Financially sophisticated individuals start with an asset allocation. For someone under 40 you should probably allocate around 30% of your assets to fixed income securities (probably half in treasuries and half in TIPS) and the remainder in securities that have more appreciation opportunity (10% in real estate, 35% in US equities, 20% in foreign equities and 5% in emerging market stocks). it's very hard to outperform the market in fixed income so i recommend buying treasury and TIPS ETFs. For your US, foreign and emerging market equity allocation you might want to try wealthfront.com to identify money managers who have outstanding track records (I am a co-founder of wealthfront). Wealthfront currently doesn't offer any real estate managers so a REIT ETF is probably the best bet.