I seem to be much better at picking and buying stocks than I do at selling them. The number one reason for this is because I often forget to sell on the gains. But if I could always call the tops and bottoms of every stock than ranking with investing legends would be a snap.

Where will the market top? Where will it bottom? Buying after a correction or after a company has a rough week is easy. Learning to sell right before one happens is the real trick.

So If I’m not claiming to be a great investor what exactly do I need to be doing to get there? One thing that I need to work on is determining my selling point and timeframe BEFORE I buy the stock.

From there it is a matter of sticking to your guns and selling when you have hit the mark. Of course if significant news come out you will need to re-evaluate where you are going.

If I would have been following my own advice here within the past month I would have been able to sell off one of my stocks at my price, right below the top. Now I have lost much of the gains that could be out growing in another investment.

Well, I have learned quite a bit from this, and hopefully that will make me a better investor in the future. I suppose only time will tell.

What lessons have you learned in bear markets?

According to The Motley Fool (fool.com) now is historically the best time to invest in the stock market. In their article “Now Is the Best Time of the Year to Invest” they bring up some historical data about the average return of the market during the year.

Average return, November to April: 6.52%.
Average return, May to October: 0.98%.

Yowza.

Surprised?
That’s one of the lesser-reported stock market stats I’ve ever seen.

Of course, you’ve probably heard the old Wall Street adage to “sell in May and go away.” So, there’s some conventional wisdom that the summer has historically poor returns. Many are also aware that October (mother of a pair of Black Mondays, and more than a few other Black Days of the Week) is a scary month.

November, on the other hand, has clearly been a very good month for market returns, perhaps juiced by the weak three months that typically precede it. For 11 of the past 12 Novembers, the market has had positive returns.

There is of course a tendency for many of the articles at the Fool to end in promoting one of their investment advisory groups, and this article is no different. It’s a good read, just skip the last paragraph.

Sometimes that is good enough, not always, but sometimes knowing more than everyone else will allow you to advance. Of course it helps to know what everyone else is thinking before you claim to be smarter than them.

I just ran into a site called Buzzdash. They constantly run polls and about all kinds of things. The stock market, business, and finance being one of them. While I wouldn’t be using this information directly to invest, it can possibly help you determine some trends of everyday people.

Personally I will be sticking with Motley Fool’s CAPS, as that holds people accountable for their predictions and any market analysis that they make. Although with the market’s recent turns, I am not so excited to log in and see how my ratings are doing!

Do you need more help learning how to invest like Warren Buffet? Most people do, with the exception of perhaps only one. Of course that person is Warren Buffet himself!

I ran into this article from the Motley Fool a little while ago called “Buffett’s Words of Wisdom.” It gives out a bit of advice that Warren seems to follow, as well as tips and hints on becoming a better investor yourself.

“I am a better investor because I am a businessman and a better businessman because I am an investor.”

All in all it is a pretty good read, check it out.

I think that I am finally approaching a point in my life where I can start saving and investing in the market. Instead of investing in something like the stock market, I want to start a ROTH IRA. I knew that this form of investing in mutual funds and national and international portfolios made sense; I just didn’t realize how much sense it actually made. Check it out:

1. You invest after-tax money. All of the money you withdraw is tax free. You never have to pay taxes on the interest!
2. You can pull the money out early if you need to without being taxed as long as you’ve had the account for five years.
3. This year, you can invest $4,000, and you have until tax day in April to consider your money a 2007 investment. In 2008, you can invest $5,000.
4. The IRAs and 401(k)s require you to start withdrawing money at age 70½. You’re never required to withdraw this money, so if you don’t need it, you can keep doing tax-free investing.
5. When you die, your heirs don’t have to pay ANY taxes on what they inherit from your Roth.

Seems like a logical savings plan to me!

Do you start to get stressed out when watching your stock prices yo-yo up and down?
I do. I’m willing to bet that this has consumed your mind a number of days before. Especially when you’re losing money.

When your stocks are down, it’s common for people to stare at the tickers and look at every piece of news about the market. The technology that we have today allows us to completely entrench ourselves into the market’s world.

We’ve got CNBC running news, stock prices, and evaluations at us with Yahoo Finance streaming our quotes and bringing in tons of RSS feeds chalked full of info on the market conditions. Meanwhile you’ve got a copy of business week on your desk that you can’t even begin to think about until you completely devour your copy of The Wall Street Journal.

Now if that doesn’t cause you stress, I don’t know what will.

The most well known and successful investor lives a thousand miles away from Wall Street simply for this reason. Of course with technology one could still easily become entangled and paralyzed with the random fluxuations of the market. Warren Buffet chooses not to.

What does Omaha, Nebraska have that’s so appealing to him?

Peace and Quiet. You don’t have to make thousands of trades a year. You can do fine with only making a couple good ones.

So the next time you’re pulling out your hair because your Euro-Disney Stock is flailing, tighten your belt, turn off your computer, and go spend the day with your kids.

You never know when a good idea might hit you.

These days, it is very hot and humid in Tokyo. Investing is getting hot, too. Thanks to evolution of internet, investing is becoming a lot easier for everyone, especially in Japan. Not so many people were buying and selling stocks about 10 years ago. Playing the stock was not for the general public here. Nowadays, however, even college students are making money on the stock market because people can buy and sell stocks through internet. For those of who do not want to take much risk, banks and stock brokerage firms are offering investment trusts.

Not only the general public but also Japanese companies are changing. Japanese companies used to grow their assets for retirement allowance. Companies were responsible for granting retirement allowance for their employees. Now, more and more company let employees manage their own retirement allowances, which are just like a 401K.

I just graduated from the university and began working in the real world. I realized that it is not easy to make money for anyone. The Japanese economy is getting better, and I’m earning some money to play with. Maybe, it’s time to consider playing the stock.

Today we’re thrilled to feature the reflections of Yuka, a recent college graduate working in Tokyo. She says that she’s still not sure what her job title is. In Japan, you are hired based on your fit in a company’s atmosphere. They take you through training and decide where you’ll best fit their needs. When Yuka isn’t working, she loves travel, friends, and challenges… maybe even investing a bit??

If you are interested in investing beyond national boarders into hot places like Japan to diversify your portfolio, you run some additional risks:
1. currency exchange rate
2. political or economic instability and crisis
3. different rules and regulations like taxes

If you are interested in being our next Saturday Strategist, contact us.

1. The stock market is the result of potentially billions of calculations in which millions of variables are changing values and alternating their direction every second.

Or you could take the easy way out and say, ‘the stock market is a bunch of random numbers with derived colorations to the real world.’ Let me amend my easy definition so it’s a little simpler, ‘the stock market is a bunch of changing pricetags’

2. The stock market preys on the weak.

Anyone who isn’t doing their homework is fair game to both the sharks and the system itself. While the ‘system’ isn’t ‘out to get you’ it certainly has no qualms about taking you out.

3. The thoughts expressed by Jim Cramer are those of his own.

You are responsible for your own portfolio at all times. Any recommendations by anyone are simply that, recommendations. That’s why we’re not all go-zillionaires like Warren Buffet. That’s why there is a 10 page essay as a disclaimer at the beginning of every episode of ‘Mad Money.’ That’s why this article should probably have been called, ‘Everything I *think* I know about the stock market.’ And that’s why every time in the past 7 months that I have a conversation about stocks with my dad, he ended it with, “But what do I know? I bought stock in a company that makes robots that go around and vacuum”

4. Market Cap is real and does matter.

How much are you going to be personally be affected when a tidal wave hits your investment ship? If you’re in a hugonic cruise liner, you are simply going to continue playing shuffleboard right through it. But if you’re sitting with 2 other investors in a small cap dingy, you’re going to be in for the ride of your life!

5. It’s better to invest smaller amounts often than large amounts rarely.

This might just be my own little philosophy, but I think it’s better to invest more often. That way you are constantly watching the market. You are watching for trends. You know what’s going on in the sector and industry. If you don’t then you will become target to the second rule. But if you do follow these things, your gain will be substantial, if not initially in fiscal value, but in your trading and investing abilities. And with stock commissions at a super low price, you don’t have to save up for months to invest.

There it is, everything I know about the stock market. Of course I’d like to hear what you know about it, so please leave me a comment.

We talk a lot about ideas for growing wealth. And if you stop to think about it, I’m pretty sure every plan of attack can break down into one of the four:

1. Business—sell yourself, your product, your idea, or your services
2. Investing—gaining bonds, growing interest, gambling stocks and CDs
3. Real estate—I never thought of this method as a kid…own properties
4. Internet—extend the possibilities. A lot of people are making fast money on brilliant ideas. Even less classy ideas like collegehumor.com has brought in millions for its authors

Don’t spend every minute and dime focusing on one of these money makers, though. I’ve been trying to think of anyone who’s wealthy that only used one of these methods. I can’t think of a soul. Therefore, diversify your avenues just as you diversify your stock portfolio.

Everyone loves it when their stocks go up. Hey, that’s the whole reason that we’re in the stock market to begin with! Unfortunately that isn’t always the case. I’m sure that in the roller coaster of a market we’ve had in past couple of months you don’t need to be reminded.

Just because a stock has gone down, doesn’t mean it’s going to go back up. Sure in the perfect world you would double up you holding and watch it jump back.

Sometimes you have to sell when it’s going down, NOT BUY!

I bring this up because I have done both. A couple months ago Sirius Satellite started to drop. I was able go get my holdings out soon at $6.00 at a loss of $1.00 per share. OUCH! But then If I would have kept them in there it hit a low of $3.60 and is now trading around $4.50. I had the potential to lose a heck of a lot more if I would have held on and tried to ‘tough it out.’

My other stock will remain unnamed as I still have the destroyed remnants of what once were (I thought) valuable shares. Let’s just say it was a bad investment from the get go. The first time I saw Cramer’s Mad Money, I got excited about a stock he was talking about and placed an order. The show was on Friday, and I was using Sharebuilder, meaning the trade wouldn’t take place until Tuesday.

I watched the stock go up during after hours on the weekend, as well as a good raise during Monday’s trading. This caused me to think, “Oh wow! Cramer really knows his stuff!”

So now I’m into an over inflated small cap stock that spends the next couple of months going up and down, but mostly down. Once the stock had been cut in half, the stock seemed to be bouncing all while staying within a $2.00 range. It’s time to double up on the downside.

Then I found out that something can be halved more than once. Instead of taking the initial loss, I’ll be taking way more than I should have.

When you want to make money, don’t be afraid to actually do it.

Let’s look at the stock market for today. It did great for the first time in a couple of weeks. Since it has jumped up a bit, it may be time to cash some of it in.

Don’t worry about the taxes on it. It’s better to pay some fraction on profits than to skip out on the profits all together. We all know that the day after a market rally, many of the gains will be lost.

So why not cash in stocks before they go down, and re-buy them again when they are down there. Of course if you know the tops and bottoms of any given stocks, then you already know this.

And If I knew the tops and bottoms I would have sold and bought in much better positions.

Now I’m not saying that in the morning the market will go back down, who knows what it will do. But historically it likes to drop gains twice as fast as it makes them.

We just went through the largest one day drop in three years. Everybody is worried that the Fed is going to go berserk and raise rates nonstop for months on end. All kinds of traders and analysts are driving stock prices down like there’s no tomorrow.

Me on the other hand, I don’t listen to these ‘doomsday’ predictions. Something everyone knows is that the stock market is constantly going up and down. So you’ve got two basic choices when your stock is down in the dumps.

First, you could stress out about all the money you have lost. The next step involved in this train of thought is to sell your stock as it gets towards the bottom. If you do this, you’re breaking the only rule of investing. You’re losing money.

(Continue reading this article…)