Need to know where to invest for long term growth?

It looks like you are talking about making multiple investments for him, if he wants long term appreciation (generally stocks) and a rainy day fund (generally some bond funds with check writing capability). You can't start investing with nothing; but some places like Charles Schwab have low minimums if you also add more monthly. But Vanguard has the lowest fees of all, and over decades could mean thousands of dollars more for retirement.

A mutual fund is an excellent choice for a very low cost, professionally managed vehicle for investing.

But you need to choose what to invest in; what time horizon and how much risk you want to take on - there are aggressive as well as more conservative funds.

Start with some basic books to teach you the fundamentals. Two excellent reads are The Complete Idiot's Guide to Investing, and Investing for Dummies. You can probably find them in your local library. Before doing anything, make sure you have bad debt like credit cards paid off first.

If he is thinking of retirement, consider a Roth IRA. The money grows tax free, and when he retires he can withdraw it tax free as well.

For more information, try looking at

https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/vanguard/al...

and play with it, comparing funds with more or less risk.

Do some reading online such as

http://www.vanguard.com/us/insights

for some important investment truths.

my first advice is read this http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/money101/l...

Mutual funds is the best way for you to invest his money.

The problem with only investing 50/month then advancing 25 for each promotion is that the stock market advances at an average rate of 5% per year(averaging bad years and good years etc.) even if you started with 200 each month and kept it at that for 30 years NEVER TOUCHING IT he would still only have $166,000. Which with the purchase of any house or sending kids to college is going evaporate quick and he'd be completely dependent on his military pension(which I assume is good).

I would have you suggest to him that he begin putting a little more away earlier, because the more money he puts away now the more interest he'll earn on it over the years.

As for what kind of funds I would recommend? Go for funds with a solid 10 year track record and really low fees like 1 percent. Because the average mutual fund doesn't do any better than the s&p 500 in any given year, so the best way to ensure you make the most money is finding the fund with the lowest fees.

Definitely when he's young put 25% in a bond fund. Then I'd say 40% in a value fund and then the other 35% in different stock funds. As he gets closer to retirement putting more and more into the bond fund.

eTrade "active" (experienced traders) experienced traders, for the most part, don't use them. eTrade seems to appeal to those that don't know too much about trading. (BTW: 10 trades a month is nothing in terms of "active"). You could have done much better.... a novice investor is better off with Fidelity or Schwab. If you're experienced investor (vs trader).... they are also excellent choices. I don't believe they have fees for inactivity. Here's the real problem: Because a stock is at it's 52 week low..... doesn't mean it's a good buy..... in fact the odds are it will get worse. Trying to catch the bottom is a typical novice move that gets a lot of people in trouble. Another problem many people do is buy too much of their companies stock. Just because you work there doesn't mean you know how the market will treat the stock. You should read these two books before you do a thing; Stock Investing For Dummies Mutual Funds For Dummies Best idea: Put $1000 into your companies stock. Put the rest in a good Stock Mutual Fund.

50% stock and 50% bonds.

That way, your portfolio can take advantage of a market downturn by rebalancing back to the 50/50 position. Analyzed logarithmically, such a portfolio will have the highest growth rate.

The usual concept of aggressive when young rebalancing to progressively more conservative investments does not optimize for growth. The aggressive 100% funds actually results in eventual debilitating losses not growth, they only have the highest potential growth not the highest expected growth.

Even the Markowitz risk reward ratios state that the 50/50 portfolio has the same risk as a 100% bond portfolio but much higher gain. With the Markowitz Efficient Frontier, the lowest risk is actually 25% stocks and 75% bonds and the return of such a portfolio is also higher than that of a 100% bond fund.

The bond portion could be a simple low fee broad index fund and the bond portion could also be a low fee bond fund rather than try to individually select stocks and bonds. Both index and bond funds should have the lowest management fees possible as there's very little for the fund manager to do. However you should be able to find a reasonable fund with a 50/50 allocation, they tend to be called moderate funds.

I just answered a similar question: "Do you research and invest in about 10 companies across different sectors. Consider ETFs, commodities, even options as well if you know anything about them. My personal opinion is that US REITs will do VERY well over the following decade. It's hard to say more than that, as there are hundreds of thousands of investment options you have."

so diversify.. look into successful dividend stocks too; for instance, Canadian banks will likely do great in the long-run

Also you might want to reconsider letting your son go into the army, unless that's what he absolutely wants.. pardon me as I know this isn't quite my business though

It all depends on how long your term is. Economic growth is fundamentally limited by the material base it depend on --- real value (resources). All our economic activities do is to convert this real value into use value (products and services). We are doing this in a positive feedback loop boosted way, so it will bust in an accelerated way. We can see that trend in all diagrams of statistics in population, productivity, consumption of resources…Productivity curve has the characteristic feature of a parabola; it got beginning, peak and end. This feature represents that it is a limited and irreversible process. Though it shapes like a hyperbola: the ascending side curve had been shown us it is an exponential growth tendency dominated ascending ----- it means when productivity ability allows the consumption of real value will grow in an explosive way. The descending side of the hyperbola haven’t been shown us yet (I just have to hope it will never been shown to human ever). It might be the other side of the hyperbola curve which represents the productivity been forced down by the real value reserve decrease and environmental limitation.