Finances, Stock Market, Money Market, Mutual Funds, Investments, Savings, etc.

[NH Homesteader]

I’m lost as to why that’s a political statement?

 

[CrealCritter]

I don't play in the stock market. (Period). The reason is simple... I don't like money, it creates way to many problems, 1 Timothy 6:10. But I'm following this thread because I do like learning.

I like to follow but not invest in commodities. To me commodities seem to be good indicators of what real prices I will end up paying for foods and products (up or down). Common stock as in companies is where it gets very confusing to me...

Anyways, I doubt I'll have much of anything to contribute but I'm sure I'll learn a lot

The commodity for me to watch today is wheat. Although midday still, look at the mountain chart, pretty crazy hu? How will this impact the prices of breads? I guess we'll find out soon enough...

Wheat PRICE Today | Wheat Spot Price Chart | Live Price of Wheat per Ounce | Markets Insider

Wheat Price: Get all information on the Price of Wheat including News, Charts and Realtime Quotes.

markets.businessinsider.com

Jesus is Lord and Christ

 

[flowerbug]

This is a good thread. Thanks for starting it.
You can buy stocks through Computershare.com There are no brokerage fees or commissions. Pick a solid stock that pays dividends and park your money there. D.R.I.P. stocks build up. Dividend Re-Investment Program. The dividends go into your account, quarterly the dividends purchase stock and grow your stocks.

it's been ages since i've thought of DRIPs, and also about the actual stock certificates that you could hold instead of having them at a brokerage - when you bought or sold that meant those certificates needed to be sent through the mail and you sure didn't want to lose them. so in the end it just made more sense to leave things with the brokerage.

waxing nostalgic here a moment more for the older days when i was in an investment club and first learned about DRIPS and started doing them on my own too. before the computers were really going and the brokerage did not keep track of your basis in what you bought and sold so you had to keep track of that yourself. i am not doing DRIPS any more (explained below), but i did have a portfolio of about a half dozen stocks besides my regular ones (that were not set up to do DRIP).

i don't really miss that though now. computers can keep track of this and do the math when needed. so i'm happy for that. i do keep an eye on things. sometimes computers make assumptions that are not correct.


ok, so let's talk about basis, capital gains and losses.

as a beginning investor when you buy something the price you pay (plus any commission/fees) is the basis for that purchase. when you sell it, the price you get (minus commission/fees) is the net amount.

subtract your basis from the net amount and any positive amount is a profit called a capital gain (of which part may be needed to pay some taxes). if the amount is negative then that is a capital loss and there is no capital gain tax. some of the loss may be written off against income. note however, that all of this gets a bit fun when reading through the IRS publications or if you are doing complicated things and have a lot of other financial stuff going on you'll deal with your accountant or tax preparer.


back to DRIPS... (no it's not raining )...

with a DRIP plan each reinvestment was an accounting event and i had to keep track of each of them. when i got to where i was starting to sell some things off i decided to simplify my life and accounting and sold the DRIP stocks off so that i was back to just my blocks of shares stocks that i'd been holding forever. gladly since then times have changed. computers and brokerages are required now to keep track of things better.

now the brokerages will keep track of your gains and losses and basis automatically but you will be asked what accounting method you want to use for your stock sales. FIFO, LIFO or something else. FIFO is first in, first out, LIFO is last in, first out. etc. but all of this is important because you do need to know another thing about a stock purchase and sale. that is how long you've held it. because things you hold for the short term can be taxed differently than those you hold longer term.

all of this is described in the IRS publications. if you need something to read sometime...

 

[Trying2keepitReal]

what about cryptocurrency...anyone dug into it? I have no idea/clue about how it works, if I should start investing or what the long-term probability is. I am so uneducated when it comes to financial investments

 

[flowerbug]

...Look at what people fear and what they will do to cancel out the fear and see if you can tap into that.

when everyone else is selling is usually a good time to be buying, but sometimes there are larger trends happening and you'll go against those at your own peril.

short term quick trades are ok, but i like to back them up with thinking longer term like what are the consequences of that freeze in TX for the longer term and could i buy a company that i like what they are doing for the longer term?

i did find one company and i did buy some shares recently - they pay a dividend and so that provides me with a bit more income but i'm also into them for as long as they keep doing things i like - which looks like they're going to be doing.

as usual i did some research and set a buy range and waited until the market went through this recent drop so it did get into that range. now they've bumped back up again and i have both the dividend and that bump up as a cushion for the future. never know what the future can bring, but it is paying me better than the money market was getting.

 

[flowerbug]

with recent market gyrations it should have given you an idea if you are (or were) too exposed to the market for your own comfort or abilities to withstand it.

a common practice is to rebalance a portfolio on some kind of fixed schedule so you don't end up feeling whiplashed by every market change.

another approach is more fire and forget, where you invest a set amount every paycheck, month or whatever schedule so that you in effect buy more shares when the market goes down and less when the market goes up. so this acts as a type of market averaging through time.

my own method has been to do research on companies i'd like to buy as a regular activity so i always have candidates on my list to buy when they get within a certain range and i set aside so much of my earned income for that so when a market correction does come along or another buying opportunity i'm ready to go. there are times when i've talked myself out of making certain buys because i felt it might have been the wrong time and then later i kick myself because it was a good investment and i'd have done well by it. you can't win them all, but it's nice when things mostly work out.

 

[flowerbug]

I have two stocks in particular I have been looking at. Amazon and PayPal. For personal reasons I regret buying them but money is money sometimes. But I am currently in a slight red with both of them. As soon as the scale starts to tip me in the other direction I will sell and add onto my lands a bit because I really want to go back home. And I might as well square off my property. I don’t know that I’m going to be able to make big investments in the future. I probably will just act like my grandparents who went through the depression if I am not satisfied with my wealth.

none of us know the exact future or paths we'll need to travel. if i had less than five years time horizon i'd not have bought the stock i recently put some money into but it wasn't that much so i figured it also is going to be a bit of an entertainment expense too since i will have fun watching it. other people aren't so easily amused.

i hope it works out well for you.

 

[flowerbug]

making good progress, i thought this current task was going to take me another week but i may be able to finish it up tonight or tomorrow. will be great to have this one done and then i can get on to the next one...

which has 25yrs less of history to transcribe and even better i have most of it already typed in and have been working on a program to translate it all so i'm really a long way further on that one.

the first task mentioned above is an acct i've had since i was 4yrs old. so far there have been only two errors (i knew about them already) and missing a few lines of transactions (because back then they wrote things in the passbook by hand - and someone just wrote a balance and didn't put in the intervening transactions - so maybe three or four transactions i don't have). when i get done i'll have good ammo to go talk to the manager and see what they think...

 

[flowerbug]

in a place far, far from here someone said, "How do you know what to do in a market like this?" my reply was, "That is why you have a system and try to stick mostly to it."

this morning was a prime example. some things i follow were in the buy range that my system sets up, so as much as i didn't really think it was the best idea, it was what i did. of course i had no idea what was going to happen later today. so after i did those buys i went off and did some other things and wasn't paying any attention to the market. came back a while later and saw what was in some of those buys a big enough jump that they were now in my sell ranges. so i lined up the sales and got most of them done (waiting on one small one at the moment).

of course this is in a trading account where i may be holding things for a short while and some other things are not in the money (aka, i'm not going to sell them at a loss) so they are future sales waiting to happen (and a few of them may not ever happen - or i will have a loss at some point or they go out of business and i won't be able to sell them). my longer term account i don't do much with other than cash dividends and once in a while add something to it, but not much these past 20 years as i've needed the income.

and just as i posted this the last bit of selling i wanted to do got done...

 

[flowerbug]

file this under if you ever wonder why accountants go nuts...

i wrote a little program to compute some numbers on buy, sells and splits of investment shares. in researching it i found out about things i didn't know before (a newer programming language (Python) that has a data type (Decimal) that does things very accurately and is also very specific about how you can check for failures, etc.) so that is fun, but also as a computer science student of many years ago i also knew that dealing with fractional amounts can be quite an interesting issue/challenge.

i put my program out there for other people to use. i didn't completely test it as i did admit it was a rather hacked together thing and not formally developed. so errors did appear and i've been correcting them as i go along when i get time to go back and poke at it some more.

one of the interesting things i learned was that it depends upon where you were taught rounding it can be different, there are many different kinds of rounding methods and i assumed the one called bankers rounding was the right one. nope, at least not for my brokerage account. surprise!

today i'm working on this and seeing if i can figure out all the quirks i need to work around and then i see yet another example of a different but related issue of where the stock brokerage has alternative values that it shows (in some cases it reports one value, but if you look at it in another view you may see it being slightly different which can change your results by a fraction). when things are shown in an inconsistent manner which one do you pick? eventually this does become important for tax reporting purposes...

and then that gets me to where i have the same sort of beef with my insurance annuity company that doesn't give enough digits to calculate the results to match what appears on their statements.

whatever hair i might have left will soon be torn out...