CD
Chindata Group Holdings Limited
stock NASDAQ

Long story short, I had about $348k from a savings/CD ladder that I started transferring to my robinhood account. The first bet I made was a $500 on nvda jan25 $140 calls that netted me a little over $6k. I continue gradually making larger and larger bets, and my portfolio was growing.
However back in March, I went all in long calls - all of them short-dated (<30DTE). I convinced myself it wasn't gambling if I was compounding "asymmetric bets" with positive convexity. I got crushed during 4/2 tariffs and sold them in panic. I'm left with just $20k now and don't know what to do other than try to recoup my losses.
How do you detox from thinking you’re still smarter than the market even after losing everything?

It's a question of what you do when you suddenly have a chunk of extra money. A CD unlocking. A bonus at work. An inheritance. Whatever.
You can lump sum invest that, while continuing to make small regular contributions with every paycheck.

I have a family member who had decided to hold all of their cash their inherited, in a checking account. Not even a savings account. Not a CD. Not even S&P500
"why would I keep it in savings, if I need to spend it"

I believe it would be like a bank in terms of if you deposit $100 you can gain interest but the bank decides where to store or use those $100. Where as if you were to get a CD you lock in $100 and you won’t have it available for set period of time.

You can do this with Schwab. Very easy to create and manage CD ladder and purchase CD's from different issuers up to $250,000 per CD.

IMO, flexibility in your spend is critical. The 4% rule (4% the first year, adjusting for inflation every year after that) was the percentage that gave success in like 90%+ of starting years over the study period. That period was 1926 to 1976, so it included a few major financial events (i.e. Great Depression and the 70's inflationary period... but not the dot com crash plus the 2008 financial crisis).
In most of the cases, the final portfolio value was WAY higher than the starting value. So, if you want to use a fixed rule like the 4% rule, it needs to be conservative to account for the really bad times, but then you end up spending way less than you could have for normal or "good" times.
I plan to calculate my annual withdrawals using something like the RMD tables or a tool like Boldin - and calculate the withdrawal amount such that I have a 90+% chance of 30 year success (and then maybe 20 year success once I'm 10 or 15 years into retirement) each year when I decide my withdrawal amount. That might mean that in some years when I'm traveling I'm flying in business class and staying at 5 star hotels, and other years I'm doing a road trip and staying a the holiday in (or camping). I'll try to level it out by having 2 or 3 years worth of expenses in CD's or a HYSA... so if 2032 starts a bad stretch for the stock market my spending can kind of glide down to a much lesser spend in 2034.

Age is important. Other assets matters.
There is risk investing in the market. Yes it can drop. If you don’t sell it won’t matter much as long as the dividend is sustained, that’s the point of dividend investing.
There are many positions you can choose that will return higher than your CD with reliability and minimal price volatility. It’s doesn’t mean they won’t, they absolutely will fluctuate. But that’s part of it.
You need to test your risk tolerance and know you won’t sell the minute the market corrects even if it isn’t as short as the one earlier this year. Be prepared to have value declines for 1-2 years in all possibility. That’s when you want to keep investing to buy low.
You are losing a ton of opportunity cost leaving money in a CD that’s nearly keeping up with inflation of at all.
There is a time and place for fixed income assets. CDs are not investing just keeping cash safe. These should be used for longer term emergency funds and sinking funds not investing for growth.

I have about $75k that recently unlocked from a CD that was originally air marked for a down payment on a home this summer. My plans changed and I decided not to buy a new property this year, or for the foreseeable future.
I’d like to keep $25k of it in cash as an emergency fund, which leaves me $50k to invest, or keep in my 4% money market.
I have the majority of my existing investments in the S&P 500. Would you add the $50k in now to my brokerage? Or would you slowly drip it in the next few months?

I use EJ because I needed brokerage services for exercising options, and they manage about 10% of my retirement nest egg. In exchange I get 100% of my planning and analysis and am very satisfied with that.
The cost of originating CDs with EJ is the least of my concern, the commission is maybe $2 on a $10k transaction. And given the effort and the ability to find a CD that fits my horizon (you can find a 3 month CD that matures in 3 weeks where someone else wants liquidity) the commission is washed by the yield benefit.

my mother in law passed away and she had CD's all over the place. Her husband has a trust account with Merrill Lynch which was focused on mostly municipals. They thought the idea of tax free appealed to them. What I found was that this brokerage also sells CD's from all sorts of banks. So we set up a new account just to consolidate the CD's. As a bank CD matured, we would transfer the money into this account and the broker would let us know what CD's are available (that do not overlap with the others in this account). So right now he has 5 CD's from various banks, some callable, some not. This really made life so much easier while preserving his strategy of bank CD's.

Schwab, and I assume others, will have in house systems in which you can create CD ladders. Eg CDs at multiple banks, that mature at regular intervals.
That said, with $5m in cash, you might consider other options. Let’s assume your mother needs assisted living arrangements. That will run from $5k to $10k per month. Or $60 to $120k/ year. Assuming she also has Social Security, let’s round that out to $50 to $100k/year. At current interest rates, that is about $2M in CDs - meaning you’ll have another $3M that can be used elsewhere.

Put in savings account that gives 4-5% and compound it. Just let it sit till you need it. Or do a CD ladder. Helps out

Open a Treasury direct account and buy your time deposits there. You will get a higher rate than a bank CD, and there are no insurance limits.

My father is a widower in his eighties. I’ve set him up in a CD ladder with a 2 year maturity. While your mother’s assets are well above the $250,000 insurance limit, if you only bought from well established banks, the risk of default is extremely low. Look for interest payments on a monthly or quarter basis and she’ll have a lot of ongoing income for living expenses.

Combine all CD accounts into a single brokerage account with SGOV shares which pay about 4% APY until you figure out a further investment plan that you’re comfortable with.

What about short term US treasury bills and notes? The US federal government requires banks buy fdic insurance to meet certain name and marketing requirements. If the US federal government goes bankrupt and doesn’t pay off treasury bills, I’m not sure that the fdic will be much better.
You’ll also get a small bump from CD rates.

Hi everyone. My father recently passed away and left my mother everything. Between the two of them they had roughly 5 mil in total assets. My father had most of that set up in CDs at many different banks to keep things properly insured. It's a lot to keep track of. I'd like to simplify things if possible. I like the safety of CD's, but is there something a little easier to keep track of that provides decent returns and isn't spread across so many accounts? I apologize for my like of knowledge and appreciate any advice.

The CD commission is pretty minimal. There are some commissions on the bonds (like someone else noted probably in the 1-2% commission range)
The American fund likely charged a sales commission in the 5.75% range if an A share.
I agree with others, probably a low risk tolerance, but I don’t understand putting almost all the portfolio in just 2 indv bonds. Even if a bond fund costs more, I think the diversification is worth it. I know some advisors don’t like bond funds because when rates go up, the price of the funds goes down.
Most concerning thing to me is the Citi note. Even a very short term CD or Tbill would be paying in the 4% range. I’m wondering if the Citi note is a structured product of some sort. Is the coupon 2% , or is the yield to maturity 2%?

Sorry for the rest of you, but, I wish they were 7%, I'm making a killing on my CD's, lol

We put our emergency fund in a CD with Fidelity, right now a little over 4% APY, we typically do 3-6 months at a time.