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

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