During a bull market most people would say that they are investors, but when the stock markets are jittery investors get tested, revealing many closeted speculators. This may include you, if you liquidated your investments and are … Read More…

(Maybe Digg fails because it emphasizes recent popularity, then its users/readers move on without the time/crowd diversity corrections) Just as stock markets have many bullish market analysts publicly pushing stocks one way, … Read More…

There are a vast number of investment opportunities available to potential investors, but not all of them are right for all purposes. The most common types of investments are stocks and bonds. Stocks are shares of individual companies, while bonds are government-issued investment funds. Both can be great for starting in the investing market, but you should know a little about the difference between the two before making your investment.

Stocks

Stocks can help balance out a bond-heavy portfolio by providing diversification

Stock dividends also receive more favorable tax treatment than bond payouts.

If you make the decision that stocks may be the place for you to put your investment dollars, you must now determine the primary purpose of your stock investment.

The two primary stock investment goals are income and growth. You can have a combination of the two in one stock investment, but the features are almost never equal. In other words, although growth and income may co-exist in a particular stock investment, the investment choice you make should take into account the primary strength of the stock.

Growth Stock vs. Income Stock

Growth stock is stock in a company that doesn’t pay cash dividends, but instead reinvests its profits into the company. The idea behind this strategy is that the company will continue to grow and become more profitable, driving the stock price up.

Income stock is stock in well-established companies that do not need to reinvest their profits into their companies and therefore use their profits to pay dividends to stockholders. Income stock is often more expensive because the income stream and security of the investment is greater.

Mutual Funds

Many investors invest in the stock market through mutual funds. Mutual funds are professionally managed and are easier to diversify your investments in, which makes them less risky than investing in individual stocks. You still have to research what type of stock will best suit your goals, but the average investor finds it less stressful to invest in the stock market through this method.

Bonds

Bonds, though some consider them ?safer? than stocks, still come with risks. Some bond funds offer enticing payouts but may take big chances to do so, including venturing into lower-quality and longer-duration credits; if your funds’ bonds lose value, you could see your principal shrink even though you’re pocketing a healthy yield. Checking a fund’s quarterly losses can be an easy way to see whether you could stomach a given fund’s short-term losses. There’s nothing wrong with making room for some higher-yielding bond funds around the margins of your portfolio, but consider these income-heavy funds to be side items because of their greater potential for volatility.

And while paying for high-quality financial advice can be money well spent, think carefully before paying a sales charge for a bond fund. If you’re paying a 3.75% load to buy a bond fund (and that’s a pretty low load), you’re surrendering most of your first year’s income payments from the get-go.

Individual Bonds vs. Bond Funds

Many investors prefer to invest in individual bonds rather than bond funds. While that’s a reasonable tack if you’re buying Treasury securities or perhaps even extremely high-quality corporate bonds, it makes sense to opt for a professionally managed bond fund for every other type of fixed-income security. Not only will a mutual fund offer you much more diversification (and therefore lower risk) than you could obtain by buying individual bonds, but smaller investors who are buying and selling individual bonds are also at a big disadvantage when it comes to trading costs.

You may freely reprint this article provided the following author’s biography (including the live URL link) remains intact:

Every morning the trader sits down at his computer to begin the day, and the dilemma faced is always the same - finding a stock or two or three to make a buck on for that day. This really shouldn’t be that hard, but for some traders it is. Let’s see if we can break it down and maybe make it a little easier.

First let’s start with a few basics about your work habits. The markets open at 9:30 EST, right? WRONG! Trading these days starts at 7 A.M.! That’s the very early morning action. Then you have what some traders call the official pre-market trading that starts at 8 A.M. following that is the official market opening at 9:30 A.M. EST. This means that if you have been sleeping in, you could be missing some very interesting early morning trades. However, a word of caution here - pre marketing trading also has a higher element of risk attached to it because of a lack of liquidity.

Okay, so now that I have gotten you out of bed, you can start scanning the pages of Wall-Street Journal, Independent Business Daily and… WRONG again! Oh sure, you may find a trade or two in one of these publications, but in all too many cases that news is going be too old to trade. In addition, the news in those publications, or the reaction by the stock, is going to show up in other places.

The first thing you may want to do in the morning is check the after hours action from the day before. This information can be found a number of places. I use the NASDAQ home page under the Extended Hours Trading link found on the left side of the page. This will give you a list of the stocks that were most active in after hours for the day before. In most cases these stocks are moving on news released after the close. These links as well as others can be found at www.TraderAide.com.

While you are on the NASDAQ page make sure you take note of the Pre-Market Most Active list. This is going to be another great source of potential stocks for you to consider. An additional source on the NASDAQ page is the NASDAQ-100 Pre-Market Heat Map. This is especially useful right at the beginning and for the first hour of so after the beginning of the 5 A.M. premarket trading action. In both cases, after-hours movers and pre-market movers, the action is usually news related.

An excellent source of this news is MarketWatch. You can find it in a hundred other locations on the net, but I find the MarketWatch site easy to use and even more important, easier to search. It is also less likely to be full of non-trading” news that you really don’t need to trade.

A few of the things you want to be looking for include events on stocks that take place nearly every day, such as: analyst up/downgrades; earnings reports’ and FDA actions which could include approval, disapprovals or merely making comments on application.

I also suggest you watch Bloomberg TV early in the morning, before the 5 A.M. premarket trading begins. I prefer Bloomberg to CNBC at this time in the morning because of their presentation of the futures and the news streamer on the bottom of the screen. Once the pre market opens I suggest you change over to CNBC simply because they have, what appears to be, a much larger audience. On CNBC the stocks reported on or mentioned are often sent up or down, offering excellent trading opportunities in many cases.

Once the markets opens, almost all real-time quote systems have an element built into them that will give you at least the top ten most active on the three main exchanges, both gainers and losers. Also, they may have a more advanced “screener” of some sort. With RealTick by Townsend Analytics, Ltd, it’s called Hottrend Realtime Radar. You can leave this running throughout the day. Stocks that show unusual volume compared to their historic volume patterns will show up automatically on the Radar. It is available for both NASDAQ and NYSE traded stocks. Check with your supplier to see if this feature, or something like it, is offered.

Last but not least, you want to be checking your Dow Jones news feed for the latest breaking news starting at about 6:30 A.M., New York time. Sorry “West Coasters, but as the bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that is where the money is”.

Happy trading!

No permission is needed to reproduce an unedited copy of this article as long the About The Author tag is left in tact and hot links included. Questions and comments can be sent to Floyd at floyd@TraderAide.com.

About the Author

Floyd Snyder has been trading and investing in the stock market for three decades. He was on the forefront of the day trading craze that swept the nation back in the late 1990’s, both as a trader and as the moderator of one of the Internet’s largest real time trading rooms, http://Daytraders.com. He is the owner of http://www.TraderAide.com and Strictly Business Magazine at http://www.sbmag.org

During a bull market most people would say that they are investors, but when the stock markets are jittery investors get tested, revealing many closeted speculators. This may include you, if you liquidated your investments and are … Continue Reading…

World stock markets extended their winning streak in 2007, outperforming the US for the fifth year in a row, thanks primarily to huge increases in emerging markets and a weakening US dollar. For example, the Dow Jones World Stock Index, …

Specialists for OTCBB and Nasdaq Companies
By William Cate
Published June 2000
[http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/] [http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/globalvillageinvestmentclubwelcome/]

An orderly market should be the goal of every public company. Sharp
rises or falls in share price attract regulators. A rapidly rising share
price feeds upon itself and guarantees a share price collapse. A sharp drop
in your share price creates selling barriers. When you attempt to revive
your strong share price, your shareholders dump their stock. A steady
upward climb, with minor downward adjustments, keeps shareholders loyal.
The question isn’t how high can you drive your share price? It’s how long
can you sustain your current share price?

One weapon in your share-price stability battle is the trading of
your stock by a specialist. Most U. S. Stock Exchanges use a specialist to
match buy and sell orders to create an orderly market. When buying and
selling are relatively constant in any U. S. Stock Exchange company, the
market is orderly. Specialist can be overwhelmed with selling and this
leads to a market correction or a Bear Market. But the matching principle
is sound.

The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) rely upon
their brokers acting as Market Makers to act as specialists. This is the
basis to the Bid/Ask price structure in the OTCBB and Nasdaq Markets. The
NASD policy doesn’t work. The Market Makers goal is to make money for their brokerage firms. Share-price stability is counterproductive to profit,
because it reduces trading. The Market Maker needs volume to profit from a
stock. Trading volume infers instability as buyers go into a feeding frenzy
or sellers panic. Feeding frenzies and panics kill public companies.

If your company trades Nasdaq or the OTCBB, your investor relations
person MUST act as a specialist for your stock. They must trade your stock
to maintain an orderly market in your share price. Your specialist’s job is
to maintain the current share price, not to drive it up. Your specialist
should have a short term goal in restructuring your shareholder base. For
example, EFHCF’s current share price trading allows speculators to sell at
a profit. However, my goal is to replace the speculators with investors who
will hold the stock as it moves up. If I achieve my goal, I’ll need less
buying to sustain a higher share price.

Here are five golden rules for specialists seeking to maintain an
orderly market.
1. NEVER discourage a shareholder from selling their stock. If you
succeed, you are only delaying the sale until your share price is higher.
2. NEVER advise anyone to buy your stock. Let buyers make their own
decisions. Your job is to help them buy the stock at the current price.
3. Communicate regularly with your shareholders. Keep your
shareholders informed. BUT, understate the positive events and overstate
the negative events about your company.
4. Use your shareholder newsletter to regularly remind your
shareholders of your help with selling or buying your company’s shares.
5. NEVER call a potential buyer. Let them call you.

The SEC should change its rules to help specialists. Changes would
allow public companies to act more effectively in ensuring an orderly
market in their stock. Unfortunately any rule change that would benefit a
responsible specialist would benefit a crook. The crook would use the rule
change to steal from the public and destroy the public company. At present,
the crooks seem to have enough going for them. They don’t need more
regulatory help to bilk the public.

To contact the author: Visit the Beowulf Investments website: [http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/] Or, visit the Global Village Investment Club Website:
[http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/globalvillageinvestmentclubwelcome/]
By William Cate
Published June 2000
[http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/] [http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/globalvillageinvestmentclubwelcome/]

An orderly market should be the goal of every public company. Sharp
rises or falls in share price attract regulators. A rapidly rising share
price feeds upon itself and guarantees a share price collapse. A sharp drop
in your share price creates selling barriers. When you attempt to revive
your strong share price, your shareholders dump their stock. A steady
upward climb, with minor downward adjustments, keeps shareholders loyal.
The question isn’t how high can you drive your share price? It’s how long
can you sustain your current share price?

One weapon in your share-price stability battle is the trading of
your stock by a specialist. Most U. S. Stock Exchanges use a specialist to
match buy and sell orders to create an orderly market. When buying and
selling are relatively constant in any U. S. Stock Exchange company, the
market is orderly. Specialist can be overwhelmed with selling and this
leads to a market correction or a Bear Market. But the matching principle
is sound.

The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) rely upon
their brokers acting as Market Makers to act as specialists. This is the
basis to the Bid/Ask price structure in the OTCBB and Nasdaq Markets. The
NASD policy doesn’t work. The Market Makers goal is to make money for their brokerage firms. Share-price stability is counterproductive to profit,
because it reduces trading. The Market Maker needs volume to profit from a
stock. Trading volume infers instability as buyers go into a feeding frenzy
or sellers panic. Feeding frenzies and panics kill public companies.

If your company trades Nasdaq or the OTCBB, your investor relations
person MUST act as a specialist for your stock. They must trade your stock
to maintain an orderly market in your share price. Your specialist’s job is
to maintain the current share price, not to drive it up. Your specialist
should have a short term goal in restructuring your shareholder base. For
example, EFHCF’s current share price trading allows speculators to sell at
a profit. However, my goal is to replace the speculators with investors who
will hold the stock as it moves up. If I achieve my goal, I’ll need less
buying to sustain a higher share price.

Here are five golden rules for specialists seeking to maintain an
orderly market.
1. NEVER discourage a shareholder from selling their stock. If you
succeed, you are only delaying the sale until your share price is higher.
2. NEVER advise anyone to buy your stock. Let buyers make their own
decisions. Your job is to help them buy the stock at the current price.
3. Communicate regularly with your shareholders. Keep your
shareholders informed. BUT, understate the positive events and overstate
the negative events about your company.
4. Use your shareholder newsletter to regularly remind your
shareholders of your help with selling or buying your company’s shares.
5. NEVER call a potential buyer. Let them call you.

The SEC should change its rules to help specialists. Changes would
allow public companies to act more effectively in ensuring an orderly
market in their stock. Unfortunately any rule change that would benefit a
responsible specialist would benefit a crook. The crook would use the rule
change to steal from the public and destroy the public company. At present,
the crooks seem to have enough going for them. They don’t need more
regulatory help to bilk the public.

To contact the author: Visit the Beowulf Investments website: [http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/] Or, visit the Global Village Investment Club Website:
[http://home.earthlink.net/~beowulfinvestments/globalvillageinvestmentclubwelcome/]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

There are a vast number of investment opportunities available to potential investors, but not all of them are right for all purposes. The most common types of investments are stocks and bonds. Stocks are shares of individual companies, while bonds are government-issued investment funds. Both can be great for starting in the investing market, but you should know a little about the difference between the two before making your investment.

Stocks

Stocks can help balance out a bond-heavy portfolio by providing diversification

Stock dividends also receive more favorable tax treatment than bond payouts.

If you make the decision that stocks may be the place for you to put your investment dollars, you must now determine the primary purpose of your stock investment.

The two primary stock investment goals are income and growth. You can have a combination of the two in one stock investment, but the features are almost never equal. In other words, although growth and income may co-exist in a particular stock investment, the investment choice you make should take into account the primary strength of the stock.

Growth Stock vs. Income Stock

Growth stock is stock in a company that doesn’t pay cash dividends, but instead reinvests its profits into the company. The idea behind this strategy is that the company will continue to grow and become more profitable, driving the stock price up.

Income stock is stock in well-established companies that do not need to reinvest their profits into their companies and therefore use their profits to pay dividends to stockholders. Income stock is often more expensive because the income stream and security of the investment is greater.

Mutual Funds

Many investors invest in the stock market through mutual funds. Mutual funds are professionally managed and are easier to diversify your investments in, which makes them less risky than investing in individual stocks. You still have to research what type of stock will best suit your goals, but the average investor finds it less stressful to invest in the stock market through this method.

Bonds

Bonds, though some consider them ?safer? than stocks, still come with risks. Some bond funds offer enticing payouts but may take big chances to do so, including venturing into lower-quality and longer-duration credits; if your funds’ bonds lose value, you could see your principal shrink even though you’re pocketing a healthy yield. Checking a fund’s quarterly losses can be an easy way to see whether you could stomach a given fund’s short-term losses. There’s nothing wrong with making room for some higher-yielding bond funds around the margins of your portfolio, but consider these income-heavy funds to be side items because of their greater potential for volatility.

And while paying for high-quality financial advice can be money well spent, think carefully before paying a sales charge for a bond fund. If you’re paying a 3.75% load to buy a bond fund (and that’s a pretty low load), you’re surrendering most of your first year’s income payments from the get-go.

Individual Bonds vs. Bond Funds

Many investors prefer to invest in individual bonds rather than bond funds. While that’s a reasonable tack if you’re buying Treasury securities or perhaps even extremely high-quality corporate bonds, it makes sense to opt for a professionally managed bond fund for every other type of fixed-income security. Not only will a mutual fund offer you much more diversification (and therefore lower risk) than you could obtain by buying individual bonds, but smaller investors who are buying and selling individual bonds are also at a big disadvantage when it comes to trading costs.

You may freely reprint this article provided the following author’s biography (including the live URL link) remains intact:

Dubbed as the “Frontier Markets” by the Barra Index, these economies are just beginning their development stages; they hold less than 1% of the money invested in stock markets worldwide. But that will all change soon. … Read This…

Every morning the trader sits down at his computer to begin the day, and the dilemma faced is always the same - finding a stock or two or three to make a buck on for that day. This really shouldn’t be that hard, but for some traders it is. Let’s see if we can break it down and maybe make it a little easier.

First let’s start with a few basics about your work habits. The markets open at 9:30 EST, right? WRONG! Trading these days starts at 7 A.M.! That’s the very early morning action. Then you have what some traders call the official pre-market trading that starts at 8 A.M. following that is the official market opening at 9:30 A.M. EST. This means that if you have been sleeping in, you could be missing some very interesting early morning trades. However, a word of caution here - pre marketing trading also has a higher element of risk attached to it because of a lack of liquidity.

Okay, so now that I have gotten you out of bed, you can start scanning the pages of Wall-Street Journal, Independent Business Daily and… WRONG again! Oh sure, you may find a trade or two in one of these publications, but in all too many cases that news is going be too old to trade. In addition, the news in those publications, or the reaction by the stock, is going to show up in other places.

The first thing you may want to do in the morning is check the after hours action from the day before. This information can be found a number of places. I use the NASDAQ home page under the Extended Hours Trading link found on the left side of the page. This will give you a list of the stocks that were most active in after hours for the day before. In most cases these stocks are moving on news released after the close. These links as well as others can be found at www.TraderAide.com.

While you are on the NASDAQ page make sure you take note of the Pre-Market Most Active list. This is going to be another great source of potential stocks for you to consider. An additional source on the NASDAQ page is the NASDAQ-100 Pre-Market Heat Map. This is especially useful right at the beginning and for the first hour of so after the beginning of the 5 A.M. premarket trading action. In both cases, after-hours movers and pre-market movers, the action is usually news related.

An excellent source of this news is MarketWatch. You can find it in a hundred other locations on the net, but I find the MarketWatch site easy to use and even more important, easier to search. It is also less likely to be full of non-trading” news that you really don’t need to trade.

A few of the things you want to be looking for include events on stocks that take place nearly every day, such as: analyst up/downgrades; earnings reports’ and FDA actions which could include approval, disapprovals or merely making comments on application.

I also suggest you watch Bloomberg TV early in the morning, before the 5 A.M. premarket trading begins. I prefer Bloomberg to CNBC at this time in the morning because of their presentation of the futures and the news streamer on the bottom of the screen. Once the pre market opens I suggest you change over to CNBC simply because they have, what appears to be, a much larger audience. On CNBC the stocks reported on or mentioned are often sent up or down, offering excellent trading opportunities in many cases.

Once the markets opens, almost all real-time quote systems have an element built into them that will give you at least the top ten most active on the three main exchanges, both gainers and losers. Also, they may have a more advanced “screener” of some sort. With RealTick by Townsend Analytics, Ltd, it’s called Hottrend Realtime Radar. You can leave this running throughout the day. Stocks that show unusual volume compared to their historic volume patterns will show up automatically on the Radar. It is available for both NASDAQ and NYSE traded stocks. Check with your supplier to see if this feature, or something like it, is offered.

Last but not least, you want to be checking your Dow Jones news feed for the latest breaking news starting at about 6:30 A.M., New York time. Sorry “West Coasters, but as the bank robber said when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that is where the money is”.

Happy trading!

No permission is needed to reproduce an unedited copy of this article as long the About The Author tag is left in tact and hot links included. Questions and comments can be sent to Floyd at floyd@TraderAide.com.

About the Author

Floyd Snyder has been trading and investing in the stock market for three decades. He was on the forefront of the day trading craze that swept the nation back in the late 1990’s, both as a trader and as the moderator of one of the Internet’s largest real time trading rooms, http://Daytraders.com. He is the owner of http://www.TraderAide.com and Strictly Business Magazine at http://www.sbmag.org

STOP.

STOP trying to create the perfect trading system. There isn’t one.

Phew..what a relief. Stop spending all those hours creating more and more trading rules and realize this:

Money creation in the stock market is made from CONCENTRATION. That’s right. Trading the very best stocks atthe right time with enough capital to make a big difference.

You must go from wealth CREATION to wealth maintance in this game. Unless you plan on “investing” for the next 25+ years and building wealth slowly.. this is my plan of how you can make millions in the stock market:

In Darvas’s book “How I Made $2 Million…”

How many looked at his position sizing? In his early trades Darvas only trade 1 or 2 stocks at any one time on MARGIN! Only when he got upto over $500,000 did he start diversifying a little. Most people overlook these facts.

MY Momentum Stock PLAN:

CONCENTRATION BUILDS WEALTH DIVERSIFICATION MAINTAINS WEALTH

END GOAL:

$2 MILLION+ ACCOUNT MAKING 20-30% P.A

Start with:
$50,000 Trade 2 stocks with half capital in each.

RISK Per TRADE = 5%

When at $100,000 Trade 3 stocks with 1/3 capital in each.

Risk Per Trade = 3%

When at:

$500,000 Trade 5 stocks with 1/5 capital:

Risk Per Trade = 2%

When at $2 Million Trade 8 stocks with 1/8 capital:

Risk Per Trade = 1.25%

You first have to create wealth in order to maintain it. Whilst trading only two stocks at a time may be deemed to ?risky? by the ?professionals? you must be very selective on the stocks you trade. Quality beats quantity. Especially when you concentrate so much.

This is the only way a small account can break into the big time. You must not only focus your efforts in the early stages but you must also onlytrade the top 0.1% of stocks in the marketand get yourtiming SPOT ON.

About the Author:

Mark Crisp, A Successful Momentum Stock Trader and Author http://www.stressfreetrading.com