Investing megathread extravaganza

[DaFace]

A place to talk about investing stuff.

[eDave]

Think I'm going to invest in gift cards now.

[Cornstock]

Originally Posted by Demonpenz

This might be my first ever youtube shoutout...

[scho63]

Originally Posted by lewdog

I'm torn between understanding that, and wanting the money to be very safe. I realized bond funds are fairly safe, but parking money in there does have a chance to go down.

Not a FUND but buy a individual corporate bonds with a short term maturity, you can stagger them on maturity maybe 5K each year.

[scho63]

Originally Posted by DaFace

Buying a 1 year bond is different than buying a bond with the intention of selling it. If you hold to maturity, you won't lose value (assuming the issuer doesn't go under or something). A 1 year CD is another similar option.

Let me help you with one little caveat here: if you buy a bond today trading ABOVE par, (greater than $1,000 face for each bond), you will lose principal but the interest earned will cover the capital loss. Unless you buy a German government negative yield bond, the craziest shit I've ever seen.

If you had a 15 year 12% interest corporate bond issued back in 2004 that was to mature in 2019, it might cost $1,225 for each $1,000 face. So you lose some principal upon maturity but the interest payments provide a positive return.

You have COUPON YIELD, CURRENT YIELD and you have YIELD TO MATURITY to take into consideration whenever you buy any bonds.

[lewdog]

I originally was going to move some money over to that "high" interest CD offered with Allybank, but then realized we weren't set to max our Roth IRAs this year. Especially my wife's Roth which I can further add $3k to for the rest of the year. After those are maxed I am also maxing out my HSA for the year. I think these are better uses for the money than parking it in the high interest CD, but I'll consider it later for the bulk of our savings that we keep in cash in the form of an emergency fund.

[lewdog]

Would be curious if anyone else wouldn't mind sharing their individual stock picking success this year. I'm here to show it's ****ing hard! I opened my first brokerage account to start this year. All the things you read discuss the difficulty in beating the market with individual stock picking. Something like 5% of individual investors are successful in this. It's why there's so much talk about passively investing most of your money in mutual funds and index funds that track sectors of the market.

My brokerage account has 5% of my total invested money, so not a lot. I also chose some fairly risky investments across the board but that can technically be true of much of individual stock picking it seems. However, the percentage growth on the stocks in it and the portfolio overall is somewhat interesting when comparing to the great year the market has had.

My 401k/Roth IRA combined has gained 17.8% year to date.

Here's the current stocks I own and percentage of gains/loses for the year:
X- US Steel+28.86%
UA- Under Armour -15.76%
TWMJF- Canopy Growth +2.27%
UBQU- Ubiquitech Software Corp -62.50% (total penny stock. I bought when shares hit $.02-I don't have a lot of cash in this but quite a few shares given it's price)
PEMIF- Pure Energy Minerals Ltd +22.47

Total Growth +1.31%

So pretty big swings on almost all those stocks! It's definitely a learning curve and I think in future purchases I'll be selecting more stalwart companies Obviously pales in comparison to my retirement accounts.

Recent considering Ford stock due to the yearly dividends they always pay out. The stock itself has always been a rather dud with few swings/gains, but it's paid a yearly dividend from 4.6%-7.2% every year no matter what (I find this amazing coming from an automaker!). That seems somewhat attractive.

[Hog's Gone Fishin]

Originally Posted by lewdog

Would be curious if anyone else wouldn't mind sharing their individual stock picking success this year. I'm here to show it's ****ing hard! I opened my first brokerage account to start this year. All the things you read discuss the difficulty in beating the market with individual stock picking. Something like 5% of individual investors are successful in this. It's why there's so much talk about passively investing most of your money in mutual funds and index funds that track sectors of the market.

My brokerage account has 5% of my total invested money, so not a lot. I also chose some fairly risky investments across the board but that can technically be true of much of individual stock picking it seems. However, the percentage growth on the stocks in it and the portfolio overall is somewhat interesting when comparing to the great year the market has had.

My 401k/Roth IRA combined has gained 17.8% year to date.

Here's the current stocks I own and percentage of gains/loses for the year:
X- US Steel+28.86%
UA- Under Armour -15.76%
TWMJF- Canopy Growth +2.27%
UBQU- Ubiquitech Software Corp -62.50% (total penny stock. I bought when shares hit $.02-I don't have a lot of cash in this but quite a few shares given it's price)
PEMIF- Pure Energy Minerals Ltd +22.47

Total Growth +1.31%

So pretty big swings on almost all those stocks! It's definitely a learning curve and I think in future purchases I'll be selecting more stalwart companies Obviously pales in comparison to my retirement accounts.

Recent considering Ford stock due to the yearly dividends they always pay out. The stock itself has always been a rather dud with few swings/gains, but it's paid a yearly dividend from 4.6%-7.2% every year no matter what (I find this amazing coming from an automaker!). That seems somewhat attractive.

X will be a good investment , I'm happy so far.

[Hog's Gone Fishin]

Originally Posted by lewdog

I originally was going to move some money over to that "high" interest CD offered with Allybank, but then realized we weren't set to max our Roth IRAs this year. Especially my wife's Roth which I can further add $3k to for the rest of the year. After those are maxed I am also maxing out my HSA for the year. I think these are better uses for the money than parking it in the high interest CD, but I'll consider it later for the bulk of our savings that we keep in cash in the form of an emergency fund.

I don't get putting money in a CD when there are all those mutual funds bringing 10% +

[lewdog]

Originally Posted by Hog Farmer

X will be a good investment , I'm happy so far.

X is such a cyclical stock to own. I am debating how high I'll ride it before selling it all? I'll then wait for it to dip again and buy back in.

Did you know it was $186/share in June 2008 before the crash and it tanked to $24 in November 2008?!

Originally Posted by Hog Farmer

I don't get putting money in a CD when there are all those mutual funds bringing 10% +

It's hard because I always think emergency savings should be fairly liquid. If I put it in the market, there's a chance it takes a dump. And the idea behind emergency savings is to not lose that money as it's your safety net. Hence why keeping it safe but growing slightly in a CD seems like the most attractive offer to me.

[Buehler445]

Originally Posted by lewdog

X is such a cyclical stock to own. I am debating how high I'll ride it before selling it all? I'll then wait for it to dip again and buy back in.

Did you know it was $186/share in June 2008 before the crash and it tanked to $24 in November 2008?!



It's hard because I always think emergency savings should be fairly liquid. If I put it in the market, there's a chance it takes a dump. And the idea behind emergency savings is to not lose that money as it's your safety net. Hence why keeping it safe but growing slightly in a CD seems like the most attractive offer to me.

If it is cyclical see if you can find a technical indicator that it follows. Either timing or technicals. Probably won't find anything but it is worth a shot.

[lewdog]

Originally Posted by Buehler445

If it is cyclical see if you can find a technical indicator that it follows. Either timing or technicals. Probably won't find anything but it is worth a shot.

I have looked and I'm definitely not sure.

Then again, I am not exactly sure what I'm looking for!

[Cornstock]

Originally Posted by lewdog

Would be curious if anyone else wouldn't mind sharing their individual stock picking success this year. I'm here to show it's ****ing hard! I opened my first brokerage account to start this year. All the things you read discuss the difficulty in beating the market with individual stock picking. Something like 5% of individual investors are successful in this. It's why there's so much talk about passively investing most of your money in mutual funds and index funds that track sectors of the market.

My brokerage account has 5% of my total invested money, so not a lot. I also chose some fairly risky investments across the board but that can technically be true of much of individual stock picking it seems. However, the percentage growth on the stocks in it and the portfolio overall is somewhat interesting when comparing to the great year the market has had.

My 401k/Roth IRA combined has gained 17.8% year to date.

Here's the current stocks I own and percentage of gains/loses for the year:
X- US Steel+28.86%
UA- Under Armour -15.76%
TWMJF- Canopy Growth +2.27%
UBQU- Ubiquitech Software Corp -62.50% (total penny stock. I bought when shares hit $.02-I don't have a lot of cash in this but quite a few shares given it's price)
PEMIF- Pure Energy Minerals Ltd +22.47

Total Growth +1.31%

So pretty big swings on almost all those stocks! It's definitely a learning curve and I think in future purchases I'll be selecting more stalwart companies Obviously pales in comparison to my retirement accounts.

Recent considering Ford stock due to the yearly dividends they always pay out. The stock itself has always been a rather dud with few swings/gains, but it's paid a yearly dividend from 4.6%-7.2% every year no matter what (I find this amazing coming from an automaker!). That seems somewhat attractive.

My best stock pick of the year was an uncharacteristically high risk gamble on PLUG, Which is a hydrogen fuel cell company that specializes in powering forklifts at distribution centers. They had contracts with Walmart and a few smaller companies, but the technology shows promise in the warehouse setting, and Chinese companies have shown a great deal of interest.

The problem with the 2 existing technologies (gas and battery) are that gas emits toxic emissions in an enclosed space, and battery powered operations charge slowly and require a great deal of equipment.

Hydrogen, on the other hand, can be refueled quickly and only emits water.

The break I caught was Amazon decided they want to phase in implementation in all their distribution centers and signed a huge contract with them, and Wal-Mart (not wanting to be left behind by Amazon) renegotiated and expanded their contract to be more favorable to PLUG.

I bought 2000 shares at 1.48 and it ended today at 2.19, but has been above 2.50.

I am shameful about how little diligence I put into this trade, as I took the word of someone I trusted. But the guy was right and it's up 67% with much more potential to go higher.

[Hog's Gone Fishin]

Originally Posted by lewdog

X is such a cyclical stock to own. I am debating how high I'll ride it before selling it all? I'll then wait for it to dip again and buy back in.

Did you know it was $186/share in June 2008 before the crash and it tanked to $24 in November 2008?!



It's hard because I always think emergency savings should be fairly liquid. If I put it in the market, there's a chance it takes a dump. And the idea behind emergency savings is to not lose that money as it's your safety net. Hence why keeping it safe but growing slightly in a CD seems like the most attractive offer to me.

I keep an LOC set up for $100,000 against some rental property so it's there as my safety net. It's at 6.25% so if I dig into it I always pay it back off quickly. That way I keep all my cash busy losing money on stupid stocks

Yes I knew X was way up there at one time. 2008 is when EVERYTHING went to shit unless you were a corn farmer. I had to shut down my hog operation for 3 years and become a lease operation. Which in the long term turned out to be the best thing anyway.

[Hog's Gone Fishin]

Stocks that may present opportunity from Hurricane Harvey


5:02 AM ET 8/29/17 | MarketWatch
By Nigam Arora

From insurers to refineries, some companies' share prices are being distorted

My sympathies go to those who have been hurt or displaced by hurricane Harvey. But even in the middle of this tragedy, the world will go on and, soon, rebuilding will begin. No wonder I am getting an inordinate amount of requests from investors regarding stocks that are affected by the hurricane.

The basic principle

For investors, the basic principle to understand is that everything is temporary. Stocks that fall tend to recover. Stocks that rise tend to give up some of their gains. Hurricanes typically don't create many situations for investments, but many short-term trading opportunities do arise.

How to trade

Please click here (https://thearorareport.com/chart-trv-08282017) for an annotated chart of insurer Travelers Cos. (TRV) stock.

Historically, insurance stocks recover after a brief dip. The reason is that insurance companies often succeed in raising rates after storms.

Read: These 15 energy stocks are down more than 3.5% in the wake of Hurricane Harvey (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the...vey-2017-08-28)

To be consistently successful at a large number of trades over a long period of time, traders must look for good setups and refrain from overtrading.

The chart shows that Travelers stock has fallen, but it doesn't present a good trading setup at this time. A good setup would be if the relative strength index (RSI) drops below 20 on heavy volume and then tries to recover. Such an occurrence is marked on the chart.

This is the kind of setup that is needed on most hurricane-related stocks to trade on the long side. For trades from the short side, the setup is similar, but look for a reversal of RSI from about 80.

Ask Arora: Nigam Arora answers your questions about investing in stocks, ETFs, bonds, gold and silver, oil and currencies. Have a question? Send it to Nigam Arora (mailto:ask-arora@thearorareport.com).

Here is a list of stocks that may present trading setups over the coming days.

-- Insurance stocks such as Progressive (PG) and XL Group (XL).

-- Recreational-vehicle stocks such as Thor (THO) and Winnebago (WGO).

-- Engineering and construction firms such as Fluor (FLR), Quanta Services (PWR), Aecom (ACM), MasTec (MTZ) and Chicago Bridge & Iron (CBI)

-- Refineries such as Valero (VLO), Andeavor (formerly Tesoro) (ANDV), Marathon (MPC) and Phillips 66 (PSX).

-- Building-material stocks such as Beacon Roofing Supply (BECN), Eagle Materials (EXP), USG (USG) and Owens Corning (OC).

-- Home-improvement stores such as Home Depot (HD) and Lowe's (LOW).

Disclosure: Subscribers to The Arora Report (http://thearorareport.com/) may have positions in the securities mentioned in this article or may take positions at any time. All recommended positions are reviewed daily at The Arora Report.

Nigam Arora is an investor, engineer and nuclear physicist by background, has founded two Inc. 500 fastest-growing companies, is the developer of the adaptive ZYX Global Multi Asset Allocation Model and the ZYX Change Method to profit from change in trading and investing. He is the founder of The Arora Report, which publishes four newsletters. Nigam can be reached at Nigam@TheAroraReport.com (http://mailto:Nigam@thearorareport.com/).

-Nigam Arora; 415-439-6400; AskNewswires@dowjones.com

> Dow Jones Newswires

August 29, 2017 05:02 ET (09:02 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

[lewdog]

Still time to get in on that Marijuana. Already up about 10% from my purchase last month of Canopy Growth. Looks like regulations in Canada will promote further growth of Canopy Growth.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/410...59eb7be72&dr=1