• Life Advice & Visual Arts Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    🌌 Share Your Dreams! 🌌
    📸 15 Years of Photo Contests 📸
  • LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

the market: stocks, bonds, options, whatever

^congrats if you played that. i'll admit i shook my head when you posted about it back in august.


just bought some $WFC. after my first year of screwing around in low-cap, high-risk nonsense, now nothing excites me like when a high-div blue chip stumbles.


edit:
i'm very tempted to take half my profit on $GOOG/L, which is over 35% and qualifies for capital gains at this point, and double my position in $HCN. but -- with the regular fed rate hike scares, the overwhelmingly and unanimously positive forecasts for alphabet inc, and the desire to diversify not just positions but the market period they were acquired in -- i might hold and wait a bit.

edit again:
hydroazuanacaine said:
anyone buying oil?
Click to expand...
fuck futures-focused ETFs in a contango market. i knew $USO was such a silly buy, but i was just too salty about what $BP (stumbling, high-div blue chip) did to the ocean. get it?
 
Last edited:
thanks :) it was a good time frame. speaking of rate hike, news that the BoC is considering a rate cut has just pushed USD/CAD up through a stubborn level of resistance. what timing too, just as vancouver RE prices have stalled.

i'm still not holding my breath on oil, gonna have to see what happens when WTI reaches $60/bl.

GOOG is riding a stable trend so i'd consider hanging in there until it breaks.
 
sold $uso -- dead money too long. still have some $kmi keeping me invested in energy.

President Trump to Move Forward on Keystone XL and Dakota Access Pipelines

Trans-Mountain Pipeline Clears Final Hurdle for Expansion

fight, fight, fight!


also sold $goog yesterday. looks like waiting a bit wouldn't have hurt, but kept $googl. reading analyst reviews, seems it will be a toss up whether or not they will have positive surprises in this thursday's report. and inside trades are selling, not buying. it's a company i'm sticking with (sold green so can re-up my position whenever), but i don't profit take enough for how actively i watch and that position had grown disproportionate to others in my portfolio. i have a large position in $aapl as well -- maybe what i should have sold, earnings on jan 31 -- so i'll still feel tech movement plenty. did not put the money in $hcn. worried about how long the market will maintain this positive momentum. plus i needed some cash.
 
Last edited:
Keystone makes strategic sense but the Kinder pipeline faces competition for the Asian market from Russian oil+LNG, plus risk from nascent Chinese adventurism. It'll be profitable for Canada when the next boom cycle kicks in but the geopolitical situation in Asia looks more unpredictable than ever now.

Good call on rebalancing, I still have no idea why Google is so profitable, why pick GOOG and AAPL instead of buying the index?
 
thujone said:
why pick GOOG and AAPL instead of buying the index?
Click to expand...
no good reason. because i barely knew what a fund was back in 2014 when i bought them. because i was seeing more and more people tapping ppc ads on their iphones. more fun. more risk in the hopes of making more money. 401k for funds.
 
Trump's trade war is dragging us all down (a trade war with China is listed as the number one reason the stock market sentiment is turning negative). What a fucking fucker. We really don't need a second recession in 10 years... someone please get this buffoon out of office.
 
aww, he?s creating an nice entry point for those late to the game. always looking out for the little guy.

what?s really gonna crush the market is if it starts to look like he?s actually going to be impeached.
 
You think? I thought maybe that would restore confidence since it's his actions that have largely destabilized it recently (it seems anyway).
 
Well my thought was, if that elected leader's behavior is what's causing lack of confidence, and the vice president will just take over immediately, maybe that won't be the case. But I'm not an economist either.
 
vice wont fix anything. he wasn?t elected president. he?ll just hold seat until next election. at least that?s my understanding of how a vice is supposed to handle the situation.

also trump being a dicklet about china isn?t helping, but it?s unlikely the sole driving force. who knows if it?s even the primary.
 
I told my dad to buy TGT (Target) when they were trading at $70. He was like, "no i'll go with the pro tips on fidelity".

-_-

This was in the summer, it's now trading at $105.
 
in 2012 i put 10 grand into nvidia i told people with more money to invest their savigns into it as the gpu market is only going to get huge. I cashed out at start of 2018 when the stock hit over 200 usd from 15 usd. If only the people i told who had huge savings due to not spending most their money on drugs like myself could of been millionaires. Made enough profit to put a good down payment on a house which kind of saved myself from terrible choices i had been making for a very long and spending most my money on drugs to suddenly having a very nice savings and ability to live on my own without renting.
 
^ that's the best kind of success story, when the average joe sees the right opportunity and capitalizes on it. I wish I had invested in AMD when the time was right, did well on Bitcoin though and funneled the profits off that into some dividend ETFs.

Everyone has the chance to make something happen if they don't blow their money on drugs and debts for shit they don't need, like expensive cars (too many people are doing this!!)

Comfort today has a cost, you don't know what it is until the bill arrives tomorrow!
 
i bought a little bit of VB vanguard etf yesterday. morningstar gives it five starts and over the last few years it's gotten 9 up to 30 percent return a year. not only this most recent year with the tax cuts. it's small cap so it's risky, but i had some extra cash and i usually play it safe so i figured let's see if i get rich. management is only .05 percent, no commission. i'll buy a little more every 3 months, bobblehead style.

i bought more VOO and VGT when they dipped a couple months ago. i know you are not supposed to time the market, but it made me a ton of (unrealized) money.

not trying to be one of those people who fools people into thinking stocks are get rich quick routes by only talking about their wins. i also lost a lot on a cannabis stock. i sold %75 percent down. oops. i bet in a few months it won't be liquid anymore. you do not want non-liquid equities. brokers hose you to get rid of them, so at least i got rid of it before then.

almost all online brokers offer commission free trading now. i think e*trade started it so everyone had to follow suite or they'd lose all their self-directed clients. it's a huge advantage if you don't want to buy all at once but instead slowly build positions. unless you make upper 6 figures or more, there's no reason not to use a self-directed broker. even if you do, i'd split it between guided and self-directed. my stupid rich friend does that. some money in guided, some in self-directed. i'm not sure which does better, but he makes some stupid calls so probably his guided. he isn't a career investor so he doesn't have time to manage his own.

now that i got this figured out a bit and am actually making significant cash on my investments, i'm gonna start a tax shelter account in addition to my 401k. prolly roth ira.

done real well on real estate too.

if anyone wants to talk about how to semi-safely make money investing, i'd be happy to discuss. i use a hybrid a personal straggles and well established ones like bogglehead. this penny stock get rich scheme trend is ruining so many people. i don't like the government stepping on individual freedoms, but i had no idea what i was doing when i started and i wish some authority org would have limited my risks. and to be cocky, i consider myself far more financial literate than the average american, even back then. there are people losing way more than they can because the internet sats options, puts, and shorts will get you lamborghinis. unless your an institution with software that shaves off percents all day or have the luck of a lottery winner, all those high risk trades will get you is crippling debt. you shouldn't be able to self-direct short without taking a gov funded class and test resulting in a certificate that proves you know the risks. it's way more dangerous than online gambling.

i'm embarrassed about some of my early posts in this thread.
 
Last edited:
@hydroazuanacaine

If you could recommend a single resource on investing what would it be? What would you tell you from four years ago about learning investing and trading in general? Sounds like you'd have something to say.
 
well a lot of people say the market is due for a correction, but they've been saying that for years and people who ignored that have made well above average annual returns.

that said, i'd buy VOO and maybe VGT (or the admiral version if you have stupid money, but they are almost the same thing), and slowly add money to it. that way you don't get fucked on the ups and you buy during the dips too. don't invest so much that you have to pull out in an emergency, because if that happens during a bad market period you will lose big. have about $10k cash in case of an emergency (that's the ideal, but try to have at least a couple grand). if everyone needed more than $10k cash to start investing, the majority of people wouldn't be able to invest. i don't have quite $10k cash, but i have had a rough to years and am still close. and i have way more than that in investments. your brick-and-mortar bank's savings account interest does not count as an investment.

i think vanguard has super low minimums, so it's a good starting place. they are my favorite because so many of their funds are almost nominal management fees, which can add up if they're high. always read morningstar. trying to read quarterlies is a waste of time. people act like they can interpret them, but it's like creative lit. one person can take a quarterly and make it sound great and another can take the same and make it sound like a garbage company.

also pick one or two individual stocks for fun, once you can. bluechips in industries you think have room to expand and introduce disruptive tech (think amazon), not companies that performed well in the past but are failing to adapt. not lyft or anything like that that still can't figure out how to turn a profit. at least not yet. lyft might make money in automated driving systems, but tesla will probably beat them to it. but lyft, tesla, uber, these are all hype stocks i avoid.

once you have enough money, partner with a developer who knows exactly what he or she is doing and go into real estate. not these silly house flippers, but real developers. that's where you can make infinity pool money. or lose infinity pool money, but don't invest in anything you can't lose.

stay away from crypto, biotech, penny stocks, and and especially foreign penny stocks (a lot of foreign penny stocks manipulate their earnings by transferring assests through subsidiaries and then calling it real revenue). yeah some people made a lot of money on it, but only because so many lost everything on it. blockchain is real; crypto is for drugs.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top