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DRIP Investing
Vs.
Traditional Brokerages

 

  The chief foil to investing success is the tendency to react emotionally to day-to-day stock price movements. Should you buy on the dip or sell? You won’t know until it’s too late.

 

The ease of action in a brokerage account entices you to act. With DRIPs, investors establish a plan to build holdings by making scheduled (or unscheduled) investments over a period of years until the dividends alone keep the account growing. This subtle difference accounts, for the success-advantage DRIP investors enjoy. 

 

The ability to diversify and to invest dollar amounts (instead of buying shares) makes the difference.  

 

If you want to end up with a lower cost per share than the average price of the shares during the investing period, you don’t want to be buying the same number of shares regularly—but you do want to invest the same amount of money. The difference will become clear as you read on. (A few traditional brokerages are now adopting measures to provide this advantages but it’s easier to implement in a DRIP portfolio.)

 

Here’s why those are two critical factors:

 

Diversifying among market sectors is an uncontested risk-reducing strategy. Diversifying holdings within a traditional brokerage account, where you generally buy in 100 share lots, is more limiting than diversifying among DRIP companies, where a small dollar amount is all you need to open an account (or as a shareholder by owning even a single share of company stock). 

 

Buy more, low--and less, high.

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