How many people in this thread even know how you would determine whether a company is actually a good company to buy stock in?
I know of one.
It was really more of a rhetorial question, not a poll. I would bet most people don’t even have an investment strategy. Are they looking for modest returns over a long timeframe? Are they looking to pick the next Google or Microsoft and make huge returns in a few years? Do they understand the risk vs rewards for either strategy?
I glanced through the posts here and forgive me if this has already been mentioned. Like the OP I would like to get into some mild day trading, maybe a couple hundred a month. Does anybody have any suggestion on what brokerage I should go through? Most of them charge so much per trade I would have to make a pretty good return on my investment to come out even. Its not a big deal spending $12 bucks a trade if you are investing a thousand, but it sucks when you only want to invest 50 or 100. It doesn’t really even have to be a brokerage, is there a trustworthy online sit I can use? Any advice would be appreciated; as you can probably tell, I’m new at this.
So, do stocks supplying chocolate and booze go up in hard times?
Here’s a site that compares 11 brokerages. That’ll give you a place to start. Generally you’ll expect to pay $5 ~ $10 per stock trade. If you only want to buy $100 worth of stock then my advice is Don’t.
I use Scottrade. $7.00 a trade, regardless of quantity, and good research tools. But I don’t do day trading, since I like my bank account to go up, not down.
Look into hotel stocks, Marriott, Starwood, Hilton and the like.
They may go lower even, but hotels are very cyclical. They are way down now, and they will go up. The thing is they may still go lower, so you may have to keep holding them
Look up historical rates and do some research to see which hotels are likely to stay afloat for the next two years.
I’d look for companies whose stock price went down not because of a loss in sales, but went down for no other reason besides the whole market went down and they followed. Large companies whose risk of a buyout or bankruptcy is small because of their size.
Proctor & Gamble, ConAgra Foods, General Mills for instance. Massive companies, people really haven’t stopped grocery shopping or stopped buying essentials (soap, toothpaste, laundry detergent). They have little risk of going belly up but unfortunately took a hit along with the market.
Medical device companies. St.Jude, Boston Scientific, Medtronic. All of them saw their stock price drop. However, sales of pacemakers were up 33% last year. All 3 are elbowing for market share but all will be going up again. People don’t just stop buying pacemakers because the economy is bad.
Just out of curiousity, why do you think you could make money day trading a couple hundred bucks a month on a standard online brokerage account?
[Buffett’s metric says it’s time to buy
According to investing guru Warren Buffett, U.S. stocks are a logical investment when their total market value equals 70% to 80% of Gross National Product.](http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/04/magazines/fortune/buffett_metric.fortune/index.htm)