anyone here play the market? any advice on stocks to get?
Chief’s Domain - http://www.seas.ucla.edu/~ravi
Go with one of each
Give me your money and I’ll take care of it.
(Actually, diversification is one of the best peices of advice I was ever given.)
Ask people, IRL, whom you respect their opinions and take notes. Come up with your own philosophy and investment strategies. A great way to get going is via mutual funds.
Get some stock listings, like the newspaper, get a dart & throw it at them & buy those.
You can do pretty well doing that.
Anyone remember on tv once a year for about four years now there was a professional stock manager & a monkey choosing stocks? The monkey was way ahead after two years but year three the professional caught up.
This is my first posting, I hope I’m able to offer something you find valuable. The question, I think, is what do you want to do. Are you looking to make some quick trades, or are you looking for long term appreciation? I do both.
I trade mostly techs, but I try to stay with stocks that have some value. This leaves me out of the wild iStock (internet, insane?) game. There are a bunch of “earnings plays” this week and two I like. Companies release their earnings reports quarterly and the market goes mad depending on how well they beat or miss the analysts’ estimates. I believe that both AAPL and AMD will trounce the estimates by about a nickle a share after the close on Thursday, and I expect this to add at least 10% to their share prices. If you are really cautious you could wait for the results on Thursday and still get in, trading after hours with http://www.dljdirect.com or such.
The other posters that appear to be joking are not too far off, in a bull market such as we’ve seen this last year, anybody can make money. Dart or monkey, pick ten random stocks to hold and the winners will outnumber the losers. One of each, why not? This is actually a legitimate long term system, you can buy an Index Fund. The DOW has historically returned about 20%, not bad for a totally brainless play. With a mutual fund you are paying an army of managers to be smarter and more thorough than you could be, they generally earn their money. I park some profits this way.
I think I’m rambling now. If I wrote anything germane, let me know and I’ll try to be more specific.
martin
Find stocks with sound fundamentals, buy them, and hold them. Set aside money every month for investing, and let the dollar-cost-averaging smooth out the ride.
If you have enough money to buy a significant number of stocks, spread it around into different industries, put aside 10%-20% for high-risk stocks that might show big returns, and put the rest into a diversified portfolio of sound, profitable companies with some good long-term prospects.
If you want to get into the high-tech internet stock game, consider stocks like Cisco, Sony, Northern Telecom, Lucent, and other ‘infrastructure’ stocks. Avoid the AskJeeves.com’s of the world.
Most people in the ‘trading’ game are losing money. Most day traders don’t know what they are doing, and 95% of them will go broke.
Avoid jumping on fads, and don’t get into the habit of continually dumping stocks and buying new ones - the commissions will get you. As a part-time investor, any decisions you make along those lines will almost certainly be no better than chance, so the commissions will just be a drag on your earnings.
I recently got started with investing, my financial advisor pretty much set it up for me since he knows what hes doing. I am currently not trading stock personally, rather the bulk is in Mutual Funds… and by my last statement, they climbed quite nicely. The latest investor magazine I got here seems to like Cisco Systems, and judging by the history, its not too bad. Diversification is a good idea. (not too put all your eggs in one basket so to speak) Since I am just starting out, I plan on learning much more (most likely go back to school because this really is starting to interest me) but as of now someone else is watching my dough. Perhaps in the future I can be of more help.
“Wow! Spider-Man! Are you really friends with the X-men?”
"Not since Cyclops tried to use my viewmaster."
(Marvel Team Up #1)