Stocks

Stocks Articles | Investopediahas some good reading
and a simulator atInvestopedia Stock Simulator

Google Finance: Stock market quotes, news, currency conversions & more

Lovin google finance, its easy to use for playing around with the stocks. I would create a few different portfolios with however much money you want to invest and track maybe 5 or so stocks in each over the next week to start. Things such as market cap, volume of trades, 52-week moving average are a few of the basic metrics to watch out for.

Read this and never worry about buying/trading individual stocks ever again:The Bogleheads Guide to Investing: Taylor Larimore, Mel Lindauer, Michael LeBoeuf, John C. Bogle: 9780470067369: Amazon.com: Books

Unless you want to spend all of your life doing this, take Warren Buffet's advice. When he dies, he wants 90% of his wife's assets invested in the S&P 500, with 10% in short to medium term bonds.

Pick one ofthese three stocks:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=SPY
http://finance.yahoo.com/q;_ylt=Aqk_...inance_vert_gs
http://finance.yahoo.com/q;_ylt=AgRC...=2button&s=VOO

If you want a book on investing, I recently found this book and it's completely changed how I look at the world. Must read for anyone living in a capitalist system:The Richest Man In Babylon.

Tarrant_sl said:

So at what point do we admit we were maybe wrong about Facebook stock crashing and burning? It's been over 2 years now and their stock is nearly double the value it was when it opened.

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I was certainly wrong about it.


OP, find yourself some good indexed funds (lowest fees) and dollar cost average yourself to $$ is the TLDR version of most starter books. Stay away from Dow indexes IMO you get better diversification and growth in S&P or one of the many Russell variants.

So, seven months later, how did the inventing turn out? Did you make mad cash?

A lot of junior mining/exploration companies are trading for insanely cheap right now.

Bear markets are the authors of bull markets, the brutal bear markets for mining commodities is going to lead to an insane bull market and people are going to be shifting their Krispy Kreme Donut stock into companies that produce the materials that are necessary for society to function.

When will that happen? I'm not too sure, but I certainly am well positioned for it.

What are your recommendations?

I can see higher Platinum, Palladium, and Uranium prices in the future. These are commodities that the growing middle class in countries like China and India will need a lot of for their application in industry and energy production. Big money is eventually going to flow back into the natural resource sector and it's not a matter of if it happens but a matter of when it happens. Commodities are highly cyclical in nature and if you can get in somewhere near the bottom of a cycle you're going to be sitting fairly well off once sentiment changes.

dml.to and mga.to are my biggest holdings, for what its worth.

"Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful"

? Warren Buffett

Personally I see a lot of these high flying bio-tech and social media stocks selling off in a big way and that money will then flow into infrastructure/energy/commodities which are going to become incredibly important over the next decade as millions of people pull themselves out of poverty and into a middle class lifestyle around the globe.

Alibaba IPO tomorrow morning. Estimates are saying it will be $68ish a share. Yea or nay to buying?

Why isn't a strictly Chinese company going public on the Chinese stock market?

I'll open up a question that has stirred debate for ages when I bring it up to my circle of friends.

What is a stock's value, and why is it valuable?

And you must be absolutely precise. If a stock doesn't pay or likely will never pay dividends in your lifetime (GOOG never does, for example), then why would you buy this stock? You can't answer 'to sell it for higher' because that's simply passing the hot potato onward.What is the real value in a stock if it pays no dividend or will not in your lifetime? You will realize no value if the company sees more profit - i.e., you will realize none of that profit. The only thing you can do is sell it to another, who then sells it to another. On and on, like the hot potato. It's a giant ponzi scheme.

The answer to this question underscores everything illusory in our entire socioeconomic system, of capitalism.

What is the value of value?

It's only value lies in selling it to someone else, and that someone else realizes value insofar that he or she thinks it can be sold to yet another someone else. That's it. This 'market' is a complete fabrication because the good being sold wouldn't exist without the market for the damned good. I use 'good' here very loosely.

At least with dividends you get some realization, some connection to company success. Otherwise it's complete ponzi, where the only 'value' is getting a leg up on another person, who thinks they can get a leg up on another - a giant circle of people exploiting one another with an object that has no value outside of the people trying to do the exploiting.

It's rather hilarious when you think about it.

Buybacks, buyouts.

Everyone buys stocks hoping the company will buy them back or the company will be bought. Sure.

Dumar_sl said:

What is a stock's value, and why is it valuable?

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You own a fraction of the company. Not enough to have a meaningful say in it (though you can generally attend shareholder meetings), but fractional ownership nonetheless -- just because it's a very small stake doesn't make it any less real. There's also no reason why you'd treat a dividend-paying stock differently. If a stock is valued at $10/share and it pays $1/share dividend, then the stock will be valued at $9/share afterward. Before that, you had fractional ownership of a large cash reserve; after the dividend payment, you have some cash and fractional ownership of a smaller cash reserve. Simple as that.

Maybe your question is why anyone would want to own a tiny share of a company. A big reason is that running a company takes a lot of time, and if all you care about is cashing in on their profits, then you might as well invest in stocks and diversify. You give up any possibility of influencing a company's direction, but that may not be what you care about to begin with.

Notably, you don't just realize profits from dividends. If Amazon invests all their money in expanding, then that means their future expected profits are going to be higher (as long as you think they invest the money wisely). You might as well ask why a company keeps investing its money in hopes of making even more money down the road, when they could just stop with the business they have and cash in on their profits (aka turning into cable companies). Paying dividends may actually signal that they don't have opportunities for growth, which may be a bad signal for the future. I'd rather invest in a company that sees opportunities for growth everywhere than one that can't find things to put their money toward and has to send it back to investors.

You can expect to sell stocks to others at any time (because there are always some who will start retirement, and others who will save for retirement -- on top of institutional investors), but that's meaningful for liquidity (the ease of selling) and has nothing to do with where stocks derive their value from. It's not like gold, where the only value is that you expect someone else to buy it from you. It really is backed by ownership of the company.