Glad to see you guys have an interest in this subject. I spend a pretty good amount of time on stocks. I wouldn't call myself a guru, as it can certainly be a very humbling field even for "so called" experts, whom I personally believe are very few and far between by the way. Vito, if you want, a Jewish stock guru, I'm sure you've probably heard of CNBC's Jim Cramer, who's pretty much all over the place. In addition to CNBC, he owns and operates a great website at
www.thestreet.com which is full of information, trading ideas, and investment opportunities on a daily basis. They're are literally tons of other sites on the internet I could mention if you guys want to know. I prefer individual stocks to mutual funds because the returns are far greater if you hit them right. Actually, if you do your homework, I think you are likely to better your returns with single stocks than funds, and every statistic I have read supports this as well, by a pretty large margin. Still, you have to know your own risk tolerance and if you are not comfortable putting a lot of work in, or don't have the time, you may be best off with an index fund that simply tries to track the returns of the overall market, or large segments of it. Options are a great tool to give you leverage if you don't want to put up all the money needed to invest in stocks. However, you have to use them smartly and conservatively because if you don't know what you're doing you are likely to lose all your money. A great place to learn about options without wasting a lot of money on a course is
www.888options.com. They have a tremendous amount of free information which is probably as good as, or even better, than anything you could pay for, in my opinion. What else? Asian and BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China)stocks are certainly hot right now, but you do have to bear in mind that you are dealing with a still Communist country, which despite pretty strong Democratic leanings in finance, could hurt your investment at any time. Of course, any new terrorist event would also spell short term disaster for the markets, but probably create a long-term buying opportunity. Well, that's all for now. Feel free to ask me any questions and if I know the answer, I'll respond.
P.S. Two more great sites - Yahoo Finance at yahoo.com and Investopedia at
www.investopedia.com
Topic: Any Stock Market Fans in the Forum! (Read 5943 times)