[bolu]

They're good - gotta watch out for your effective expense ratio, which is the amount of commission you pay for the trade (depends on your brokerage house and the ETF) divided by the years you plan to own it, added to the ETF's own existing expense ratio. So net net, buy in larger chunks, or find one of the no-commission-ETF houses.

Also, and it sounds like you are, you need to be familiar / comfortable with limit orders or market orders. That sometimes can scare folks who are used to not-very-time-sensitive daily-priced mutual funds.

[davidw]

Actually I don't know much at all about investing. I know what a stop loss order is, but I don't think I'd know how to use one effectively.

[bolu]

You probably won't need it, unless you're doing something significantly more complex than the fundamental buy-and-hold index investing strategy.

I'd just use market orders all the time except I'm a little freaked out about momentary (on the order of minutes) market freak-outs as happened a couple months ago. Limit orders priced at the current price (or 1 cent higher) is pretty much just my way of enforcing a sane market order.

[mcknz]

Stop limit orders are a good way to determine when to sell, which is the toughest decision to make. Even if you are dollar cost averaging into a position, you can set a limit order to protect profits, or prevent a large loss. I've seen some recommendations to put a stop limit order of a certain percentage on any new position for stocks/ETFs as a way to keep emotion out of your decision. A trailing stop limit order allows you to sell only when a stock/ETF goes down.