Sure I’m no expert but I’ll tell you what I know.
Vanguard and Fidelity are two separate companies ignore the /. They’re two examples of companies that provide mutual funds and ETFs.
ETF stands for Exchange Traded Fund, basically it’s a collection of different stocks in one fund. As opposed to spending $1,000 on stock in a single company like Apple for example, you can put that same money in a number of different stocks that are all in one ETF. They can be traded just like regular stocks, hence the name Exchange Traded Funds.
You can put your money into a brokerage account somewhere like Vanguard or Fidelity where you can add to it, like a savings account, but you can also draw money out when you need cash. It’s not like a 401k where you can’t really touch it until you’re old and shyt.
Brokerage accounts like these are a good alternative for people who don’t want to trade individual stocks.
I personally don’t spend much time at all learning about investment strategies and what’s the best stock to buy, etc. Like I don’t even have a Robinhood account, and I would prolly lose money learning in the short team. So for somebody like me a brokerage account is the way to go.
It’s a safer place to put money, steady growth is almost completely assured, but it’s also never gonna explode like for someone who put $10,000 in Tesla in April, they’d be looking at about $55,000 now.
Like I said there’s nothing wrong with having $2-3,000 in a regular savings account, but if you have anymore than that in there you might want to look at a brokerage account where you can grow that money without the day to day maintenance that trading stocks requires.