Fortune Watch

If you’ve never invested in stocks before and are about to buy some for the first time, you should understand what to look for and what factors to consider when selecting a stockbroker. It can be a good idea to use a stockbroker for an active management of your stocks or mutual fund portfolio. Most investors will use a stockbroker at one time or another.

First of all, what is a stockbroker? Well, I’m not really sure… 😉 …just kidding. A stockbroker is an intermediary between you and the stock market, which is an exchange where shares of stock in public companies are openly traded. When you buy or sell a stock, also known as a “security,” you must place the order through a broker, who then transacts your business by placing the order on the market.

I personally use a discount broker only to carry out my order, I am willing to listen to a full-service broker’s story but in the end invariably the decision is mine. If you have done your homework, trust me a broker doesn’t know much more than you.

A discount broker is someone who gives you zero advice, and just executes your market orders for you, but does nothing else. Therefore, a discount broker usually doesn’t collect commissions. Instead, they usually charge a flat annual fee and are paid a salary. Internet brokers such as Etrade or Ameritrade are discount brokers that work on commission. They allow you to place your market orders online, and the website itself is the broker. Internet brokers usually charge a much smaller commission than anyone else.

If you use the services of your bank there are some facts to consider. When you talk about the options you have to invest your money, they will certainly recommend the funds they control themselves. Do they recommend other banks portfolios? I don’t think so. If you go to a car dealer that sell Ford, do they recommend you to buy a Lexus?

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Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) offers a host of benefits to both your business and your customers. Accepting payments electronically allows your customers to avoid using credit cards by having the funds directly debited from their bank accounts. In addition to the convenience this provides your customers, electronic funds transfer also saves your company money by eliminating the high fees associated with credit card transactions and replacing them with a much lower per-transaction fee.

Electronic funds transfer also has several advantages over accepting paper checks. You’ll receive the funds much more quickly and save time and money over processing paper checks.

Electronic billing is also a great tool for recurring payments. If you charge your customers on a regular basis, electronic funds transfer deducts the funds from their accounts automatically. This will save your business the time and costs associated with sending and processing bills.

You can set your business up with easy-to-use software and services for electronic transfers. You can accept electronic payments online, by phone, or by fax. You simply need to get the customer’s bank routing number, account number, and authorization for each transaction. You then submit this information each day through the network, and the funds appear in your account within 48 hours.

Banks can provide your company with a customized package that allows you to integrate electronic payment services into your existing payment processes. In addition to accepting electronic payments from customers, electronic funds transfer also allows you to pay employees and suppliers electronically with direct deposit.

Here’s a simple question-what is trading? To answer, perhaps not so simply, we first need to understand what trading is NOT. Trading isn’t about buying the fanciest chart, hanging on to something because it is a good buy, or feeling good about yourself because you can go to a cocktail party and relate to what everyone else is saying. Trading is about making money.

There are software systems that create pretty colors and tell you which stocks are safe to buy because they have moved a certain way in the past. If one particular stock has been going up and up and up, a trend follower concludes that the stock should continue moving UP! However, in order to follow a stock’s true potential progress, would you rather wait for a computer program, or be actively and directly involved in its ascent?

Picture an apple in the center of a room, surrounded by 10 traders. Consider for a moment, each trader buying the apple until everyone has owned it. What is that apple worth? It is worth ONLY what someone will pay for it. Person #1 buys the apple for $1 and takes a bite. Person #2 then pays $2 for the same apple and takes another bite. Person #3 pays $3, and so on until finally, the last person takes that final bite. Yes, the apple is STILL worth only what the next person will pay for it-no more, and certainly no less. The only person left to sell it to is the one who walked into the room an hour late, looks at the apple’s past price history, consults his software that says the smelly apple has had a great price performance, and determines that it’s a worthwhile buy. That is precisely the definition of trend trading.

Make no mistake, successful trading is about you versus the guy sitting next to you with the pretty software. Don’t waste your time trading with charts, spend your time leaning how the stock markets really work.

If you are like most people, you do not feel that you “deserve money”. The simple fact is that most people are broke. Most people are broke because they do not feel that they deserve money.

To be financially successful you must: save prodigiously, invest wisely, and act like an entrepreneur. If you don’t believe you are capable of financial success, figure out why.

OK, maybe now you are thinking, “I deserve money…right?” Well, here is the thing, if you have the thought that “It takes money to make money”, or “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”, or “Money is the root to all evil”, then you do not deserve money…well, maybe not yet, but there is hope for you.

There are two sides to every coin, people can look at money as good or bad and often at times people look at money as bad to justify why they do not have any. I dont know, maybe someone with money or someone that was thinking of making money was with someone that did not have any and did not have any plans to make any. What they thought about having lots of money and they gave off one of the lame excuses as suggested in the previous paragraph.

Why do you deserve money? The answer is simple…because you deserve money! Look, making money is simply the result of exchanging your efforts or ideas for money.

There are a many ways to make a million dollars and most of them are quite fun ways to make money and thats the key! If you are willing to learn how to have fun, make money and teach others to do the same, then it should end up being easy to make the money for you.

Start with this; how much money would you like to have, then ask yourself how much money do I currently deserve doing what I am doing now? If the answer is not 10-20 times more, then you are not doing the right thing to attain the amount that you would like to have. Time to change…

Change…is the word “change” scary to you? If it is, then you do not deserve money! Broke people are afraid of change. Change is natural and should be embraced by everyone. If we do not embrace change in our life then we are accepting where we are and probably will stay where we are. If you are happy with what you are making and like where you work, then go out and buy your boss a gift basket, sit down, be quiet and stop complaining about your finances.

I was involved in a discussion some time back and we were discussing this and all of us thought it was ridiculous that they don’t teach a personal finance class in high school, at least not when we were in school. Is it any wonder that when kids go off to college they rack up so much debt? According to some statistics I read that the average undergraduate has credit card debt!

The logic behind teaching children and teenagers about personal finance is pretty obvious. Just think of all of the finance clichés that you’ve heard: start investing as early as you can, the most important factor in investing is time, don’t get into credit card debt, etc. – all things that are best to learn sooner rather than later.

And because many basic aspects of personal finance currently aren’t taught in school and are left to be learned at home, this current system seems to nurture the fact that wealthy people tend to stay wealthy and poor people tend to stay poor. I don’t think it takes a giant leap of faith to see the possible correlation.

A simple personal finance class with discussions on retirement, the negative impact debt can have on a person, automobile financing, and saving for the future instead of buying for the now should be implemented in every single high school across the country.

The best long term solution is educating people so that they want to save by making financial capability a compulsory part of the school curriculum and embarking on a public awareness campaign to show the potential hazards of not saving.

Did I really need to learn Chemistry if I had no interest in any fields that would need it? I would think that learning how to control one’s money would be of more help to most people. Thoughts? Did you have finance classes in high school? If you did, did they help? I would love to hear about your experiences!

Fear is a huge issue with a lot of traders. And interestingly, not just fear of failure but also fear of success.

I think there are two keys to taming fear, you can never eliminate it so don’t even try. The first and most critical is the one noted above – action. Action can tame fear in an instant. But it needs to be the right sort of action.

____I personally have a fear of heights; so going bungee jumping may not have been the best way to address it! But that’s exactly what I did. There I was on a platform 250 feet above water, cursing why I got into this, but the only way to conquer fear was to jump and that I did. Do what you fear and the death of fear is certain.

In the same way, if you have a fear of losing your trading account, trying to face it down by putting it all on the line in one trade is not the best sort of action. But taking considered, appropriate action, like the strict use of stop losses is a way of taming fear and getting past the paralysis stage that fear can create.

The second key is focus. By this I mean keeping in the moment and concentrating on the immediate action that is required to move you forward.

If your focus is too broad you can become overwhelmed by the possibilities. Or you might start to worry about things that are beyond your control or simply don’t matter – like whether interest rates are going up or not.

But when you narrow your focus and remain “in the moment” in regard your trading, fear will be sidelined. The simple reason for this is that you can’t concentrate on two things at once!

And again, this will help overcome the paralysis that can be created by fear. So if you suffer from fear in your trading – action and focus are the only keys!

There is an old saying on Wall Street that the market is driven by just two emotions: fear and greed. Although this is an over implication, it can often be true. Succumbing to these emotions can have a profound and detrimental effect on investors’ portfolios and the stock market.

Investing in conservative blue chip stocks may not have the allure of a hot high-tech investment, but it can be highly rewarding nonetheless, as good quality stocks have outperformed other investment classes over the long term.

Historically, investing in stocks has generated a return, over time, of between 10 and 15 percent annually depending how aggressive you are. Stocks outperform other investments since they incur more risk. Stock investors are at the bottom of the corporate “food chain.” First, companies have to pay their employees and suppliers. Then they pay their shareholders. After this come the preferred shareholders. Companies have an obligation to pay all these stakeholders first, and if there is money leftover it is paid to the stockholders through dividends or retained earnings. Sometimes there is a lot of money left over for stockholders, and in other cases there isn’t. Thus, investing in stocks is risky because investors never know exactly what they are going to receive for their investment.

What are the attractions of blue chip stocks?

Good long-term rates of return. Unlike mutual funds, another relatively safe, long term investment category, there are no ongoing fees. You become a part owner of a company. Very actively traded so, easy liquidity.

So much for the benefits – what about the risks? Some investors can’t tolerate both the risk associated with investing in the stock market and the risk associated with investing in one company. Not all blue chips are created equal.

If you don’t have the time and skill to identify a good quality company at a fair price don’t invest directly. Rather, you should consider a good mutual fund.

Selecting a blue chip company is only part of the battle – determining the appropriate price is the other. Theoretically, the value of a stock is the present value of all future cash flows discounted at the appropriate discount rate. In reality supply and demand for a stock sets the stock’s daily price, and demand for a stock will increase or decrease depending of the outlook for a company. Thus, stock prices are driven by investor expectations for a company, the more favorable the expectations the better the stock price. In short, the stock market is a voting machine and much of the time it is voting based on investors’ fear or greed, not on their rational assessments of value. Stock prices can swing widely in the short-term but they eventually converge to their intrinsic value over the long-term.

You’re young, you just landed a new job and you’re going to be getting a decent pay check. You also have bills and student loans to pay and there are also a few items that you’ve always wanted so now you can finally afford them.

Investing for your retirement may be the last thing on your mind at the start of a new career. Especially being so young. Take some advice from those with a little more experience: Start investing early in your career. Start from day one and you will never miss that money you’re setting aside. Even if it’s only a few dollars a week. They add up to millions by the time retirement age rolls around.

It really does make a difference when you start contributing. It is important to invest in your retirement account early in your career for two reasons. First, if you’re fortunate to receive matching contributions, you don-t want to miss out on those added contributions that are a significant part of your benefit. Second, the longer contributions stay in your account, the more you stand to gain. Your money makes money in the form of earnings, and those earnings in turn make money, and so on. This is what is known as the “miracle of compounding.” As money grows in your account over time, the proportion resulting from earnings will become larger compared to the proportion resulting from contributions. And the best part is you don’t have to pay taxes on the earnings until you with draw them.

By investing the money wisely, typically starting off with investments that build slowly but steadily, you are able to better ensure you have money for your later years. And just because your later years are far away doesn’t mean you should wait to invest. The thing is that the best investments are the ones that take time to pay off. The ones that make you rich over night are few and far between and are also the ones that are risky enough to make you broke overnight as well.

The size of your account balance is going to depend on how much you (and your company if they match funds up to a certain percentage) contribute to your account and how your account grows as a result of earnings on your investments. To get an idea of what your retirement account could be in the future, look at the following projection.

A starts putting away $100 a month when she’s 22. Her money grows at 8 percent a year, and after ten years she stops contributing – and lets her stake grow. B waits until he’s 32 to set aside $100 a month, also growing at 8 percent a year, and he keeps it up until he hits 64. When they both retire at 64, she will have $234,600, and he’ll have only $177,400. Need I say more?

Looking at the numbers, it’s hard to imagine why someone wouldn’t start investing immediately!

Last month I had made a post “Needs and Wants, getting REAL about Money” which attracted a great comment by Althea. I immediately thought that the comment itself would make a good post, so here it goes.

“I liked your article and it’s so true. The following information was taken from the book “The Insider’s Guide To Saving Money” by Michael Ellenbogen. “Cutting back does not necessarily mean giving something up all together, but rather finding a less expensive way to do it. Let us say, for example, that each morning you stop by your favorite coffee shop and buy a cafe latté. It costs $3.00, or $15.00 per week. Another option is that you could stop by a local convenience store and buy your coffee for $1.00. You would save $10.00 per week or $520.00 per year. Not bad for a minor adjustment. If you took the $10.00 savings each week and invested it at a 5 percent return, after 20 years you would have over $17,600.00. Not bad for altering one buying habit. Most people have more than one cup of coffee a day. Just think of those savings. You could even make your own coffee at work, which would save you even more.”

This book was a real eye opener, on the amount of money I have been wasting on cigarettes and so many other things. The savings added up quickly. I will be saving over $86,000.00, over 20 years because I stopped smoking 1 ½ packs per day”.

Let’s face it: Most people spend way too much money on things they don’t really need. The more money we make, the more we tend to spend. This endless cycle of materialism has led many people to confuse the word “need” with the word “want.” As in, “we need a big-screen TV for our new home theatre.” Or, “I need a new pair of shoes to go with my new outfit.”

If you want to achieve your vocational passion, where every day you jump out of bed and can’t wait to go to work, then you need to re-order your priorities. Stay away from the purely material.

The pursuit of material success often is the root cause of burnout at midlife. In fact, a recent study found that people primarily motivated by the love of their work grow dissatisfied as they begin to make more money.

The first step to breaking free from the materialism trap is to understand the difference between “need” and “want.”

We need food, clothing, shelter, reliable transportation, education, enrichment, and the technology necessary to do our work. Also, we need the occasional small indulgence to treat our children and ourselves.

We do not need 500 cable TV channels, brand new luxury cars, 5,000-square-foot homes in exclusive neighborhoods, lavish ski vacations, and smart phones that do everything but think for us.

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