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Investment: The Stock Market is a fickle thing
That_Guy
I don't wanna be that guyRegistered User regular
I don't wanna be that guyRegistered User regular
There's been talk of making a thread dedicated just to investment in stocks, bonds, funds and indexes. So here we go.
I've made a small amount buying and selling low risk short term stocks. You really gotta keep your eye on the ball or you could lose a fortune overnight. I don't really have any sage advice to offer. I'm just keeping my ear to the ground for hot tips and hoping for the best.
I've made a small amount buying and selling low risk short term stocks. You really gotta keep your eye on the ball or you could lose a fortune overnight. I don't really have any sage advice to offer. I'm just keeping my ear to the ground for hot tips and hoping for the best.
https://www.youtube.com/hesthatguy | https://www.patreon.com/hesthatguy | https://steamcommunity.com/id/ThatGuy3141/
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I might make a small bet in a sector or stock if it seems low.
Looking at ATVI right now. Might buy now and sell at Blizzcon.
And people who feel like being fiscally responsible.
AKA cowards.
That's how to do it.
There's a ton of knowledge and discussion about investments in the financial literacy thread already. Maybe start there if you're shaky on the basics.
Never mind that you might end up with:
a) a company with a bankrupt director still trying to direct a sinking ship into the ground
b) a company who have stopped communicating but are still trying to raise money elsewhere
c) a company that outright lied to investors about its progress and state
But hey! Maybe the others will come good.
This the fervent hope of the Angel investor, which in this story is my dumb ass.
Those sorts of companies get a lot of 3F money. Friends, Fools, and Family. There's often overlap between those groups.
If you're doing any investing that's not just buy and hold until retirement or cashing out to get money for a down payment or something, the main thing is to have solid entry and exit criteria. Why are you buying this investiment at this time and at this price; and what is your plan for exiting the position, covering both ways the investment can go. How much are you looking to make, how much are you willing to lose, how long are you willing to wait.
REITs are not a great investment to hold outside of tax-advantaged accounts (401k, IRA, Roth IRA, HSA) because those dividends are taxable, whether you sell the stock or not.
For small-scale investing outside of retirement accounts, a basic app like Acorns or Robinhood is fine.
If we're talking 5 digits or more, then the easiest thing is to use the brokerage services provided by whomever has your retirement accounts.
At University, I was forced into doing a course where we all formed different "public companies" that issued shares, did something, and then liquidated at the end of the semester to give a return.
We made cheap wallets.
Basically our only customers were ourselves, our family and friends, and other desperate student companies (although we had a website that might have sold some elsewhere).
We were lucky we liquidated before we ran out of people who liked buying our cheap plastic.
I sort of see it as an object lesson in this now.
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How much control/data do they give you about the loans available to fund?
How is the accounting/recourse for non-performing/default loans done? A loan can be “written off” and then partially/completely collected up to 6 months later- who has claim to the funds collected at that point?
Being a lender isn’t about avoiding losses, it’s about knowing how to price your loans so you are adequately compensated for the level of risk you take on...
That's one narrative I think about a lot, when deciding whether I'm still comfortable buying the market.
I did Lending Club for a bit when it was new - if a loan goes to default but collections successfully gets anything (they usually don't) then you get a share of that.
All of the low-risk loans with decent returns get snapped up by algorithms/big traders, so "normal" users end up picking through a collection of high-risk loans that those people don't want...once all the defaults were filtered out, I didn't make notably more money than I would have in an index fund.
Over a few years, I invested in 81 notes (some 3 year, some 5). 65 eventually got fully paid off, 16 were charged off (some with partial payments, some not). I invested $1000 originally, and the 81 notes was a total investment of $2025 (so cycling that same money back through). Of that, $1789.8 was principal that was recycled back through, $506.74 was interest. I also got 12 cents in late fees and $28.03 in "recoveries" (whatever that is), but was charged 27.92 in various fees (mostly service fees) so those two end up mostly being a wash.
This was mostly over a period of time from 2012 to 2015, I've just been letting those notes which were left finish and withdrawing from that point. Pretty much entirely because this happened, when the CEO was ousted over fraud charges. Which threw into stark relief that the money I invest is kinda going into the piggy bank which is reliant upon the company itself, and the company didn't seem too stable, and I didn't want to be heavily invested in a company whose future seemed uncertain. At that point I moved my microlending stuff completely over to Kiva where I don't have an expected return on investment, but can think of it more as a charity, I guess. I just let my account slowly get its payments and withdrew anytime it got over $25 bucks, which...thanks for reminding me, it's been a while and I've gotten my last few payments early this year, so my account balance is now zero.
So yeah - the concept itself seems pretty sound, and I got a good return on investment (basically every year was in the low teens from what I recall). I also took the time to manually select every note, which I'm sure had something to do with it. But given the very nature of the system, you're betting on the company, not just on the notes, so it doesn't feel super safe because of that, and also the loans are very not liquid - despite there theoretically being a secondary market where you can transfer notes, there's just not enough interest in the system to make it a reliable way to shift the money around if you need to get it out for an emergency.
So my advice would be to look into the financials of whichever company you're going with for the p2p stuff, and to assume that any money you put in is in that sandbox until you're paid back, because it'll be difficult to find a buyer to take them off your hands.
You can individually pick, or let the company do so for you. Interest rates are spelled out up front, along with what it's for, etc. They give you whether the person owns or rents their home, length of employment, gross individual income, individual dept-to-income, job title, credit score range, and a few other details. Each note was assigned a "rating" based off of risk, which was tied directly to the interest rate.
Accounting/recourse is handled by the company. You get a notice if there's no payment, over time, they attempt to collect, and it's charged off. Given my above they can recover some (hence the recoveries), but I don't think it's super common.
Yeah, we had basically 6 or so years of a reasonably steady rise, followed by a big jump based on smoke and mirrors bullshit (buybacks, tax cut, deregulation, etc) and now we have had 18 months of stagnation and we are starting to see ominous economic numbers start to trickle in (yeild curve inversion, bad jobs report, etc). If you had been in the market the past few years you probably did well but it doesn’t look like a good jump in time.
I know. I'd been considering getting into stocks for years, but I wanted to wait until the market had a dip first. It hasn't happened and is long overdue; I suspect some weird sort of collusion or something to keep stock values high for as long as possible and damn the consequences and future. But I start to digress.
There was a 20% dip in December. Did you buy that?
Yeah like I'm happy with a 5-6% return tbh. So I should probably just dump all my money into vanguard or something I guess.
https://engaging-data.com/market-timing-game/
Even if you think stocks are too expensive relative to real value right now, you're missing out on dividends and other "free" money by not being in the market. In my Roth IRA alone, I made $1800 in dividends last year, regardless of the market level.
Yeah - this shouldn't be ignored. For my own investments, I tend to do my buying in the early part of the year and just sit on everything (exploiting the "buy in May and go away" effect), but also I am a bit more of a sophisticated investor. For most people, the best bet is dollar-cost averaging and making small sustainable investments regularly. That said, if you had to pick a time to start, this is one of the relatively rare circumstances where "today" might not be the best answer.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
Especially for a newbie.
Speaking of market timing, you could also end up like me where I finally decided to start investing after my job was fairly settled and I chose...September of last year.
That was a rough 4 months. But hey, it's mostly all back now!
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Without knowing details, are you waiting long enough that you aren't paying short term capital gains on your cash out? (I think it's 3 years) I'm assuming you have a rolling sale at this point.
I used it for a year to learn the ropes. I think it's a good tool that can teach a person how things fluctuate and its amount of user level control on trades felt empowering. But, to caveat that, I went down 25% before I came back with an overall 20% gain. Because I was day trading there was a lot of stress while I was down.
Also I was fortunate to be in a very good market when I played with it. So long as you look at it as gambling I think it can be useful.
Also, stay away from ETFs, crypto, and options.
I signed up on Questrade platform. I recently sold a property so I’ve got some money to play with.
AMD does seem good, and like you said That_guy after the new 3000 launches I imagine it will go up a bit more.
Are there any other recommendations for trading platforms? I’m in Canada so I’m sure it limits what I can use compared to our American siblings
I wish I had invested even more in Coke. It's more than doubled than I bought. It is by far my best pick, and then afterwards Disney. My worst pick? Nvidia. The one share I bought is -$116. Ouch.
No, other stuff came up. I don't want to invest anything that I'm not willing to lose utterly and I'm not in as good a financial position as I'd like to be.
For short term like that I've always heard recommendations of either just a high-interest savings account or a GIC.
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But really, if any of us knew for certain what would be best for a year, we'd be doing it for a living and would charge you for the answer. In no small way, this is the gambling thread