How To Get Into Stocks?

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Red695 said:
it is not a secret ****ing club for christ sakes. They don't give a **** who they show the ropes to. It is not like the movie "Wall Street". Join reality...it isn't that bad...
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Well, there is a huge amount of investment that goes on in Canada outside of public markets, in order to access such opportunities, you usually have to be an accredited investor, something you are if you meet one of the following tests

200k per yer of income ( 300 with a spouse)
1 million financial assets ( cash and securities)
5 million net assets

In addition to that, you also have to know the right people ( usually the management team, to get in during the private equity investment )

So yes, there is a club, and as an example of such clubs doing it without public help - see Tourmaline Oil Corp.
 
If you are going to pick individual stocks as an newb private investor.... Learn Blackjack and go to the casino. At least you will loose money slower and get some drinks comp'd.

How much time a week are you willing to spend on this? 1hr? 5? 15?

If you aren't willing to play - don't enter the game. Go for long term, low management fee invests that match your risk preference and diversify investment types, currency, sectors, countries etc. (Are you willing to loose 50% of your investment with the same upside? What about all your money for a chance to double it? - oh wait, sounding more like a casino again isn't it? low risk high return does not exist, risk=reward.)

To learn to play - devote the time. Practice and see what happens. Trial portfolios and see what happens when you make a bet.
 
Are you a buy and hold investor or a day trader?
 
IMHO the "safer" way to get into stocks is through an investment group like Edward Jones, you get to self direct if you want, but you also get the support of guys that do this all day every day.
Some of the trading houses report big wins, but a $0.20 jump when you have millions in translates to a big win. Kitchen table investors dont have that stack of money behind them.

FWIW, I followed strictly's advice on bank stocks a while back in his thread, and yes i made some good money. I didnt have bundles to put in but what i did put in made me a nice gain.
 
As already said, do not invest more than you can afford to loose. In other words, assume you'll lose all the money you invest. That way you can "play" with a cool head and learn the ropes without losing any sleep.
 
Vlad said:
As already said, do not invest more than you can afford to loose. In other words, assume you'll lose all the money you invest. That way you can "play" with a cool head and learn the ropes without losing any sleep.
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Which is precisely why I make money the old fashioned way. I invest in myself and I earn it.

I hate losing money for nothing, and the main reason why I don't do casinos either.

I believe in "lucky" money, but I chuckle at all those looking for "easy" money (low risk, high reward). No such thing! Or we'd all be doing it!


.
 
Speaking of easy money, in order to earn stable and reasonable income by trading stocks you need to be good at it. To become good takes considerable time, effort and investment (not to mention talent), and the returns are not nearly as big as some people think. When it all adds up, you have two choices: pick it as a career and get as good at it as you can possibly be or play it like a casino. Either way you need to know the risks involved and accept them - otherwise you are doomed to fail miserably.

The only sure way to win (or not to lose) is to own the casino.
 
Stocks are an integral and necessary part of any balanced portfolio, its the day trading style that makes it casino like.
 
Red695 said:
If you are saying that a stock broker would not advise a non stock broker then you are wrong. If you are not saying that, your post is mostly irrelevant to my post. However I find the information valuable regardless.
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I don't deal in absolute statements like that, but there is most definately a club in Canada and its both based on information and opportunity. I am not going to argue about whether any particular indivdual I don't know will help or not.
 
There's a club in Canada, a bigger club in America and an international club, membership in one does not guarantee acceptance in the others. Anybody that thinks otherwise has not had the opportunity to see the benefit.
 
mmmnaked said:
Nobody successful will 'show you the ropes'

They worked too hard for it to just blab all the experience away to a newb.
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Disagree entirely. It depends on how much that success interferes with their own future success and whether or not this bothers the mentor/teacher. I've personally taught some handful of people (people I've known, not randos off the street) how to successfully day trade stock over the past few years. People willing to cooperate are few and far between, though, and it's mostly because once people start catching onto your edges, your edges disappear, hence most people keeping quiet about them to anyone else.

But what most people don't understand AT ALL is that your edges will eventually be discovered, so sometimes it pays to have a few trusted eyeballs and brains working with you, and if that costs you a little in divulging your precious secrets to people, then that's a small price to pay.

Odds are good your idea isn't anything new, or so incredibly proprietary to you that nobody else could learn and do it on their own without you anyway. All they need to do is stare at the screens for long enough.
 
Red695 said:
Thank you for posting Viper. If you don't mind me asking, how did you come to be in the position of being knowledgeable enough to mentor people? Where did you learn to day trade?
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Short answer:

I kicked down the door of Swift Trade in Hamilton (which unsurprisingly no longer exists) and said "I'm going to trade for you, and I'm not taking no for an answer." thinking it was something much more professional than what it really was.
 
SunnY S said:
Which is precisely why I make money the old fashioned way. I invest in myself and I earn it.

I hate losing money for nothing, and the main reason why I don't do casinos either.

I believe in "lucky" money, but I chuckle at all those looking for "easy" money (low risk, high reward). No such thing! Or we'd all be doing it!
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Thanks guys...it looks like I'm just going to keep doing what I do, and get into some long-term investments. I doubt that day trading is for me. I'll mess with day trading when my current career picks up.

And Sunny, I was just wondering if the same mindset/outlook would work with analyzing/predicting stocks (ie read your news, check stocks periodically, base decisions on how business decisions will ​most likely affect the stop. But if they have all of these algorithms and stuff in place that are meant to confuse the market, then it sounds like something that I'd want to stay away from).
 
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knowledge said:
But if they have all of these algorithms and stuff in place that are meant to confuse the market, then it sounds like something that I'd want to stay away from).
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Unless you're a high-frequency day trader, you won't even notice those algorithms in the first place. They'll blend in as background noise more and more the further away from high-frequency you go, so don't worry about any of that.
 
There's one trap many investors fall into and that is thinking they have realized a profit just because the stock (or whatever else they may own, like a house for example) they bought for $50 currently trades for $100. They don't understand that they won't realize any profit until they sell, so they consequently keep overpriced holdings until they tank. For the same reason most will panic and sell when their holdings loose value. You haven't lost anything until you sell either.

How many times have I heard people say they made profit (or worse, "earned") on the house they live in and don't intend to sell any time soon...

If I had a way of knowing what majority of individual investors are doing I'm pretty sure I wouldn't go wrong by doing exactly the opposite.
 
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Vlad said:
There's one trap many investors fall into and that is thinking they have realized a profit just because the stock (or whatever else they may own, like a house for example) they bought for $50 currently trades for $100. They don't understand that they won't realize any profit until they sell, so they consequently keep overpriced holdings until they tank. For the same reason most will panic and sell when their holdings loose value. You haven't lost anything until you sell either.

How many times have I heard people say they made profit (or worse, "earned") on the house they live in and don't intend to sell any time soon...

If I had a way of knowing what majority of individual investors are doing I'm pretty sure I wouldn't go wrong by doing exactly the opposite.
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There's an element of truth in buying when everyone else is selling, and selling when everyone else is buying ...

I extract income from stocks by writing (selling) slightly-out-of-the-money call options against them. If the price takes off, it will get called away (i.e. I'll have to sell at the strike price of the option that I wrote) but I would have wanted to sell it at that price anyway. If it does nothing by expiration, I keep the stock and the proceeds from selling the call. If it goes down ... it's as if I'd bought it at the original price minus whatever I sold the option for.

Today being a quiet work day AND being expiration Friday AND being a mildly up day in the market, and having already bought back some well-out-of-the-money options that were about to expire worthless ... I'm selling. Back to the brokerage screen in a moment ...
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