Investment discussion

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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Eternauta » Fri Feb 16, 2018 12:38 am

Put most of your money in, in a given year, around end of Jan/beginning of Feb, that's usually when markets are at their low, if you get in after a good drop, you're in for an upward ride the rest of the year.

I've tried microlending sites like fundingcircle or lendy, but recently thought I'd be a grownup and invest in funds with a good track record, such as Vanguard products.

As it has been said before JUST SIT ON YOUR STOCKS and put money in at regular intervals. Do not try to day trade, because the odds are, you'll sell/buy after the smart players have done so, resulting in making the wrongest possible choice most of the time.

But this is coming from someone who seriously thought about buying bitcoins back when they were at $35 per coin and then didn't. So yeah.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Sun Feb 10, 2019 1:01 am

Revived.

Of late, I've finally gotten serious about saving for retirement and become kinda obsessed with investing because I find it fun. Since I'm in that area of working class between working poor and low middle-class, I only have so much skin to put in the game, but I've been making it work. I put 5k in an IRA and 2k in Robinhood (since they allow commission-free trading) and I've been feeding 100 to the IRA bi-monthly and will now also be sending 50 to Robinhood bi-monthly. So far, I'm beating my IRA in terms of percentages (I started both accounts in December, white-knuckled that brutal month, and am now up nearly 5%), though part of that could be because I got in on CGC early and made about eighty bucks off it before jumping out. I day-trade, I should mention (not literally, since I don't want to be marked as a day-trader, but in the general sense).

My strategy thus far for my own self-built IRA goes like this:
1. Only make safe investments in things that really seem like they're about to take off. If there's too much risk, I won't put money into it. This is a marathon, not a sprint, I'm not expecting to make 200k this year, or even 2k. So far, I've only had to cut my losses a few times.
2. When I make a sale, 25% of the take goes to my CEFs (more on that below), 25% goes to ETF future bets (I've got a Cannabis ETF, a Renewable Energy ETF, an AI/Robotics ETF, a Lithium ETF, and a Blockchain ETF, the idea being that I think these sectors will become huge but don't want to risk investing in any single company{Except for Cannabis]), and the rest gets reinvested into growth stocks.
3. Since Robinhood doesn't provide mutual funds (hopefully they will eventually), CEFs are the next best thing. I have four with a sustainability of three or more on Morningstar; two are focused on capital growth, while the other two are income CEFs that spit out monthly dividends at a rate of 10%+. Since Robinhood doesn't yet allow DRIP investing and partial shares(though they intend to eventually), those dividends will merely be added to the amount which will be going right back into the CEFs. When I get to retirement age, those growth CEFs will be sold at the best opportunity and reinvested into the income CEFs.
4. For the growth CEFs, always average down with buy limits if possible and make sure I'm only ever buying when they're at a discount to the NAV rather than a premium. A lot of investors don't care about discounts/premiums, but since I'm working with limited resources, I have to maximize my take everywhere I can. For the income CEFs, I'm obviously not that worried about discounts/premiums to NAV, since I'm far more concerned about the dividends than the actual market value.
5. Don't get greedy. I usually sell my positions at 10% gain unless I strongly suspect there will be more growth in the future. I bought up shares of COTY before the earnings, it shot up 32%, and even though they pay a nice dividend I got rid of them simply because I know better than to let a profit go to waste. There's always another opportunity out there. If I think I've made a mistake on a company, just sit on it until it barely makes it above water, then trade out. IT obviously helps to have Robinhood, where I don't have to also work against trading fees.
6. As I said above, this is a marathon, not a sprint. There will be times I get my ass kicked (such as this week, where I went from battling at 2110 to battling at 2040) and have to just keep my eyes off the topline number while making what idiosyncratic trades I can around the margins. I usually manage to at least make a few bucks a day while I wait for my other stocks to have a good day. Slow and steady. At a rate of 3 dollars every trading day, if it holds, that's still a yearly gain of ~600$ on a principal of 2000, which would be incredible and make more explosive potential for my portfolio.
7. Avoid chasing bubbles. If something's big right now, I consider it too late for me to get into it. This also folds into my rule of: don't buy the hype, and don't allow partisan politics to affect my trading decisions.
8. If I suspect we're in a bear market or headed to recession, start pulling away from growth stocks and look toward more stable dividend stocks--beauty products, gold, infrastructure, waste management--which are very reliable even in a recession.
9. If a stock is speculative and expensive, it damn well better pay a dividend to make me feel secure, else I won't pick it up.
10. If I'm going to pick up an ETF or some stock which hedges against recession, it better also pay a dividend since it's basically going to be dead money until the bad times come.
11. At the end of the day, fundamentals still matter. Though I've been burned on companies with great fundamentals like Nintendo, there's a reason why, when comparing two similar massive companies which had fallen out of grace (Ford and GE, both of which provide a similar dividend and were trading around a similar price), I decided to sink 200 in one and not the other--one of them made a massive recovery seemingly on nothing more than the assumptions of the market that it would survive, while the other is still making money hand over fist.
And finally: 13. NEVER put too much money in one stock. The worst thing to do is to put all your chips )or even 20% of your chips) in one stock, no matter how strongly you believe in it. This folds in with the rule about not being too greedy. Keep the stocks diversified and just hunt day in/day out for more opportunities to earn a couple bucks or more.

My greatest triumph was getting in on CGC with 5 shares--1 when it was 30$ and four more when it was 40$. I traded out around fifty. I pulled out of CRON as well, because after the massive gold rush on Cannabis stocks, I think there's about to be a crash down to Earth when earnings come around this week and people realize that MJ companies are expanding right now instead of making beaucoup bucks. I'm gonna swoop in then and grab up ACB, Cron, and CGC on the cheap. ACB has potential if it decides to do share buybacks, CGC is obviously king at the moment, and CRON is massively overbought for how small a company it actually is yet has a 40% stake put into it by Altria (the company which brought you Marlboro) so it has potential.

My worst stock has been Nintendo. It was trading around its 52-week low, and considering its strong sales I couldn't believe it. I picked up two shares, and when it started to go up, decided to buy another three. It posted great sales but lowered guidance for its next earnings, and so it sunk. Then EA and Take-Two shit the bed, and Nintendo sympathetically sunk with them, so I'm down ~10% on my five shares. I'm still holding--they provide a dividend, and I firmly believe they'll recover (unless my theory down below ends up being true).

Right now, Microsoft, Ford, and Nintendo make up about 1/3 of my portfolio, in order of least to most valuable. Ford I've been particularly bullish about as a very long term stock, since Ford will never die, is cheap, and pays a steady dividend.

At the moment, I've grown a bit conservative. After the recovery in January, this last week brought everyone back down to Erf. Looking at the market over the last six months, it's been volatile, but both the peaks and valleys are getting lower. I'm starting to suspect a lot of stocks are wildly overbought, especially those which have formed a bit of a mountain between Jan '17 and now. I think we might be headed toward a bear market, if not a recession, and so I've started picking my growth stocks more carefully than I would if I thought we were in a bull market.

I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on what I'm doing, because I've only been doing this a month.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby IamNotCreepy » Mon Feb 11, 2019 5:25 pm

Well, probably the only ones literate enough can't legally give you any kind of investment advice ... *cough*
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Absentia » Mon Feb 11, 2019 6:16 pm

IamNotCreepy wrote:Well, probably the only ones literate enough can't legally give you any kind of investment advice ... *cough*


I think I'm fairly literate, I just don't pay attention to the market because it's not my preferred method of gambling. It's all I can do to read my monthly statement.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby NathanLoiselle » Tue Feb 12, 2019 12:55 am

For all those who want to invest. Invest in me. I'll put your money to great use. You may never get it back but it'll definitely go to a 2003 Thunderbird.

Did I say Thunderbird? I meant "important surgery".
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Tue Feb 12, 2019 3:53 am

IamNotCreepy wrote:Well, probably the only ones literate enough can't legally give you any kind of investment advice ... *cough*


I mean, I only started doing this a month ago. Not looking for insider trading or anything like that, just wondering if anyone with much more knowhow than my dumb ass sees any severe flaw in what is more or less me trying to outdo my stolid IRA.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Sat Mar 16, 2019 12:32 am

So, I'm now at 2251, with a total gain of 200 since December. I've decided to try my hand instead at the long position, so I migrated my funds to M1 Investing this week, which allows for building a proper portfolio and (more importantly) fractional shares for the poors like me who can't afford to buy a full share of Tesla.

Morphed my profile to be 30% bets where I put money down on stocks like GE, Aurora Cannabis, and Lloyd's Group, among others, and it's been my most profitable part so far.

The stolid blue chip stocks (think Dollar General, Lockheed Martin, Waste Management, Disney, etc) and S & P funds make up 40 percent and have posted the next best performance.

The next best performing are my sector bets, which make up 20% of my portfolio. These are just a number of funds targeting a sector so I don't have to risk any one company dragging me down. So far I've placed bets on clean energy, video games (which I believe will recover after consoles got kicked around by mobile gaming this quarter), robotics/AI, aeronautics/space, lithium, and blockchain. My assumption is that all of these industries are poised to make good money in the future, but I don't want to have to choose a specific company out of the bunch.

Next come the activist investments, which make up 5%, and are for companies I just genuinely want to give my money to. Tesla for their space research, NYT (who knew the Times was publicly traded? I didn't), some electric car companies in China...just companies I want to fund and who will hopefully return a profit to me. IF they don't, ah well, it's only 5%.

Finally comes the defensive stocks, which make up the last 5% and are 1/3 gold/silver trusts, 1/3 precious metal mining ETFs (under the assumption that their fortunes tend to rise and fall with precious metals and they produce a dividend to make up for any losses) and a bond CEF which spits out dividends at a 12% clip to hopefully help make up for any losses incurred by the defensive portion when it's not needed.

Some of the old rules still apply. I thumbs-downed Google and Amazon because they don't give dividends, and dropped Berkshire Hathaway (Buffet's Company) for the same reason. On my bets and activist investments, I'm not so concerned about dividends, but in the other three sections, I am. I am going to pick up a slight share of Amazo today because they have a REALLY interesting program for their investors concerning startup companies, but otherwise I avoid expensive stocks which offer no dividends.

With my rule on three dollar profits nixed, I'm having to guesstimate the proper valuation of some of these stocks, which is rough. Some, like Luna, have gained exponentially since I bought them, but I'm not sure where the correct sell price is.

Anyways, I find it really fun, and this new site helps manage the short-seller in me who always wants to just scoop up any profit and run for the hills without care. I still make some short decisions, like trying to decide whether or not I want to drop Northrop Grumman in favor of Boeing, who (if you've watched the news, you'll know why) are getting the shit kicked out of them yet I think will recover just fine.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby JamishT » Sat Mar 16, 2019 4:50 am

I don't think this turbulence (pun fully intended) will bankrupt Boeing and they will recover, so if I had money to spare, I'd invest in Boeing. Conveniently, I have some virtual money on https://www.howthemarketworks.com where you can simulate buying and selling stocks, so I've got some trading to do!
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Sat Mar 16, 2019 3:27 pm

JamishT wrote:I don't think this turbulence (pun fully intended) will bankrupt Boeing and they will recover, so if I had money to spare, I'd invest in Boeing. Conveniently, I have some virtual money on https://www.howthemarketworks.com where you can simulate buying and selling stocks, so I've got some trading to do!


Well, the beautiful thing about this site is I don't HAVE to buy full shares of a company. Putting 2% in means two percent of my total cash goes to the company regardless of whether or not I have the money for a full share, not 2% of the company's stock value. And, of course, you get a dividend even for partial shares, I believe.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Fri Mar 22, 2019 4:58 am

So, the Fed recently announced that they swore not to raise interest rates for the year and that they would end Quantitative Tightening in the summer, which was a lot more than the market was expecting, and...the market dropped but for the Nasdaq, which has been doing its own thing for a while. Stocks came back today after falling early, but it was really only because Apple got upgraded by a few analysts, and that was enough to pull the whole market up.

We'll get some more labor and housing data over the next couple of weeks to get an idea of where the economy's actually at (our last big piece of news, that Feb added 20k jobs against an expected 180k, was extremely concerning), but the response to the Fed's very generous announcement was worrying to me. I haven't ditched my blue chips and S/P funds, but I have dropped them to a much lower percentage of my profile while I've increased the amount of new money flow to my bets and sector ETFs, which are outperforming the markets. As for my blue chip stocks, I'm putting extra emphasis on stocks like Waste Management, Dollar General, Johnson and Johnson, and Next Era Energy. You know, stocks that are much likely to outperform a recession and bounce back quicker.

Now that I know a lot more about what I'm doing, I exchanged the funds in my IRA. I've shifted my Nasdaq fund to a Science and Tech Fund, because it performs very similarly but for the last two years has paid a big-ass 13% dividend at the end of the year. I've also swap my more conservative fund to a medium-return low-risk bond fund that's a blend of municipal and high-risk corporate bonds which returns a 6% dividend and pays monthly. I'm putting more money in the conservative fund right now, given that I'm getting very skittish on this market. For both of them, I'm setting them to automatically reinvest dividends (which will be especially dope in the bond fund).
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Fri Mar 22, 2019 6:04 pm

Really bad news for investors today. The three month treasury bond yield flipped over the ten year yield, which is an event that typically indicates a recession in 6 months to a couple of years. U.S. manufacturing has fallen backward and Germany's has cratered. It's gonna be rough
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Tue Mar 26, 2019 10:39 pm

Been moving toward a setup now which I'm comfortable with should a recession hit. Holding onto JnJ, Waste Management, NE Energy, and Dollar General while trying to get rid of a manufacturing company I have, JPMorgan, and Disney. Once that's done, I'll be ready to rise again. Just hope we have some more green days (and we probably will, a lot of bear markets are proceeded by highs) so I can sell out of those positions fully.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Doodle Dee. Snickers » Thu May 16, 2019 2:40 am

So my strategy changes once again. Were I in a different or more traditional investment vehicle, I would hold all stocks, but M1 (what I use) is meant to be more of automated input, so I have a set up which mimics an actual IRA/401k a little more and looks like this:

Stocks - 5%
Value - 30 %
Growth - 10%
Sector Bets - 10%
Bonds - 40%
Activism - 5%

Now, Bonds/Growth/Value/Sector Bets are a diversified set of ETFs and Closed End Funds (which are basically the same as open-ended mutual funds), but rather doing the 60/40 or 20/80 split between bond and stocks, I adjust the percentages based on where the market is at right now. Since I think the market is at its top, bonds are likely to give me my best returns while Value investing is going to be more important than Growth. If we have a bear market and hit a bottom, Growth goes to 50%, Value to 20, and Bonds/Sector go to 10. That's what I mean.

Stocks cheat past that 5%, though, because I always keep 10 bucks per pay period on hand to sink into a stock that I think is undervalued. So far, I'm holding over 20 shares each of COTY, GE, and F at ~7 dollars (which is great for me, since one is almost at 13 and the other two are at 10.50). Since COTY and Ford pay a badass dividend, I'm holding very long on them. I have a price point for GE (it's 31). I also have a bunch of shares of Lloyds Group and Aurora Cannabis, hoping that the first will eventually reclaim its former stock price and that the latter will be amazing three or four years down the road. Finally, I've got silver as a pure value play since it's fallen down a hole and VEON bringing up the rear.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby jbobsully11 » Tue Nov 05, 2019 6:09 am

I got a thing in the mail last week saying that my temp agency allows me to invest in a 401(k) and get a 10% match on my contribution up to 5% of my pay. After running some numbers (ie. consulting the weirdly detailed, yet haphazard perfectly normal, readable spreadsheets I have), I figured with the amount of OT I usually work and how much of my student loan debt I’ve paid off, I can contribute 5% and still have enough to save for emergencies (like replacing my car that has... one wheel in the... grave? Junkyard, I guess?).

So anyway, I called the number they said to call, and they sent me an e-mail with more information. Why they couldn’t have done that in the first place remains a mystery.

EDIT: The match doesn't even sort of start until I've been working with them for at least two years, and then it goes up by 1% every year. So I'm not really counting on that anymore. But now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure if I'll go with them, or do something with my bank.
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Re: Investment discussion

Postby Windy » Sun Nov 10, 2019 4:54 pm

I stopped investing because I realized there's no point in investing for the future when you're going to be dead in 3 years.
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