
The Simple Path to Wealth https://www.amazon.com/dp/1533667926/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_i_YY2GRC68WWYBGS75P1P5
First, you need to understand bonds before you invest in them, as with any security. The fed rate is so low right now that you can't expect bonds to return much right now (and in today's exuberant bull market you can expect bond funds to lose value as long as interest rates don't change and people stick to stocks), but that doesn't mean their purpose has diminished.
Secondly, don't try to time the market. If you're investing with a long time horizon (10-40 years), then a market correction is not going to make much of a dent in your investments. Here is a good article about various market-timing scenarios. It's more important to be invested than to sit on the sidelines while paying the opportunity costs of waiting for a "rotation into value", which may never happen and might even happen before you've realized it, at which time it could be too late to reap the rewards.
> I know that high turnover funds can tack the capital gains tax on the shareholders, but if I invest in a Roth account, the only expenses I’d need to worry about are the loads and expense ratio am I right?
Yes; in an IRA, the turnover doesn't generate taxable events.
Some brokerages also charge transaction fees for each purchase, and some fees charge redemption fees. So the fees you can incur are: Loads, management fee (expense ratio), transaction fee, and redemption fee (aka exit fee).
> Also, when I’m researching a fund, does the growth % displayed account for fees you have had to pay
The total return listed for a fund always includes the fee, as the fee is deducted from the fund's assets daily. In other words, the NAV is always net fee.
> including the high tax incurred through high turnover or no?
Not including taxes, no. To figure this part out — for at taxable account, to be clear — different brokerages offer research tools. Here is an example of such a calculation. Note that this calculation assumes the highest tax bracket. I don't know of any tool that lets you plug in your own tax bracket.
Find your retirement date and pick the one from the list (from the list of index funds) that is closest to it. For example, if you're retiring in 2043-2047, you could pick SWYHX.
If you're not deeply knowledgeable about investing and would like a "set it and forget it" product that earns great returns and also manages risk, then a target date retirement fund is a great idea. I believe target date funds (specifically, low cost funds) are the best solution for most people.
A target date fund is a complete portfolio in a single mutual fund. It gives you broad access to US and international markets, with a risk-reducing bond allocation that is automatically adjusted upwards as you get nearer retirement. Since it's a complete portfolio, you don't need anything else. Just set up automatic deposits and you're set.
Since you hold SWTSX, I'm guessing you're at Schwab? You can read about Schwab's target date funds here. They have some of the lowest fees (0.08%) in the industry. Only look at the target date index funds. The non-index ones have higher fees that are not, in my opinion, worth the extra cost.
I gather you were looking for feedback as you start writing this article. There isn't much there but two comments on what is there.
"The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham" is a classic of value investing. As a mutual fund investor though you don't need to be good at stock selection. Something like Bogle On Mutual Funds (and not the later books which are too extreme) would be better. Value investing is a great idea but you want to cover value investing for mutual fund investors not stock investors.
The list of fund types doesn't make sense. Indexing is a strategy for selection. There are index fixed income, index balanced and index stuck funds. You definitely want to cover money market funds, fixed income and stock and spend a lot of time on their properties. Then you can get into selection methodologies. Active vs. passive. Cover indexing as a type of passive. Indexing is unfortunately used to mean both cap weighted indexing only and passive so the word is confusing.