Vital Starts Investing

When learning about investing it’s always a good idea to know how to understand the relationship between risk and return.

If you are speculating in the stock market, and you fit into the stock market for beginners category - you should be thinking about your long term goals as well.

Visualize your retirement situation. Are you 75 years old and greeting people as they walk into a super store? Or, are you living in your dream home with plenty of retirement income rolling in? Maybe you even have something set aside for your kids when you kick the bucket!

Regardless of what you visualized in your mind - the reality is that you had better get started now. Your kids shouldn’t have to watch you eat catfood on crackers when you’re old!

Daytrading, swing trading, and any kind of personal stock investing from home is considered “Aggressive” investing. It’s the type of investing that only the true iron guts can stomach.

You can settle your anxiety, or as I like to call it “Investment Reflux”, by  investing a good portion every month into much more balanced investments.

The best way to do this is to hire a professional. I know, I know - you are investing in the stocks because you don’t trust anyone else with your money right? Well, you wouldn’t remove a bad kidney in your garage with some pliers and a box cutter would you?

Just like you go to the professionals when your life is on the line - you should trust only the professionals when your financial future is on the line.

If a little voice inside you is telling you “I need to start planning for retirement.” then check out our new page entitled:

Ask A Pro

Fill out the application and you just might get a phone call from an actual professional broker!

Do yourself a favor and stop betting your future on a gamble - besides, investing should be fun, and it’s only fun when your money is in safe hands.

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I want to point out a great bit of information you can find on the MSN site www.moneycentral.msn.com .

Institutional Ownership - Before you buy shares in a particular stock it’s always good to know if you are alone in your thinking, or whether other people agree with you. Of course, you don’t want to just trust anybody on this. Wouldn’t you want to know if major mutual funds, financial institutions, and profession investment groups were buying the same stocks you were? Of course you would!

That’s exactly what Institutional Ownership tells you. You can actually see a percentage of the companies shares are owned by major institutions. The higher the percentage means the more BIG stock trading companies like the stock you are looking at. It’s as simple as that.

To see a companies Institutional Ownership you can look under the heading “Fundamentals” on the left hand menu of their website. Click on the button that says “Ownership”.

I can’t think of very many reasons why anyone who is looking at the stock market for beginners would not want to know what the Institutions think about a company.

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The stock market for beginners focus should always have some basic and simple tools to help new investors. That’s exactly why www.moneycentral.msn.com has developed the Stock Scouter Ratings.

Stock Scouter Ratings probably weren’t invented by msn, but they are displayed all over the place. Here is how they work in a basic sense.

Let’s say you and a good friend are sitting at the park when a someone attractive walks by. Your friend might turn and ask you “On a scale of 1-10 where do you rank that one?” You would then look over the person, their hair, skin, face, body, and how they are dressed. Then in your mind you would compare that person to other people you have ranked on the 1-10 scale that you already know well.

Using this comparison and analysis you are able to give your opinion on where that particular person ranks on your scale of attractiveness.

Well, Stock Scouter Ratings aren’t much different. Using a lot of statistical analysis a particular stock is rated according to its risk vs. reward potential. A lot of factors go into this rating.

The scale actually goes from 1-10 where 1 is not good and 10 is amazingly good. Ratings are factored on a bell curve, so it’s fairly rare to get a 9 or 10 rated stock.

The basic thing you need to understand is that you should always look for stocks with a Stock Scouter Rating of at least 8 or better.

You only want to trade the best stocks so steer away from lower rated numbers. You see, day traders don’t care about these ratings and focus only on the action of a particular stock over one or two days.

Simply by looking at Stock Scouter Ratings you can get a snapshot of whether the company you are thinking about buying shares in is a good one or not.

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One of the easiest ways to do research on a corporation is to visit www.moneycentral.msn.com and learn how and what to look for there. There is a lot of accurate information on this website and it’s pages that is up to date daily, and you can trust it is correct.

From there you can type in a Ticker Symbol and get a lot of very important information you should know before you buy shares in any company. We’ll be talking a lot more specific about what to look for in the future, but just take some time to visit their site and get familiar with what it all looks like.

The best part of all is that all their information is not only accurate - which is vitally important in the stock market for beginners realm - it is also free.

It can also be a little confusing to know what you are looking at. Obviously there are basic charts there to check out, but the really valuable information is when you start to grasp P/E numbers, stock scouter ratings, institutional ownership numbers, and a lot of cool information that can really take the guesswork out of stock investing.

If you learn how to grasp the information not only on the stock charts, but also how to do corporation research on sites like this, you can really begin to paint a picture to guide your investments.

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What are stocks?The term stock(s) is used somewhat loosely in the investment world. The amount of equity in a company that is being traded publicly in the market is known as that companies Stock.

The term Stocks and Equity are generally used synonymously. Also, when talking about buying shares in a company it is often phrased in such a way to be synonymous with buying “stock” in that company. In the same way - shareholders are also loosely called stockholders as well.

So, you have to take the usage of the word into account when studying the stock market for beginners. Let’s say you bought fifty shares in Acme. When talking with someone about your investment you would say “I bought stock in Acme”, which means both that you have equity in Acme as well as meaning you have shares in Acme. If that person asked “How much stock did you purchase?” you would then specify “Fifty shares.” rather than saying “Fifty stocks.” - which would be the wrong way of saying it.

Terms like this are simple, and used all the time, but using them in the wrong sense can tag you as a rookie.

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A 50 Day Moving Average - a graphic line drawn out over a period of time that is calculated by taking the closing price of a stock each day over fifty days and adding those prices together - then dividing that answer by 50 to get the average. Each new day you add the new number to the equation and remove the oldest. The average number is then drawn each day as a continuously moving line across the chart, moving just a small amount each day - so it is called the 50 Day Moving Average. 

They do the same thing with a 200 day moving average as well. Everyone studying the stock market for beginners should know this stuff. 

If you want to read more you should visit our new page entitled “Moving Average Mojo”

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It amazes me how many times people with disabilities are targeted by home based business scams. People with disabilities are targeted by people looking to take advantage of them because they believe you are stuck at home and glued to your computers.

People with disabilities do not like being dependent upon anyone or anything in life. So, why don’t people with disabilities learn to invest in the stock market?

Here are some possible reasons:

1. Don’t get enough money from their pensions to set anything aside toward investing
2. Lack of education about the stock market
3. Fear about making too much money and losing state benefits
4. Lack of good resources to study
5. Thinking it costs too much money to learn how to invest
6. Can’t afford to pay a stock broker
7. Fear of losing money in the market because you don’t know what you are doing
8. Just overwhelmed with all the information
9. Can’t understand all the jargon about the stock market
10. I’ve run out of excuses - there really isn’t any real reason not to because excuses 1-9 are all bogus!

Everyone can learn to invest in the stock market from home, without a broker, without any money set aside, without fear of losing your benefits, without any excuses at all. Just start by learning about the stock market for beginners.

Visit my new friends and join in on a discussion there at:

http://www.disabilityresourceexchange.com/group/vitalstarts

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Have you ever wondered what a candlestick was or is? Have you ever even heard of one?

Well, I’m not talking about those smelly little wax filled fire hazards you’ve got sitting around your living room. I’m talking about the crazy looking little dynamite stick looking symbols you see on a lot of good stock charts.

They call them candlesticks simply because that’s what they look like. They were supposedly created by a guy named Homma who traded rice for a living around 1850.

They’ve obvously come a long way since then, but you can’t help but feel they were designed for the stock market for beginners group.

If you still don’t know what I’m talking about when I mention a stock chart candlestick then you need to check out our new page entitled “Candlestick Crazy“.

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There are thousands of professionals that do nothing more than analyze the stock market. They research companies, crunch numbers, and look at portfolios to try and out guess the market.

Their whole job is to try and beat the market and predict where a particular stock is heading. The problem is that a vast majority of these professional groups underperform.

All that data and number crunching gives them a slight advantage, but nothing real substantial to go off of. Most people look at that slight advantage and would rather stick with that than try and guess on their own because they feel like they have no advantage at all. They feel like they are guessing 100% of the time.

This is where Stock Charts become like a road map to success. Once you do some company research on a particular stock - you can then watch the chart. By watching the stock chart going up and down, combined with the knowledge you gained from researching out the company, you can pick the ideal time to buy your shares.

You see, by just looking at the company research you get a good idea if that company is heading in the right direction - but you absolutely don’t know the best day to buy your shares at the absolute best predicted price.

If doing company research is your shield of defense - then looking at stock charts is wielding a sword of attack. With those two elements combined you can make comfortable decisions without feeling like you’re guessing at all.

If you plan on investing in the stock market you should start setting a little aside right now. I know a lot of you don’t have the extra money to just save 10% of your paycheck toward stock investing, so here are some ideas to help you get started.

1. Change your eating habits. If you eat out three times a week try and limit this to only two times per week. One day when you feel like eating out you simply set that money aside toward investing.
2. Carpool to work once or twice a week to save on gas.
3. Focus on paying off your high interest debts. Did you know that you earn more money faster by making back-end payments on a credit card and saving the interest you would have paid - than you statistically could make if you put that same amount of money into an investment fund? So, pay off some of that debt!
4. Set up an account at your bank where they automatically put a little bit of each paycheck into a separate account. You can also use a high interest earning savings account online like www.ingdirect.com .
5. Start “paper trading” some stocks to get an idea of how much you would have earned if you would have used real money. This can be a big motivator to get you started saving some money.