Quora Answer: How Do I Invest $10 million Dollars?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “How do I invest 10 million dollars?”

How do you define “best”?  What is your investment horizon: short, intermediate or long?  What is your risk appetite?  How much do you want to reasonably turn that into?  If you really had that money, the banks will call you with all sorts of ideas.  Most of them involve putting your money in various forms of fixed deposits.  At that amount, it might even be worth it.

You could approach any of the major insurance companies, and they will offer to put your money in a HNW plan that gives a better return than a standard insurance linked investment plan.  A lot of wealthy people do that.  Especially of the money is illegal.  They put it in a single premium plan, and then take a policy loan of 90% of the plan.

You could buy property, which is illiquid and only really earns if you know the market and how to manage what you invest in.  The property is a cost centre unless it is rented out.

You could get involved in the stock market where there are a myriad of fund types and strategies.  My advice is to stay away from anything leveraged such as derivatives unless you really know what you are doing.  $10 million is not that much, and it is easy to lose it all in a bad trade.

If you talk about it to a little too much, you will have all sorts of people coming to you with business ideas.  As a general rule, never get involved unless you know the business, and you have the cards to play such as the network, and control the finances.

In summary, there is no “best” way.  The more money you have to play with, however, the more options you have.  It is a lot easier to turn $10 million into $100 million than it is to turn $100,000 into a million.  Wealth works best on economies of scale.