Do you trade on the stock market?

Post by **allingeneral** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:22:41

I'm curious how many of you trade on the stock market - whether through a broker, mutual funds, online trading, penny stocks, or if you just look at the listings in the paper from time to time.

If you do trade online - who do you use?

TD Ameritrade?
eTrade?
Scottrade?

Care to share your secrets? What stocks do you own? How are they doing?

gunderwood · Post by **gunderwood** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:28:03

401k only. I've got enough exposure there and I don't trust the government to change the rules or tax rates.

Post by **allingeneral** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:31:01

Yeah - 401k here too. I'm thinking about doing a little online trading though. I don't know - it almost seems like work, and I certainly don't need any more of that!

Post by **OakRidgeStars** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:37:48

Just trying to keep my 401k on the plus side is enough headache for me. The market is just too volatile these days.

Jakeiscrazy · Post by **Jakeiscrazy** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:43:37

VGOF going public?

wbtrunx · Post by **wbtrunx** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:11:33

I have an IRA via Scottrade. Get a subscription to something like Morningstar if you get in stocks.

CCFan · Post by **CCFan** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:27:03

Retirement/mutual funds, just add a little every month.... have been investing for years and figured that based on any 30 year period you'd still come out ahead - i won't spend a lot of time worrying about what to buy/not buy/sell, etc... I look at it once ever year or two and see if I want to change anything, that's about the extent of my "trading". The only other stock that I invest in is my stock of ammunition...

wbtrunx · Post by **wbtrunx** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:55:46

Buy long term. Drips are nice.

Post by **allingeneral** » Fri, 17 Jun 2011 22:00:19

Jakeiscrazy wrote:VGOF going public?

hahaha good one Jake. I guess I know what our symbol would be

Yarddawg · Post by **Yarddawg** » Sat, 18 Jun 2011 00:07:54

401K+PCRA The day traders are killing me!

Post by **zephyp** » Sat, 18 Jun 2011 06:51:29

Fidelity brokerage plus TSP (gubment 401k). I deal almost exclusively with large cap blue chips paying dividends. Fidelity has a DRIP where you can set dividends to be automatically reinvested which I apply to all holdings. Took a beating in 2008, scarfed up some cheap blue chips in March 2009, and now way ahead of where I was to start with. Now thinking seriously about dumping everything and sitting on cash until the Fall. Some of the large blue chips are relatively attractive right now. Yahoo has a decent search tool. Look for companies paying a dividend, at least 1B in market share, and a price less than $20 per share. If you are looking at a specific company and need tips on research or interpreting financials shoot me a PM...

gunderwood · Post by **gunderwood** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 09:57:14

Part of the problem IMHO, is that the stock market only really recovered in arbitrary numbers. I.e. ~12k When you compare the real value of today stock market given what you could actually purchase with it, it really hasn't recovered. Yes, the market went up, but so did everything else! In essence, if you were in the market you really have gained anything at all.

Post by **zephyp** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 10:31:26

@Garrett...you gained somewhat if you increased the number of shares you are holding....the real problem with the market is globalization...the market dumps every time a little chinaman takes one in china....its definitely a different game than what it was a few years ago...the smart people with enough money are setting strict rules on entry/exit for their positions and sitting on cash reserves to take advantage of happenings when that little guy craps in the far east...

gunderwood · Post by **gunderwood** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:08:50

zephyp wrote:@Garrett...you gained somewhat if you increased the number of shares you are holding....the real problem with the market is globalization...the market dumps every time a little chinaman takes one in china....its definitely a different game than what it was a few years ago...the smart people with enough money are setting strict rules on entry/exit for their positions and sitting on cash reserves to take advantage of happenings when that little guy craps in the far east...

Not really. Look into the Dow-to-Gold ratio or any other Dow-to-<insert item of value here> and it doesn't matter. Everything else when up at similar rates (a few went up much more, e.g. silver) as the Dow. It isn't real growth (which is why we haven't recovered yet), but rather was the results of the Feds money pumps. The money goes somewhere and where ever it goes it drives up prices, just like the housing market.

Here's some info, but you can lots of it if you just know what to look for: http://seekingalpha.com/article/127275- ... -investors

Let's make an example. Let's assume that I bought stocks at the lowest point during the crash. Before that I owned no stocks, so I "lost" no money in the crash. This is the best possible situation. Let's say I timed the market virtually to perfection. That would mean buying the Dow at 6547 (or whatever stocks I wanted to buy). The Dow is now around 12k. That's an 183.3% increase. It looks wonderful on paper! However, if you look at what gold was around the same time it was about $800 an ounce. It's now about $1,540 an ounce. That's 192.5% gain which is greater than the Dow. If you did as this example shows you could buy less gold with your Dow invested money today that you could have at the lowest low of the recent crash.

The data is even more extreme when you don't bias the results in favor of the Dow. Instead of having perfect market timing, lets say you had perfect gold timing. You cashed out of stocks and bought gold right before the market crashed. That would have been 14,164. Gold was going for about $600 an ounce. If you left that money in the stock market, you would be down almost 20%, but if you cashed out and bought gold (ignoring all stock gains leading up to that peak) you would be up 256.7%!

Your ability to market time and buy more stocks simply didn't matter. If you do the same exercise with nearly everything it comes out the same. Food, silver, etc. The Dow recovered because they printed money, nothing else. However, because they were "printing" (I use that term loosely as they obviously prefer electronic methods of money creation rather than physical printing) money, everything else reacted and prices have been skyrocketing. The official CPI is "low" only because they have manipulated the data to give a good answer. Don't believe me? Look at the data as the government use to crunch it (which is better, but still heavily manipulated).

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_da ... ion-charts

That's data which is crunched using the pre-Reagan (1980) formula. That should be directly comparable to what Carter did. Remember, those old formulas were still politically manipulated too! They just aren't as bad as the current administrations.

Here's some sources:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/127275- ... -investors
http://www.the-privateer.com/chart/dow-long.html
http://goldprice.org/gold-price-history ... gold_price

Post by **zephyp** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 11:20:41

Bottom line is my portfolio is much fatter today than it was July 2008...thats good enough for me...

gunderwood · Post by **gunderwood** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 13:27:11

zephyp wrote:Bottom line is my portfolio is much fatter today than it was July 2008...thats good enough for me...

The whole point is that the numbers are larger, but those larger numbers aren't an actual wealth increase.

Would you still be happy if the Dow hit 100k, but a loaf of bread costs $1k? Of course not, despite the balance of your stock account being larger, the real purchasing power of that stock would be less. Having more dollars only matters if those dollars can purchase more, not less.

Kreutz · Post by **Kreutz** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:27:44

Roth IRA and some different individual stocks I bought and forgot about.

Post by **zephyp** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 19:31:48

gunderwood wrote:
zephyp wrote:Bottom line is my portfolio is much fatter today than it was July 2008...thats good enough for me...
The whole point is that the numbers are larger, but those larger numbers aren't an actual wealth increase.

Would you still be happy if the Dow hit 100k, but a loaf of bread costs $1k? Of course not, despite the balance of your stock account being larger, the real purchasing power of that stock would be less. Having more dollars only matters if those dollars can purchase more, not less.

But that aint the case yet...and I do look through a dollar/price adjusted lens regarding investments...

gunderwood · Post by **gunderwood** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 19:39:00

zephyp wrote:
gunderwood wrote:
zephyp wrote:Bottom line is my portfolio is much fatter today than it was July 2008...thats good enough for me...
The whole point is that the numbers are larger, but those larger numbers aren't an actual wealth increase.

Would you still be happy if the Dow hit 100k, but a loaf of bread costs $1k? Of course not, despite the balance of your stock account being larger, the real purchasing power of that stock would be less. Having more dollars only matters if those dollars can purchase more, not less.
But that aint the case yet...and I do look through a dollar/price adjusted lens regarding investments...

Those two statements don't jive. I've shown how there hasn't been any real gain against everything else since then. Unless you've outperformed the Dow, you've lost money. Actual performance (accounting for the fact you added money) over the last three years has yielded you greater than 83% on your investments? For most people that wasn't true and for the few that it was, they were in very risky investments.

Post by **zephyp** » Sun, 19 Jun 2011 19:53:34

Aw shucks...I guess you're right...I'll sell everything tomorrow and buy bubblegum....you can cite all the numbers and sources you want...my guess is you lost big time...at any rate I am far ahead of where I was...and no I'm not outperforming the dow by 83% but my number aint a single digit either...i made some key acquisitions in march 2009 and they have done well since then...

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