Investing
 

Anyone know anything about investing, I just got a TDAmeritrade account, and was planning to put maybe 500$ in and see what happens. I don't care if it goes to 0, but if it doubled that would be cool to. Buying on margin is out, I don't want to end up in the poor house.

Re: Investing
 

smal cap mutual funds and MMA are the way to go.

if you wanna deal with the other ----, then be prepared to throw thousands of dollars into it. dont gamble man.

Re: Investing
 

JSDA....

Re: Investing
 

I also have a TDAmeritrade account (had it for about 5 years)... as far as picking stocks, it really depends on how much time you want to dedicate.

If you want to pick 'em and forget about them, go with a mutual fund.

However, you also mentioned you don't care about risking it all... in that case (if you have some time), I'd try "penny stock" trading. Basically, it's actively trading small, high-risk (and thus high reward) stocks.

To trade those you need to do a bit of research, use screeners, etc.

Personally, I'm just getting into trading foreign currencies (Foreign Exchange = Forex). Also a more active trading route, but I'm just trading a "demo account" which uses real-time info, but with fake money so you get some practice. For more info about Forex, go to babypips.com, lots of good info.

Re: Investing
 

i have about $10k in the Australian market, doing really well because i sold when market top out 3 months ago, and got in this week hella low, after the market crash. i'm going overseas this year :6
i just buy / hold / sell, its easy, you just track the top 10 companies and buy low...

Re: Investing
 

theres alot to investing and it requires alot of reading, basically what you should do is see if your ameritrade account has some kind of stock analysis tool and spend time researching various companies. basically the way it works is your betting on a companies performance for the quarter, so say (someone mentioned penny stocks) theres a pharmaceutical company working on fda approval of a new cancer medication or whatever, currently there stock is at $.20 a share, if they get approval to start distributing their medicine their stock jumps to 30-100 per share and you make alot of money, chances are though they won't get approved.

so, what you do is look at a stocks history, whats it peak price, whats the lowest, is there a trend? whats the company investing in? also I use fidelity and they have a research "watch function" that allows you to make a fictitious purchase of as many shares of whatever stock you want and allows you to watch its performance, so if it flops you don't lose any money and will teach you to do more research before putting any money down.

Also anouther thing to note about online trading is that its not really in "real time", and you have to take commision into account, so say you have 20 shares of stock and want to sell it for a profit of 100 dollars, somone actually has to sell that stock and because of the delay it may not be the same price as it was when you signaled the sale, then that someone gets a commision of 5$ per trade or whatever. Anyway you can make money with cheap stocks but always remember that theres a reason they aren't worth very much. subscribe to a stock analyst newsletter and go from there, precious metals is your best bet though if you don't want to deal with all the ----, historically the price of gold/silver jumps everytime the market crashes.

Re: Investing
 

apple, and grab some of that visa ipo fri morning

Re: Investing
 

call options otherwise your 500 is controlling nothing...

Re: Investing
 

I saw a thing on MSNBC about this... I'd do it if I had some money that isn't already tied up.

Re: Investing
 

Thx for the advice, I already have a roth-IRA that I'm going to do my safe investing with, mutual funds and high grade bonds. I have been trying to learn on investopedia, I think my approach is going to be to learn to find the intrinstic value and then use technical analysis to time the purchase. It's funny how people hear stockmarket and they think rich(my wife), I don't have any dellusions about beating the people that do it for a living. My goal is to earn average returns(in the IRA), and use maybe 10-20% for speculation.