Where is your money invested?

speed dawg

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What are the alternatives? I would love to know. Gold, bitcoin and stuffing cash in the mattress isn't a viable alternative.
I'd like to know this as well. There is literally nothing else except real estate. They are criticizing, call everyone sheep, but give no other alternatives. You'd think they'd want to help.

Do I think you should put ALL your money in retirement? No, probably only 10-20%. That's a small enough percentage to allow tax-deferred growth and still not have it own your life. After that, pile up cash in other ways. But if it's not beating inflation, you're a sucker, so money in a mattress is out, so is gold and all that other garbage.

I'd like to see examples of other tangible things that are going UP in value. Real estate is all I know of, and dealing with that is a job in and of itself.

As I typed this, Espi posted about being proactive. I agree with that in some forms. Big low, sell high, etc. Honestly, if anyone is putting a certain % of their pay in retirement at present, right now is probably the time to stop doing it, if you wanted to save for other things. You're buying high at the moment.
 

Tenacity

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you all must be blind or idiots but since you are reading this I'm assuming just idiots. Look at the fvcking 10 posts I told you bitcion, physical gold and silver.
Sir, we already seen those recommendations but they are WORSE than the ones we are using.

You ask for alternative but refuse to accept the alternatives because you have been programmed well to be the steeple you are. If this makes you angry, great. Don't buy and keep the prices that much lower for those of use willing to open our eyes.
- Gold shouldn't be a growth investment, it should be a hedging investment on if you think the dollar is going to crash, which again....if the dollar crashes the damn world crashes (give or take).

- Having assets in cash is destroyed through inflation

- Bitcoin is laughable lol.

When I asked....what are the alternatives......I was referring to the fact that there are NO other investments out there that are going to beat the performance of stocks, bonds/fixed income and real estate. If you have other actual VIABLE investments (other than gold, cash, and bitcoin) please share them.

If not, despite the weaknesses in the markets, there are no other choices available.
 

Tenacity

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Glad this thread was re-opened. These types of discussions are great to help build traffic to this section of the forum!
 

BeTheChange

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What if you were 65 years old in 2008? Would you have TIME to wait for the stocks to recover?

What if you had planned on retiring in 2008?

Could you physically work for another 5-10 years while waiting (and hoping) for the market to recover? Would your employer WANT you working another 5-10 years?
Agreed. Why would a 65 year old have the same portfolio allocation as someone half his age? If one hasn't adjusted their portfolio to sufficiently reflect their investment time horizon and risk preferences then they deserve whatever misery the market creates for them.
 

Tenacity

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This is mainstream brainwashing on how to pacify idiots into dumping their lifesaving's into a market that the corporations and governments manipulate. If they control your money, they control you. 401ks, stock market, etc. are all long term shackles that make you a slave to the system. Kind of like the matrix.

These sheeple...smh lol. The people that are unplugged, all unplugged in different ways but managed to wake themselves up. But obviously if everyone woke up and realized that they were all being herded into to be sucked dry while the few got rich, there would be blood on the streets.

Do me a favor tenacity, hold your stocks and bonds. In fact, buy more. Please buy more.

Let's chat in 5 years and i'll pay you to clean my toilets. Of course it will be salaried and it will come with lunch mon-friday.
AAA I'm interested to know if you were once in stocks, bonds, etc., and decided to move all of your funds to the alternatives you have listed currently.....like bitcoin and gold?

Bitcoin just seems very unstable to me, I can understand maybe doing some speculation with it on the side, but you are using Bitcoin as your retirement portfolio? No stocks, bonds, or fixed income, just Bitcoin and Gold?
 

synergy1

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[bTo you guys that pick your own individual stocks, how do you guys even go about your research? Do you even have enough external information on the stocks to make accurate predictions?[/b]

I started by reading about the subject fairly exhaustively. I basically taught myself everything a business school would teach ( the important things). Than I found books on the subjects that seemed helpful and read / took notes on those. I have lost count how much I have read on the subject, but still have a lot to learn. However things are starting to become repetitive, so that means the learning must be working.

As for my own research, I use a combination of my own fundamental research and simple data analysis. As far as fundamental research, i'll read annual filings ( SEC form 10k's 10qs, etc). Next I'll read about the market the best I can and study how it works. I like to read about the simple stuff like what the business does, their competition, management, and that sort of thing. Next I'll look at the finances - this is where I have my own simple data analysis. Most sites like yahoo and google have 4 years of financial data...I have 6 because I collect it and store it in my own database. Every year I collect that years data since normally you need to pay for anything more that 4 years.

What I do with the financial data is simple. I determine if the company has made money, and will continue to do so. Do they have too much debt ? What returns on their invested capital does the enterprise enjoy? Lastly, I check for financial fraud.

As for if it works, most the stocks where I have invested on my simple principals, it works. For my speculative purchases, some have, and some have not. This is a work in progress. Many of my energy related holdings did well last year, but not well this year. My new purchases this year have been doing okay , but I expect them to slow down. I invest for the long term, and do not trade. Trading is a shorter time holding period, and too involved for what time I have to put into this.

The short answer to your question is (1) understand how to look at a business and (2) final public information about the company so that you can be convinced that you would want to own it ( not just buy the stock, but own the business as if you purchased it outright).

Example - Would I want to own Tesla motors? The answer is no. They do not make money, burn cash every year, and require new funding every year. They do not sell all that much, and many of their financial reports have been questionable. I feel like they are hiding something. I look at it as if it was my business...and I wouldn't be comfortable burning hundreds of millions per year. Now if you want to *trade* this company, I am sure many can and do and have done quite well!
 

Tenacity

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[bTo you guys that pick your own individual stocks, how do you guys even go about your research? Do you even have enough external information on the stocks to make accurate predictions?[/b]

I started by reading about the subject fairly exhaustively. I basically taught myself everything a business school would teach ( the important things). Than I found books on the subjects that seemed helpful and read / took notes on those. I have lost count how much I have read on the subject, but still have a lot to learn. However things are starting to become repetitive, so that means the learning must be working.

As for my own research, I use a combination of my own fundamental research and simple data analysis. As far as fundamental research, i'll read annual filings ( SEC form 10k's 10qs, etc). Next I'll read about the market the best I can and study how it works. I like to read about the simple stuff like what the business does, their competition, management, and that sort of thing. Next I'll look at the finances - this is where I have my own simple data analysis. Most sites like yahoo and google have 4 years of financial data...I have 6 because I collect it and store it in my own database. Every year I collect that years data since normally you need to pay for anything more that 4 years.

What I do with the financial data is simple. I determine if the company has made money, and will continue to do so. Do they have too much debt ? What returns on their invested capital does the enterprise enjoy? Lastly, I check for financial fraud.

As for if it works, most the stocks where I have invested on my simple principals, it works. For my speculative purchases, some have, and some have not. This is a work in progress. Many of my energy related holdings did well last year, but not well this year. My new purchases this year have been doing okay , but I expect them to slow down. I invest for the long term, and do not trade. Trading is a shorter time holding period, and too involved for what time I have to put into this.

The short answer to your question is (1) understand how to look at a business and (2) final public information about the company so that you can be convinced that you would want to own it ( not just buy the stock, but own the business as if you purchased it outright).

Example - Would I want to own Tesla motors? The answer is no. They do not make money, burn cash every year, and require new funding every year. They do not sell all that much, and many of their financial reports have been questionable. I feel like they are hiding something. I look at it as if it was my business...and I wouldn't be comfortable burning hundreds of millions per year. Now if you want to *trade* this company, I am sure many can and do and have done quite well!
But here's my question, is all of this worth it though? Or should you just buy the market (S&P Index Fund) like I do?

- Are you getting consistent returns higher than the annual market average? When I say consistent, I'm talking year over year, for 5 - 10 years in a row?

- If the answer is No, why not just buy the market and invest this extra time into your career, building a business, or hell, just additional recreation time?
 

synergy1

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Concerning my personal motivation, I am looking at launching my business into a different direction ( getting real funding) in a few years, so I have been learning what I can on the side. Business and investing go hand and hand. Much of my money is in index funds, so I only invest with money from my salaried job. Lately I have been putting small amounts of money in to starting my business , so my investing activities will likely change in coming years. When I am working more full time, I will probably switch to an index fund, or a company like Berkshire if the price drops.

I would like to give myself a long time frame to learn how to do this correctly. My early investments in berkshire hathaway and NRG energy made money, but this was a small amount. Other investments lost money. I am continuing to develop my strategy. I don't want to quit just because I am doing badly in one time period - it would be the same logic as continuing to do something because luck was on my side. Having luck give me a false sense of confidence would be dangerous because bad habits would accumulate, and larger wagers into poor picks would eventually catch up with ya. In any case, I want to learn/ improve time permitting. To be clear, I have made mistakes and those mistakes have made me learn a great deal I would not have learned otherwise.

I'll close with this advice, stick to a good index fund. That is the direction where I will go in time once my time becomes less available. If you want to pursue investing, you can send me a PM and I can suggest some reading.

Good luck
 

PrettyBoyAJ

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So you had shares of Berkshire Hathaway? You must be pretty well off then.
 

synergy1

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So you had shares of Berkshire Hathaway? You must be pretty well off then.
Not many shares of class B shares back when I ran my own business and didn't have much money. So they did okay, but didn't beat the market. I like Berkshire, but would buy that or an index fund provided I have more money and want to get general market exposure.
 

wifehunter

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Bitcoin, bytecoin, etherium, litecoin
 

logicallefty

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Since my last post in this thread I bought some stock in CVS. They had a decline but are climbing back up.Look around you in your city. CVS is everywhere and ain't going anywhere. They sell more drugs than Walgreens, but Walgreens is bigger due to other sales.

@Bible_Belt I also bought some stock in that private prison company you suggested, GEO. It looked really good when I bought it. However just a couple days later, May 17th, was the day the market tanked pretty heavily over people loosing faith in Trump due to all of the Russian hew-ha. So I sold it. I am going to watch it for a while and may buy it again at some point. I think it was a good play I just bought it at the worst time in a while that I could have.
 

Bible_Belt

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In trader talk. you got stopped out. You hit your stop loss amount, then ejected according to plan. That's how professionals operate. 2/3rds of my trades were losers, but I always had an account in the green. The worst trader I ever met, according to a computer program we ran for him at my work, had winning trades 90% of the time. But the 10% that were losers were so big that they wiped out his account.

"Entry point" is the other operative term here, and yes it is very important. The best time to buy a up-trending stock is when it is going down, but if it is trending up that much, it hardly ever goes down. Sideways is often the best you can get.

Looking at the chart of GEO right now:
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=geo&insttype=&freq=1&show=&time=7

support at $30 is very strong. I don't see it going much lower than that. It's too bad you got stopped out, but if you can get it for a price close to that 30 level, I think it is still an attractive trade. If you own it, look up when they report earnings. I was never into earnings plays that much, it's a crap shoot to hold into earnings, but it's still a bet I would take with this stock.
 

wifehunter

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Not in dollars.
 

logicallefty

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In trader talk. you got stopped out. You hit your stop loss amount, then ejected according to plan. That's how professionals operate. 2/3rds of my trades were losers, but I always had an account in the green. The worst trader I ever met, according to a computer program we ran for him at my work, had winning trades 90% of the time. But the 10% that were losers were so big that they wiped out his account.

"Entry point" is the other operative term here, and yes it is very important. The best time to buy a up-trending stock is when it is going down, but if it is trending up that much, it hardly ever goes down. Sideways is often the best you can get.

Looking at the chart of GEO right now:
http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=geo&insttype=&freq=1&show=&time=7

support at $30 is very strong. I don't see it going much lower than that. It's too bad you got stopped out, but if you can get it for a price close to that 30 level, I think it is still an attractive trade. If you own it, look up when they report earnings. I was never into earnings plays that much, it's a crap shoot to hold into earnings, but it's still a bet I would take with this stock.
Thanks for the reply. I'm starting to pay more attention to earnings and other catalysts. I can what you mean about 10% of your trades being a killer. I saw that when I was doing a little day trading for a while. This whole area is a lot to learn and I have a loooooong way to go. But its fun. Lots of fun. Nearly addictive.
 

greatsnake

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At 28, 65% of my funds are in equities, 20% in bonds and 15% in gold.
 

greatsnake

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Equities are likely to get slaughtered with rising interest rates. Think of going a bit more over-weight in gold and Bitcoin.
Rising interest rates are a result of a strong economy and the stock market has gone higher, if we look back at history.I won’t touch Bitcoin for now.
 
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