Wednesday

Investing Online Eight Tips

Investing Online - Stock Market for Beginners - Eight Things You Should Know

If you are interested in investing online there is a great site you may want to have a look at - The Investing Online Resource Center - www.investingonline.org - the site is in their own words "designed to serve as a valuable source for noncommercial information about investing online .... created solely for educational purposes and maintained by the North American Securities Administrators Association."

They list 8 things you need to know if you are interested in the stock market for beginners and are considering investing online.
  1. Start small
    You know it makes sense - don't bet the house ! You can always decide to increase your online account if things work out OK.
  2. Diversify
    Online investors tend to focus on stocks, and in particular large-cap domestic stocks. These stocks should be a large part of your portfolio, but to increase risk tolerance you should put together a well-balanced portfolio of stocks, bonds, and cash.
  3. Don't ignore mutual funds.
    Mutual funds have the expertise (take care here as they often make mistakes too!). Keep your mutual funds - don't put everything into individual stocks.
  4. Keep a close eye on costs they may not always be obvious. Online brokerage costs are lower than offline brokers, but they can still add up. You also must reckon with federal capital gains tax.
  5. Make sure your orders work for you.
    When investing online, learn how to use the tools available. (Obvious but true)

    Make sure you know the difference between a MARKET order, a LIMIT order, a STOP-LOSS order, "stop orders," "day orders" and "good-till-cancelled" orders.
  6. Take care with market orders.
    A limit order limits the price you are willing to pay, a market order means the price when the order is finally placed, which may be a lot different to what it wa when you looked at it.
  7. Problems are inevitable.
    Investing online will undoubtedly cause problems - you may be away from your computer, your Internet connection may crash etc... your online broker may have problems etc... In this respect I would recommend anyone reading this to steer clear of TDWaterhouse in my experience you can expect problems - for further info see. TDWaterhouse Problems .
  8. Information is power.
    When investing online, you must keep youself well informed. Don't be drawn into hype - make sure you check the facts - I would also add make sure you get to grips with at least the basics of technical analysis and stock market charts.
If in addition to your online investments you have worked hard all your life and have been putting money into a 401K retirement investing then you may wish to consider a 401k rollover to an IRA as a sensible and prudent way of protecting your retirement savings.

You also need to understand about stock charts - see online stock trading for beginners

Home : How to Trade Stocks Online

Thursday

Investing Online Time To Invest?

Investing Online - Stock Market for Beginners - Is this a Good Time to Invest?

Is the Bear Market Over ?

If you are investing online and have been following the stock markets lately then one of the most overworked phrases you are likely to have heard is "there will not be a V-shaped recovery". The problem with this is that if everybody is convinced there will not be a V-shaped recovery then it is more than likely that that is exactly what we will get.

It is of course important when trading the stock markets to seek stock market investing advice - unfortunately, as we have seen over the last two years, the people who are giving the advice are generally clueless. How many of them actually said back in 2007 that the DOW and the S&P500 would collapse by 50% ? Not many. There were one or two, but one or two out of the many hundreds that are paraded on the TV finance channels is not a lot and not very impressive.

How many of them said "don't invest in the stock market ! Bear Stearns will disappear, Lehman's will disappear, AIG will be nationalized, Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac will be nationalized etc... etc... ? GM will file for bankruptcy ?" I would guess that the answer to that would be none.

So right now most of the experts are saying that there will be no V-shaped recovery and that the recovery will be slow and painful. Most of the experts that I hear on TV expect the stock market to re-test the bottom set in March around 6600 on the DOW and 667 on the S&P500, but so far it doesn't look as if the markets are keen to do this. Which makes us wonder just exactly who controls the stock markets ? Why would the stock market be going up when most people are not buying but are sitting on the sidelines ? Or could it be that they are saying one thing and doing another ?

The upshot of all this is that you really have to make up your own mind. The 'experts' don't know what's going on, as it was the experts that created this mess in the first place. Did they do it on purpose ? Was it all engineered by Goldman Sachs which seems to have been the main beneficiary of this financial meltdown ?

Trust no-one !

Today, despite no V-shaped recovery being expected the markets are still holding up well with the S&P500 up 5 points at 857 and the DOW is up 14 at 8044. Warren Buffett may have got it right by buying in October 2008, so maybe he can be trusted, but even so you need to be a long-term investor and have deep pockets if you are going to hang on in there with Warren Buffett.

The tech sector (+2.0%) has been the liveliest sector as investors buy Google ahead of its earnings report this evening.

The number of jobless continues to increase but this of course could be good news for the stock market as profit margins can increase at the same time,

March housing starts were 510,000, against 540,000 expected. This a reversal on last month where the figures were better than expected.
The stock market is a very confusing place to try and make money with your online stock trades , especially if you are not one of the insiders, and as we have seen the vast majority of them got it wrong

Wednesday

Online Stock Trades Markets Decline

Investing Online - Stock Market for Beginners

Stock Market News

The FTSE 100 started the day in buoyant mood but later slumped and drooped below 4,000 as the US markets opened up weak after the publication of inflation figures and industrial data that was not too healthy.

By the end of the day the FTSE was down 20 points to 3,969.

March saw a 0.1% decline in CPI inflation, the year on year decline was 0.4%, for the first time since 1955. The drop in industrial production was worse than expected at 1.5%.

At close of play in the UK, the Dow was 16 points higher, at 7,397, the S&P 500 was unchanged.

The worst performers in London were mining stocks.

Rio Tinto announced they would be cutting production, Vedanta Resources was the hardest hit - falling 76p to 930p, Antofagasta retreated 36p to 5543p.

Financials was also weak, Legal & General taking the worst hammering - down 5p to 50p, Schroders joined them in the slide slipping 60p to 810p.

The rotation out of miners and financials saw defensives improve, BAT were up 72p to £15.68 and Imperial Tobacco were up 50p to £14.79.

Reed Elsevier was the star performer of the day - up 30p to 489p, due to Goldman Sachs including it on their "conviction buy list". One to watch maybe ?

After the release of the Beige Book in the US, which indicated evidence that the economy may be falling at a slower pace, the DOW rose 57 points to 7977 with but it has now fallen back and is more or less flat on the day - the S&P500 is down 2 to 839

Have we seen the bottom for the stock market in this bear market, plenty of people seem to think so, and certainly the falls are not as dramatic as they were earlier in the year and it is rare to get more than 2 down days in a row at the moment - so if it falls back to re-test the March lows then maybe that would be a good time to start investing online again - just a guess.

Stock Market Privacy Policy

Investing Online - Stock market for Beginners - Privacy Policy

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