Title: Gatlins Stock tips and money advice Source:
[None] URL Source:[None] Published:Feb 5, 2018 Author:Hopefully Gatlin Post Date:2018-02-05 18:32:47 by A K A Stone Keywords:None Views:26356 Comments:167
You wanna get rich? You just might if you follow this advice.
If I had a thousand bucks and I wanted to invest it for a month, what would you buy?
This is going to be difficult to answer. It will take time and some detailed explanation, but I will do this for you. First of all, I cannot answer the question as you posed it because I have never approached trading in that manner. Meaning, As a Swing Trader, I always place a Stop Loss order on each equity I purchase. So, the sell order occurs automatically and I therefore place no time restrictions on any stock buy. I am sometimes in and out of a stock within few minutes and often times I am in and out of a stock the same day, At other times, I am in for as long as a month or two before being being automatically sold out.
I will do this exercise for you in steps but it is important that I begin by presenting the definition of Swing Trading:
DEFINITION of 'Swing Trading'
Swing trading attempts to capture gains in a stock (or any financial instrument) within an overnight hold to several weeks. Swing traders use technical analysis to look for stocks with short-term price momentum. These traders may utilize fundamental or intrinsic value of stocks in addition to analyzing the price trends and patterns.
BREAKING DOWN 'Swing Trading'
The trader must act quickly to find situations in which a stock has the extraordinary potential to move in such a short time frame. Therefore, swing trading is mainly used by at-home and day traders. Large institutions trade in sizes too big to move in and out of stocks quickly. The individual trader is able to exploit such short-term stock movements without having to compete with the major traders.
Swing trading involves holding a position either long or short at least overnight and or up to several weeks. The goal is to capture a larger price move than is possible on an intra-day basis. Swing trading assumes a larger price range and price move and therefore requires careful position sizing to minimize downside risk. Swing trading can involve a mix of fundamental and technical analysis. Swing trades usually rely on larger time frame charts including the 15-minute, 60-minute, daily and weekly charts. Swing trades tend to require more holding time to generate the anticipated price move.
Day Trading Versus Swing Trading
The distinction between swing trading and day trading is the holding position time. Swing trading involves at least an overnight hold, whereas day trading closes out positions before the market close. Day trading positions are segmented to a single day only. Swing trading involves holding for several days to weeks. By holding overnight, the swing trader incurs the unpredictability of overnight risk resulting in gaps up or down against the position. By undertaking the overnight risk, swing trades are usually done with a smaller position size compared to day trading, which utilizes larger position sizes usually involving leverage through day trading margin. Swing trading can utilize the overnight margin of 50% if the account meets the pattern day trading (PDT) rule of maintaining at least $25,000 in account equity. Swing trading on margin can be extra risky in the event a margin call triggers.
A swing trader tends to look for multi-day chart patterns. Some of the more common patterns involve moving average crossovers, cup-and-handle patterns, head and shoulders patterns, flags, and triangles. Key reversal candlesticks, such as hammers for reversal bottoms and shooting stars for reversal price tops, are commonly used in addition to other indicators to devise a solid trading game plan. Stop-losses tend to also be wider when swing trading to match the proportionate profit target.
I will offer no advice....none whatsoever. But since you asked and definitely seem interested, I will do a ONE time walk-though exercise with you. I will tell you what I am now planning. I may modify my plan tomorrow morning depending on the opening price of the stock I choose.
I am out of the market right now. Fortunately for me, all of my stocks sold off automatically on Friday with a stop loss order at one percent. I started to buy back in today but decided not to because the market was so jittery.
BTW, no plan will get you rich in the stock market. But doing the right things consistently over the years can be comforting and enjoyable. There is an old addage many of you may have heard. It goes something like this: The way to make get one million dollars out of the stock market is to start with two million dollars.
I will begin the first step walking you through it in my next post. This will be fun ...
Again, I understand what you are asking, Stone....but I have no answer for you. You definitely need to check with Pinguinite who declared in a post to me:
I don't think you know as much about trading as I do, Gatlin.
That being the case, I will at anytime graciously yield to his deep breadth of knowledge, his profound wisdom and great expertise as a stock trader.
Since I know of no quick-pick stock to buy when looking for a profit in 30 days. I will therefore explain my Swing Trading procedures for you....for what its worth.
When I am starting a new purchase, as I am now, I go to barchart.com and click on Stocks and then on the next page I click on New Recommendations to wind up here. I then click on 16 stocks [or whatever number is currently there] in the 100% Buy Signal block and arrive here. I work my way down the page to find stocks with %chg of at least a plus 1 percent. The first stock I find with that is an old friend I have lost money on twice before: DECK. But I could care less about before because today is a new ball game going forward.
. I check that DECK is listed on either the NYSE or the AMEX because only those exchanges permit Stop Loss Orders. So, I find DECK is listed on the NYSE. And I see that DECK has a 5-Day Change of +7.38% which fits my minimum of 5% for 5-days. I next check for Avg Vol of at least 100,000 shares. I want a large volume trade because with a low volume of say a couple thousand, I could be stuck there for days waiting for a buyer before my automatic Stop Loss Order kicked in. I see the DECK has an Avg Vol of 789,310....so I am still a go to move on to the next step.
At the drop-down GO TO block near the top, I select Performance Report and arrive here. It is not unusual to see a + for the Past 5 Days %Chg. Which when fitted in with all the previous perimeters would give the utmost perfect buy signal. However, here I see a three consecutive day climbs of + which is usually my minimum. BUT, when the graph below those numbers has a good steady climb, with no erratic up and down movements, I can go with as few as 2 positive upward movements.
DECK is definitely first on my consider list for tomorrow morning. A cursory glance shows there a a few more stocks I may add, but I will stop here for this exercise. I stay away form the high percentage jumps, like the 12 and 13 percent that caught my eye. With that kind of jump, I am pretty sure to see a drop the next day.
So there you have the first step of what I will be doing throughout the rest of this evening and at different times when I wake up during the night.
See you tomorrow morning when I will make a $10,000 purchase of DECK and be off and running to keep you posted on the progress over the next few minutes or I hope, the next few days. I mostly buy in with $20,000. But I am somewhat cautious considering the jittery movement of the market.
I mentioned that I have purchased DECK before with two losses. I bought back in each time my buy perimeters were met. Here are the results of one of those transactions. You will see the buy date, the number of shares I purchased, the Stop Loss Order price, the actual buy amount price and the actual sell amount price when the Stop Loss Order kicked in. Lastly, the plus and minus readings from right to left show that I bought the stock when it went up two days. Then it dropped down one day but not below 1%....then it went up two days only to drop the next to below my 1% Stop Loss and it automatically sold.
DECK - 01/26 Buy Date - 226 Shares $88.02 Stop Loss Buy Amount $19,995.33 Sell Amount $19,791.34 Daily Movement [read from right to left] -++-++.
I have been in and out of DECK at least once before this but I usually only keep the last five action days on record. I just happen to have 01/26 because I hadnt gotten around to deleting it.
Dont let this all sound too rosy to you. I have had some big gains as well as some huge losses since 1965. I had losses for one period over three straight years. But I had enough reserve capital to continue and enough guts to be persistent. But I do realize that as a trader, but for the grace of God, I could have wound up as big a loser today as I am a winner.
This is probably not what you are looking for Stone. In any case, it is all I have to offer. This is what I do throughout the trading day and for periods at night. You have to have a passion and a love for doing it hours at a time. It is not something to undertake part time. In between trades and while waiting for actions....I enjoy posting on LF.
Remember that this plan is not engraved in granite. Should I find it not working or needing a change....I will do that on a moments notice.
I dont think this is really what you are looking for, Stone. But let me know if you are interested and I will continue with this exercise tomorrow morning. If you are not interested, I will not be offended should you want to save us both time by stopping here.
That being the case, I will at anytime graciously yield to his deep breadth of knowledge, his profound wisdom and great expertise as a stock trader.
I don't do stocks. I do forex. I work with the MT4 platform.
But reading your post it's obvious you do know about stocks, and in fact more about stocks than me. To go 3 straight years with losses and continue through to success is, while obviously not a streak to strive for, does require a professional mindset to survive. If you've done that, my hat's off to you for persevering.
But my comment about knowing more about trading than you do was based on your comparison (if it *was* yours) of bitcoin to the Hunt brother's attempt to corner the market, especially when the mechanism that killed them was a change in the trading rules substantially reducing their leverage which forced them to liquidate their silver positions, when you know, or should have known, that bitcoin obtained it's highs without any leverage being utilized at all, which while not proof bitcoin is quality asset, should nonetheless be respected as a remarkable achievement in the market. That is a very significant difference and seemingly one you missed. And after I point that out you claim the similarity is that both situations ended the party due to interference by authorities. Well, in the case of bitcoin/cryptos, no one government is big enough to do what an exchange did to the Hunt brothers because crytpo trading is decentralized, and that is it's trump card.
In my view, your comparison is a poor one and is why it was apparent to me that I knew more about trading than you.
But okay, since you are a professional trader, you already have a grasp on the importance of setting aside emotion when making trading decisions. So why is it you can accept 3 years of losses and remain optimistic about stocks, but when cryptos have 6 weeks of losses, you say the party is over for them? I would expect any pro trader to admit he cannot predict the market with more than a modest degree of certainty, but you clearly did. I've offered arguments in favor of cryptos based on the changing and growing technology the world is undergoing on ALL fronts and you ignore those arguments completely, simply quoting lots of old school types who don't see it. Apparently you are like them, old school, so what they say is easy for you to accept as authoritative and knowledgeable on the subject, but you, like them, are not even open to the possibility that maybe cryptos do possess some advantages in the market that conventional systems don't have. It's not unlike how pre-WWII, the navy brass refused to believe the battleship could be surpassed in naval supremecy on the high seas, ignoring General Billy Mitchell's warnings about how the airplane was now the superior weapon. He was courtmartialed and forced out of the military but after Pearl Harbor, ended up having an WWII aircraft named after him (and his rank restored).
So I say you cannot be locked into old tech, refusing to acknowledge the new, which is what you are doing. If you have an actual argument against cryptos, then by all means make it. But it seems you've hardly even tried to even field one. It seems instead your opposition to cryptos is emotionally based and you simply get on the same anti-crypto emotion train as all other naysayers, even though you already know emotions are the bane of any trader. So yes, I proceeded to make my observation about how I thought I knew more about trading than you.
You wanna get rich? You just might if you follow this advice.
(1) Be favored by God. Concretely, this means being part of the "Lucky Sperm Club", by being born with certain attributes, "making the cuts", in descending order:
(a) be part of the 85% of the world that is born without a handicap or a disability. (One might call the 15% who are born with debilitating abnormalities the "Unlucky Sperm Club")
(b) be born in the First World (that's 8% of the world's population, so to be born unhandicapped in the First World means that you're already in the top 6.8% of the world in terms of "birth luck".
(c) be born white and unhandicapped in the first world ("white" in this case also means being more regular Japanese, Ainu Japanese are a minority that is discriminated against in Japan; the Japanese are not discriminated against in the First World). Being part of the dominant racial/ethnic majority in a First World country carries inherent advantages beyond the mere fact of being born in a wealthy place. Within First World countries there are haves and have-nots, ghettos and well-to-do areas, and throughout the First World, the quality of education and childhood care one receives is closely related to where one grows up, which in turn heavily reflects the racial majority. Racially minoritarian individuals succeed throughout the First World, but the otherwise average or below-average person in terms of native intellect still has a better overall chance of success if born part of the racial majority in a First World Country. Overall, the majority population in the First World represents about 75% of these countries. About 5.1% of people are born an unhandicapped, First World part of the ethnic majority. These people do not have physical or social limitations to operating in the most sophisticated and advanced economies in the world.
(d) Finally, to be born to a family that is in the middle of the middle class or better in a first world country is a tremendous starting advantage. The reasons for this are simple. Simply by being born in a first world country means that one is lucky enough to be born into a land where there is internal peace, stability, rule of law, property rights and democracy. Sure, half of the First World countries are formally monarchies (Japan, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, Monaco, Spain : all monarchies; the US, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy - these are the First World pure republicans) - but those monarchies are all constitutional, and power is vested in democratically-elected legislatures in all of those countries both at the national and local level. The great virtue of democracy is that the economic policies are tilted to the advantage of the greatest number of voters, which means that the middle class and up in the whole First World have good education (relative to the world standard of ignorance), health care, police protection, etc., available to them. A person born to the poor even in the First World has a lower chance of ever being rich, because the schools are worse in poor areas, medical care is poorer, access to computers and training is poorer. The playing field is not even very close to level for everybody in the first world, but for the top half it is much more so.
So, putting that all together, if you're an unhandicapped white born into a middle class family or better in the First World, you have already had most of the work of getting rich in the world done for you by your father's sperm and mother's egg. God saw to it that you were born into the top 2.55% of the world's people, in terms of wealth. You started out wealthy, in terms of all of the benefits of inherited capital, and you are in a place where you will get an education if you just pay attention in class. To get rich, you need to be able to function in a technical, literate society. That takes education. If you were born unhandicapped, middle class white American, you already got, for free (to you)the tools and the background conditions that make it possible for you to get rich through things that you control: your mind and your hands.
If you lack and of those things, then the single greatest indicator of whether you will be able to get rich or not depends almost entirely on who your parents were.
If you're born in Detroit, you can work to get richer with completely average talents. If you're born in Dakar, you were born wealthy and will stay that way, or you were born poor and will stay that way.
To recap: the first piece of advice if you wanna get rich is to choose the right parents.
If you're reading this, that choice was already made for you. You're a white male, somewhere between the working class and the upper class, born and raised in America. You can read and write and compute (you're reading this, after all). School is long past, so you got the education you were going to get. The better one you got, the farther you probably got up to this point. Nobody here on LF, reading this, is going to be redoing high school and going to a better college, getting better grades, etc. That's all water under the dam.
The past is in the past. With all of those advantages already cooked, the real question is what can you do to get RICHER, starting where you are now.
And the answer to that depends mostly on how much money you already have free and clear.
There are really only about three ways to make money:
(1) Sell your time (i.e.: work) (2) Make money on money (i.e.: invest) (3) Be favored by God (i.e.: win the lottery).
The best way to get rich quick is to win the lottery. So buy a ticket. Not 10 or 20 tickets - that's a way to get poor. One ticket gives you a chance. Two individuals both won over $500 million in lotteries in the past couple of years, on single tickets. Chances are, you'll lose. But God favored you once, in your birth circumstances. He could favor you again. Probably won't, but could. That's the best way to get rich.
If you're just working, and you're your age, you're probably not going to get rich. You can secure a comfortable middle class existence for the rest of your life if you're diligent about it.
If you already have money and you want to invest, you can get richer if you invest wisely. How to do that is a whole separate topic.
If I had a thousand bucks and I wanted to invest it for a month, what would you buy?
I would pay an interest-bearing debt. You will pay more interest on that $1000 owed than you will gain on your investment of $1000, so use the $1000 to get rid of any interest-bearing debt you may have. Once you have no interest- bearing debt that charges more interest than you would earn on a municipal bond, then you could consider investing in something that might produce a return. But you might be better served investing the $1000 on something that will improve your health. For $500 you could buy a Sperti sunlamp and get 100% of your daily Vitamin D requirement (a thing in which almost all Americans are deficient) for about 3 minutes standing in the light with goggles on.
When you have $1000 a month to invest, or ten thousand in a lump sum, THEN could consider investing in equities or debt instruments to earn a money return on your money.
First - don't invest in anything you do not understand. You probably do not really understand Bitcoin. Scarcely anybody does. Don't invest in that sort of thing.
Second - remember taxes, and remember that the "net gains" tables that are sometimes provided showing you gains net of taxes hardly ever include state taxes, or city taxes, both of which are over and above the federal taxes. Do the calculation yourself of what $100 gain will leave YOU with, after federal, state and local income taxes OR short term or long term capital gains federal, state and local taxes OR federal, state and local taxes on gains on commodities (25% federal tax on gains in gold held, for example) OR taxes on dividends, OR Taxes on interest. However you're going to make money in the investment, you're going to be taxed. To properly compare one investment to another, the number that really matters is what you have left in your hand after taxes.
Third - Remember transaction costs. It costs money to sell a security, and more money to buy another one. Every time you change positions, you pay an exit fee and you pay an entrance fee.
Fourth - Remember "loads" on mutual funds, and management fees. Understand how the financial manager will pay himself every month out of your money in any managed product.
Fifth - Remember tax-advantage investments like IRAs and 401(k)s, but also remember the disadvantages of such structures: you money is trapped, and your options are limited.
Example: You're probably better off buying a 4.4% municipal bond and holding it to maturity than you are buy a 7% corporate bond and holding it to maturity.
... but when cryptos have 6 weeks of losses, you say the party is over for them?
We were good together until here when I stopped to answer your question. I do appreciate your favorable comments on my trading.
To try and answer your question ...
I have been following bitcoin for some time now, ever since it started its run up and began hitting my news alerts. I was intrigued by it. Not with the working mechanism, because I never get involved with that since I am only looking for momentum....but the increase in price. I can say without a doubt, had there been a day trading mechanism for bitcoin [and a couple of companies have tried to start ETFs] that I could have used to swing trade...I would have proudly added couple hundred thousand dollars to my last years tax return filing. I say that after doing mental gymnastics of what if trading as I followed bitcoins climb.
But as much as I am an optimist, I am also in some ways a pessimist. I saw that bitcoin was moving too rapidly up for no reason I could find but media hype and no support level. I participated in the silver mining stock run up the last two times and made a bunch of money. I used the Stop Loss and was never married to any silver mining stock or fell in love with any one.
How do I tie this to bitcoin?
To answer your question on why I am pessimistic on bitcoin, it was something I cannot scientifically put my finger. Maybe it was a premonition [although I dont believe in such a thing] because I could definitely see a parallel to the Silver Thursday fiasco as 5 countries and then India stepped in to start government controls. I could foresee governments stepping in at anytime and upsetting the apple cart. And it was today that I learned the U.S. Senate is getting into the picture.
Sidebar: I believe that government controls are necessary evils in some cases....but in other cases, they are fucking power-hungry idiots in government and go overboard. Uh, does this make me a quasi-libertarian?
I have rambled....something I admit I am good at doing. But to try and summarize with an answer to your question: I just could see no reason for the run up other than hype with everyone jumping on the bandwagon and I fully saw it as a bubble waiting to burst. It may recover, and I sincerely hope for your sake that it does because I get the indication you have a dog in the fight. And I am not shorting it, although would have started doing so the second down week if there had been a mechanism for me to do that....so I have no personal reason not to want a recovery for the folks who lost money.
I hope this makes sense and in some way answers your qustion.....while I ask you to forgive the errors because I did this with bad eyesight and just hitting keys.
First - don't invest in anything you do not understand. You probably do not really understand Bitcoin. Scarcely anybody does. Don't invest in that sort of thing.
What a silly comment. After reading this one sentence of your entire rant, I decided to comment as you are making HUGE assumptions while simultaneously making reality out of wild hubris.
Anyone that takes you for an investment advisor needs a beating.
So I say you cannot be locked into old tech, refusing to acknowledge the new, which is what you are doing. If you have an actual argument against cryptos, then by all means make it. But it seems you've hardly even tried to even field one. It seems instead your opposition to cryptos is emotionally based and you simply get on the same anti-crypto emotion train as all other naysayers, even though you already know emotions are the bane of any trader. So yes, I proceeded to make my observation about how I thought I knew more about trading than you.
Wow. You and I do have a failure to communicate. I will accept the fault blame for that and try harder to be more detailed in my statements.
I have nothing against new tech (bitcoin) and I am for anything (well, with certain exceptions....of course) I can make money from. And I can see the day that if bitcoin survives (as I hope that it does) there will be ways to do 2x and 3x buys and the same with short sells. The market always eventually provides those mechanisms.
It's not unlike how pre-WWII, the navy brass refused to believe the battleship could be surpassed in naval supremecy on the high seas, ignoring General Billy Mitchell's warnings about how the airplane was now the superior weapon. He was courtmartialed and forced out of the military but after Pearl Harbor, ended up having an WWII aircraft named after him (and his rank restored).
I find this to be cute, and I am not being sarcastic....you using Billy Mitchell as an analogy to me, a retired U.S. Air Force officer.
If you have never seen this, here it is ...
Hey, these last couple of exchanges have been good ones....thanks for that.
Personal note: This is the second day I am not working 20 to 30 trades. The Friday and Monday dips, which I was prepared for with Stop Losses but did not know when to expect, set me at ease for a couple more days now until trends are again established so I can determine which equities are moving up with a three-day upward progression.
Another good bit of advice: BUY LOW, SELL HIGH LOL !
Absolutely NOT.
I could write a multipage essay on the reason why not to....but in the interest of saving time, I will let Stephan Abraham explain here why it is a much better strategy to: Buy High, Sell Much Higher.
I am a firm believer in this and have successfully been for many years ...
After reading this one sentence of your entire rant, I decided to comment as you are making HUGE assumptions while simultaneously making reality out of wild hubris.
Anyone that takes you for an investment advisor needs a beating.
I was quoting somebody without attribution. I'll give the attribution this time:
Never invest in a business you cant understand. - Warren Buffett
Pretty sure that bit of common sense from Warren Buffett is not wild hubris.
Likewise, pretty sure that anybody who read the moderate language and thoughtful suggestions I put into my series of writings here would not call what I provided a "rant".
Obviously Gatlin knows quite a bit about trading, technicals and technicalities. If he has steadily profited over many years then he is obviously an expert at what he does, and good for him!
That does not mean that a layman who does not have the knowledge he has can simply go out and replicate what he does by buying the same things and selling the same things.
Sure, if individual trading were simply an algorithm, whereby what one person (say Gatlin) does with knowledge, savvy, and understanding not only of why he is doing what he is doing, but also why he is choosing THAT particular path instead of the other universe of possibilities, and what he is thinking of doing next, then it would be possible to replicate what he does in real time.
But we're not algorithms. When he is making his decisions in real time, he is doing so based on a whole skein of unseen judgments, considerations, weighings of opportunities and risks. He then casts his line at a certain specific moment, and from the sounds of it, catches some good fish.
But all we can do without the expertise is ape the move, at a different moment in time, when the sight picture has changed. Perhaps Gatlin would not have made the same investment at that moment.
I will stand by what Warren Buffett said and I paraphrased: don't invest in what you don't understand. Gatlin understands more things than other posters here. HE can do it because he understands the risks. Most of us don't. We can't do it. If we're going to dabble in such markets, we should do so with professional advice - and we should take the price we pay for professional advice into the calculation of what our return will be. Gatlin will take home more on the same trades, because he is doing it himself. Those of us with less experience won't take home as much, because a professional has to be paid a fee for us to do it.
Of course we can roll the dice, but that's not the sort of advice I would give. I've had too many disasters and sudden changes of fortune roll through my life to be willing to gamble more than my couple of dollars for a single lottery ticket with a big jackpot. Wealth preservation is more important to me than shoot-the-moon growth.
I think that if you "wanna get rich", the question has to be asked "at what risk of losing?" and "how much are you willing to lose?" and "over what time frame?"
I certainly skew much more conservative than anybody who invests in Bitcoin. That doesn't mean that it's "wrong" to invest in Bitcoin. It means that it's wrong for somebody like ME to invest in Bitcoin.
Knowing yourself well, knowing who you are, what you want, what you need, what the price of things is, and knowing your tolerance for risk and desire to sleep at night is important.
And that should be taken into account by anybody giving advice on the Internet, even to strangers.
AKA Stone asked an interesting question. Different folks have different views. I admire folks who can do what Gatlin represents himself as doing, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. I do know that that way is not for me - I lack the expertise, the knowledge base, or the desire to acquire knowledge of those skills.
I also know there is more than one way to skin a cat, and was giving practical advice that I think should apply to everybody.
Don't invest in what you don't understand. Who can reasonably argue with that? Gatlin UNDERSTANDS what he's doing, at least to my eyes. Do you? Do any of us? If yes, then perhaps emulating Gatlin is the best way to get rich fast. If not, then I was suggesting other routes, other ways to look at things. To quote Warren Buffett again: Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing. And now to quote Clint Eastwood: "A man's got to know his limitations." I do. And if we're talking about money and investment, I would advise everybody else to know his too, and to not invest in what he doesn't understand. (Yes, I'm still annoyed at having been ridiculed here for having repeated that VERY sound advice).
For a single $1000, not part of a broader plan, I suspect that a $500 sunlamp used regularly will probably add a couple of years to most Americans' lives, because as a people we are so deficient in Vitamin D, and Vitamin D is crucial to just about every system in the body. People with high levels of Vitamin D are healthier, happier and longer-lived than people without. That's why I suggested the Sperti sunlamp as an INVESTMENT if one has a mere $1000 to invest. Most busy people cannot go outside and strip to their underpants for 20 minutes in the midday sun. Most people who live north of North Carolina wouldn't want to try that in winter. But 3 minutes in front of a Sperti lamp will get that same amount of Vitamin D, and save tens of thousands in medical bills over time, and is do-able.
Lateral thinking about money is important. If you're going to sell a house soon, are you better off spending $1000 to buy a few shares of stock, or $1000 to have a gardener come in and put beds of summer flowers in the backyard? $1000 buys a lot of cheap flowers, and makes the property much more inviting and desirable - and easier to sell, at closer to the posted price. Spending $1000 to get $5000 higher on a home sale is a fantastic investment.
Think about what you know. There may be places in life where a $1000 capital investment will produce much more in long-term gains, and you get to actually live with and enjoy the benefits of your investment while you're accumulating the longer-term gains.
That's all on-topic.
If we JUST want to focus on businesses, then investments in small private businesses that due diligence shows are likely to succeed may bring a much more substantial return than any investment in marketable securities.
If we only want to limit our discussion to marketable securities, to wit: stocks and bonds, we can do that too.
The subject matter proposed is vast, and all of it is worth talking about, respectfully and thoughtfully, for everybody's mutual benefit.
Calling me an idiot, an asshole and mocking what I wrote - even where it came straight from Warren Buffett - would make this thread a waste of time. I'm not trying to waste anybody's time here. I believe I am giving good, pragmatic, conservative advice that anybody can use. And I don't think that trying to have a straight and relatively serious conversation on this topic warrants my being bullied or treated like shit. It makes me think that the people who have done that so far are ignorant shitheads to whom nobody should listen for actual money advice.
Listen to anything I have said so far, and you will not get rich quick, or at all, on just $1000. But you won't piss your money down the drain either.
Tell me, please....was that an intentional setup. It looked like it had to be because it was so beautifully effective.
My compliments ...
It wasn't intentional. I agree a lot with Buffett, and I've internalized some of his thoughts over the years. I am a conservative and cautious person, in part because when I was young, dumb and full of hubris I invested in things I did not understand and I got lucky, and I also got burnt. I never stop learning.
My problem here is that you're trying to impart actual advice - and idiots who apparently know nothing come in and ridicule you out of animus. What a waste.
I have less sophisticated advice, but solid advice nevertheless, and assclowns who carry their personal animus against me from thread to thread show up to piss all over it.
In that particular case, the monkey who flung poop at me was actually calling the Oracle of Omaha a fool regarding investment. So he made a fool of himself, and I was more than happy to point it out.
Wouldn't it be swell if we could just discuss investment and philosophy of money on a thread, without disruption by nasty people?
I'm determined to do that, because the subject interests me. Seems like you make a good living doing just this. You yourself know that only Hillary Clinton could really get rich on a mere $1000 - that to go huge with THAT little money takes one of two things: (a) a lottery win (hence my $4 a week on a PowerBall and a MegaMillions ticket, the price of a dream), or (b) Clinton-style corruption.
To that I might add (c) Time. With enough time, the skillful investment of $1000 with reinvestment of the gains from the investment could indeed build up to a large pile of wealth.
And all of that is worthy of a discussion of the philosophy of money.
"You're an idiot for thinking like Warren Buffett" is not helpful. "You're a joke for having an interest-bearing mortgage" is similarly useless.
It is difficult for me to be insulted and not respond. But I'm really going to try on this thread, because the subject matter here is vital, and some really good advice can be shared here, I think.
If it get buried in bullshit that will be unfortunate.
Keep posting your expertise. I'll keep posting my own practical advice. I would advise any young person who is really interested in finance to learn ALL of it, the conservative, "wisdom of the ages", don't forget that your own health and your home are ALSO investments, sort of pragmatism that I provide, and also the trading insight you have.
A person who really mastered this subject would never have to have a boss.
Mine has an effective interest rate of 1.392%, so if I can earn a steady fixed rate of after tax return of greater than 1.392%, it does not make sense for me to pay that particular debt off at any greater speed than I do.
As inflation kicks in, the cost of paying back the mortgage over time decreases further and further, because when inflation is above 1.392%, the value of the principal invested in the house shrinks with the 2002 dollars that bought the place, but the eventual resale value of the property rises.