[Wildbill]

Unless you really want to treat this as a semi-serious hobby I don't think you should even bother with the 5k dabble. Its not enough money to do anything but get nicked to death by commissions and leakage. With 5k you will be buying a lot of under 100 share positions and you have little chance of doing all that well unless you get lucky and hit some bonanzas. If you want to treat it as a hobby and learning experience with the caveat that you are almost certain to have more money to work with in the future, then go ahead and get your feet wet. The learning experience will be good for you for when you have real dollars to invest with. Otherwise just leave all your money in growth index funds and ignore the returns or account balances in the meantime. Sure its possible other asset classes could beat you over 20 years, but I would most certainly bet my money on the growth funds coming out ahead, in your case I think the Explorer fund is the growth fund but not sure. I am not a huge fan of the SP500 for long term due to its weighted feature, but it beats leaving money in anything conservative. Once you get about 10 years from your expected retirement age you then need to get more involved and start doing some homework to figure out where to go with the money, but until then I would just put the money in and sit tight.