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Posts Tagged ‘investments’

How can I find an informal investment club in my area, one not having to register w/ the SEC?

April 27th, 2010

I’m looking more for a networking group, not a formal investment club that pools their money. Just a group of people that are somewhat organized that gather to discuss investments.

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What would be a good investment strategy for me?

April 23rd, 2010

I’m 28 years old, I make a little over 200K a year and i have over 300K in liquid cash in separate bank accounts. I don’t know what to invest in because the market is garbage. My goal is to have a million by the time I’m 35 and I hope that with solid investments and some possible continued growth in income, I can accomplish this. Can someone give me some good investment strategies?

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Where should I go to invest in equity index or no-load mutual funds?

April 22nd, 2010

I am mad that I spent so much $ on Class A mutual funds and want to dump my brokerage firm and start investing the smart way. I have read that equity index funds and no-load mutual funds are the way to go, but I have no idea where to go or which funds to buy. I just want to put my money away in aggressive investments and let the money sit there and reinvest the dividends. I don’t want to buy and sell stocks – I would rather put it in diversified funds and just let it grow. I have 30 years to retirement so I want to be as aggressive as possible. Seems like if I ask a financial "expert," they just want to sell you their own products. Is anyone out there a financial expert who can give me objective advice??? HELP! I have a couple of IRAs and about 0K in mutual funds right now. Thank you!!!

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Can your investment representative be cheating you out of your profits?

April 18th, 2010

I invest in mutual funds with a group I will leave anonymous. I just started. I know that mutual funds are like stocks and any other investment there’s a chance you can lose money. However, is it possible the representatives can be storing away any profits that you did make into their account and making it look like you lost money from the investment? If so, I might just go to saving money from the bear market point of view. Savings bonds, Certificate of Deposits, savings account, and any other sure profit investments rather than these unpredictable and shady investments strategies. What do you think? Make money the old fashioned way and just save it?

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How does the housing market affect the stock market so much?

April 10th, 2010

I heard that the housing market being low in sales and with the forclousure market crashing, it is affecting investors so much that they are moving money out of equities (stocks) and investing more in safer investments. Thats why the stock market has been down so much in the past week.

How does this happen? I was reading about it, but I didn’t really understand. Are investors pulling out their stocks from big lenders? How exactly does it affect the stock market? I need help understanding it in normal terms that make sense.

Please advise, thank you!!

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Mutual funds?

March 30th, 2010

I have a small amount of money I would like to invest. I have heard of mutual funds but what are they? how do you get them? how much do they cost? how much money can you make from them? Is there a certain amount of time you have to wait before getting the money from them? Do they require any "upkeep"? Anything else I should know about mutual funds?

Do you have suggestions for other easy investments that would be better than a mutual fund?

Sorry for so many questions but i would really appreciate someone knowlegedable to help me out. Thanks!

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What Stocks are Good Investments?

January 28th, 2009

How to Research Individual

Stocks There are good research resources available to the individual investor, many at your local library. In addition, if you hire a full-service broker, you can indirectly avail yourself of his or her research department.

In our opinion, the two most basic, cost-effective, and objective research tools are the Value Line Investment Survey and Standard & Poor’s Stock Guides. Both may be available at your local library.

list of preferred stocks their yields The Invaluable Value Line

The basic Value Line service covers approximately 1,700 stocks. For each stock, Value Line provides two rankings: timeliness and safety. Of the two, pay particular attention to safety. Stocks are ranked on a 1-5 basis, with 1 being the safest. Don’t consider any stock with less than a 2 rating.

Value Line also provides scores for four other key indicators:

Financial strength
Stock price stability
Stock price growth persistence
Earnings predictability

In addition to the rankings and key indicators cited here, Value Line includes a great deal of relevant statistical and narrative information. Value Line reports are updated regularly. The individual company write-ups will take some getting used to, but after a while, you will find that you can easily determine a company’s earnings growth rate and the consistency of that growth rate.

Use Value Line to help you select at least 25 stocks that:

Are safe or very safe (that means a ranking of 1 or 2)
Are growing at an above-average rate
Are growing consistently and steadily

What does "above average" mean? We suggest you look for a minimum of 8 percent and, ideally, 10 percent growth. And keep an eye on consistency. For a 10 percent grower, 10 percent a year is perfect but rarely achieved. A range of 8-12 percent is consistent. From 6-14 percent is acceptable. But if the company’s earnings swing between 0 percent and 30 percent, for example, it’s too volatile to be in your portfolio unless you know exactly what you’re doing.

S&P Stock Guides

Standard & Poor’s Stock Guides (Bond Guides are also available) are an excellent research tool. The guides come out monthly and cover over 6,000 stocks, 700 mutual funds, 600 closed-end funds, and 800 preferred stock issues.

Newspapers

Finally, two newspapers, Investors Business Daily and The Wall Street Journal, do an excellent job of tracking the stock market and individual stocks. Either may be available at your local library.

If you simply must follow the market during the day, both CNBC and Bloomberg Information TV do a good job of keeping you current.

For a nightly wrap-up, check out PBS’s Nightly Business Report.

How I Made $6 Million in the Stock Market
amazing report from a trader who made $6 Million trading stocks. By Mark Crisp

Own these Stocks CSCO,EBAY,FCX,GOOG,IBM,INTEL,RTP
Stockpickr.com founder James Altucher shares his picks that will make 2009 a fiscal year to remember.

Stocks jump on reports of plan for bad bank assets
Financial stocks surged on the notion that the government could take soured debt like defaulting mortgages off the hands of banks and place them in a so-called bad bank to hold toxic assets.

U.S. stocks stay under water after new home sales
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — US stocks remained entrenched in losses early Thursday after data showing the sale of new homes fell to the lowest monthly level on record.

Stocks open lower on fresh worries about economy
Wall Street has turned cautious as weak profit reports and record unemployment claims offer the latest evidence of the economy’s struggles.

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Fund Picks & Pans Stocks Jobs

January 22nd, 2009

Learn to Invest Money in Small Cap Stocks and Make Triple Digit Profits

Ever hear of no risk, no reward? Well, buying riskier small cap stocks that could return triple digit gains doesn’t have to be a risky proposition.

In the articles of this small and micro cap series, the first four rules focused on buying strategies. In this last article, the last and fifth rule will cover selling strategies.

microcap stocks daily gainers Rule Number Five: Remove emotions from your decisions with disciplined selling strategies.

So now that we’ve covered how to buy in to such stocks, let’s review selling strategies because they are just as important. With selling, always limit your downside with stop losses of 10%-15% in long positions and stop losses of 25% with options. Using this strategy eliminates much of the risk from attempting to capitalize on double digit and triple digit gains. In fact, once you become good at identifying opportunities, having winning pick percentages of 70%-85% would not be unusual. And if you attain these percentages, the 15% of picks you lose several hundred dollars in becomes irrelevant when offset by your huge gains. In reviewing what to do about gains, just abide by one rule.

Don’t get greedy and always lock in gains.

If you don’t get greedy, there is no way you should not make money from a stock that has experienced explosive growth. But this scenario does happen. And only one thing causes this to happen. Greed. People will watch 100% profits turn into 20% losses because of greed.

Just as you did with your buy in price, have a predetermined selling price. As opposed to the buy in price range, I would choose a more specific price. For example, let’s consider stock YYY again and assume you bought the stock for $3 a share. Say you set your goal at $5 a share, a 67% increase, but that it blows right through that price two weeks later.

Now what do you do? Hold on or sell?

With sell strategies of rapidly rising stocks, the picture becomes slightly murkier than with sell strategies of stocks that are falling. When a stock passes through your 15% stop loss order (see part I of this article), it will sell automatically, no questions asked, with all emotions removed from that decision. But what do you do when the stock is shooting skyward with seemingly unlimited upside? It depends on what’s driving the price up. If pure speculation is the only thing driving the price, sell half your position and then put trailing stop losses of 20% on the remaining half. In other words, now that stock YYY has risen to $5 a share from my original buy-in price of $3 a share, I sell half my position, and my stop loss price on the remaining half has now moved up to $4.25 a share. This way I’ve locked in my predetermined 67% gain on half of my position of YYY and the least amount of profit I can make on the remaining half is 42%.

Now if earnings and sales are driving the price up, I may take another strategy. Instead of selling half of my position in YYY, I’ll hold onto my entire position, but again institute a trailing stop loss of 20%, moving my stop loss price-point up to $4.25. This is riskier than the first strategy, but the important thing to note is that I am still locking in gains. In this scenario, I still guarantee myself a 42% gain no matter what happens with the stock from here on out.

The key, and I can’t emphasize this enough, is to always take gains off the table or to lock them in with trailing stops. By doing this, you remove your emotions from your decisions. Formulate a disciplined sell strategy and you’ll make a lot more money than you would by trying to forecast the direction of the small and micro-cap stocks you invest in. Plus you’ll save a lot of money on the psychiatrist you won’t have to hire due to all the unnecessary stress you would have caused yourself by not employing these strategies.

So to summarize, always limit your downside and lock in gains with stop loss orders when investing in small and micro cap stocks and you can invest in stocks with enormous potential without the stress associated with the enormous risk of some of these stocks.

About The Author

John Kim is the founder of Global Market Opportunities. He has over thirteen years of experience in finance and financial services, and has earned a BA in Neurobiology from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the McCombs Business School, University of Texas at Austin. To learn how to discover small and micro cap stocks that consistently and significantly beat the market indices, click http://www.globalmarket-opps.org

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