Time to time we like to check in with our Fool.com contributors to see what they've recently added to their portfolios. In this video clip from "The 5," recorded on Sept. 24, Demitri Kalogeropoulos, Brian Withers, and Neil Patel tell us why they decided to buy shares of the Vanguard Total Stock Market Index ETF (VTI +0.21%), Square (SQ 2.24%), and Lemonade (LMND 0.04%).
Demitri Kalogeropoulos: I recently bought VTI, Vanguard Total Stock Market Index, ETF. It's what I do. I just do that. I have it scheduled on the first and the 15th of the month, I put extra cash into that. Basically, that's where most of my cash goes in. It's a total stock market fund. I told you I own a lot of individual stocks, but new money in the market, I want to keep it steady flow into that, and I love index funds, I love passively managed index funds that have small, almost zero fees because we know that even a small fee, I was talking to a friend recently and he started to talk to me about his great two and a half percent index fee on his manager charges in for it and I was like, that is massive, if you extend that out 20 years is so much money.
Brian Withers: It's almost Jason's mortgage. [laughs]
Kalogeropoulos: That's big.
Withers: That's crazy.
Jason Hall: Yeah, you can even live in your financial advisor's office.
Neil Patel: I know. Exactly.
Kalogeropoulos: I think Vanguard's expense rate was 0.03, that's what this.
Hall: Yeah, three basis points
Kalogeropoulos: Yeah. You're going to match the market, which is something that almost all professional Wall Street and people are not able to achieve and you're going to do it with zero costs, so if you don't know where to put your money, that's a great place to just put it for now.
Patel: Now, I'll just brief here. A company I'm looking at and I'm late to the party is Square and this is one that-
Hall: It's going to be a long party, bro.
Patel: Demitri talked about it and it's a company that looks expensive, but over the long term, technically, it's cheap if it continues outperforming. I'm just completely interested in enamored with platform businesses and the network effects and the optionality, and the fact that there's still international growth potential and the Afterpay acquisition. Everything you could think of. The fact that they get customers and then they sell them new features, new products, switching costs are high for their users, all of the above. I'm super bullish on digital payments and Square in particular.
Withers: For me, I bought a stock just about a month ago, I bought a little more Lemonade. Just so that you know, it was about a half a percent position and right now, Lemonade is about, the cost basis is almost three percent of my overall portfolio and it's one of two stocks that are actually down in my portfolio right now. But I like Lemonade for the long term, and I just wanted to put a little money there.
