Learn How to Take Control of Your Investments

As promised, this blog also features information and dialogue involving finances. In particular my forte of the fiscal realm is with the stock market and in particular “Swing Trading”. This type of investor is one who will stay with a particular stock or fund for an average of 1 day to 3 months. He watches the trend of a stock and averages, in his formulation as to when the best time for the investor to sell off that particular stock.

I am sure most of you have heard of a Day Trader, they were very big in the 80′s and 90′s and they were one’s that made headlines in the news as the person who made a million dollars over night or the person who lost everything overnight. This type of trader is not seen as regularly now a days and for good reason.  It takes a daily commitment to sit in front of the computer or access to be constantly in touch with your broker to sell and trade at the bat of an eye. With this type of trader his rewards can be enormous, but his loses can also be devastating.

Most of us who have any type of stock portfolio, has a long term investment strategy, very common with most investors are the  401K’s and mutual funds. This type of investor rarely ever sell off and/or trade. They keep their money in the investment pool for as I said before, the long term, anywhere from 5 to 20 years. This is the type of trading that Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway has made his billions of dollars with.

I am in between these two types of investors and while I am not one to play the gamble of a daily trading strategy, I have been known to buy a stock in the morning and sell it off on the afternoon. For example when GM was going through their bankruptcy, if you were on top of their stock you could have made a lot of money within an afternoon of buying then selling off quickly.

For the most part thou, a trader such as myself will stick with a stock for a longer length in time, depending on how the stock is performing and what the charts indicate it will more then likely do.

As with any investment it takes a lot of time, knowledge and to take it very seriously.  If you don’t have the willingness to put in the time and learn, then this is when you hand your hard earned money to a successful professional.

As the economy quickly tanks we all look for ways to supplement our ever diminishing income. Although this is mainly a mens fashion blog, my other passion is investing in the financial markets, in particular equities or commonly know as stocks.

Now that I have been more involved with my own retirement funds I have realized that the people I pay to invest my money, do not do a very good job of it. As a matter of fact I pay them to actually lose money for me and I am sure most of you out there are in a similar boat as I.

I decided sometime ago to become better educated on investing my own money, hell I can’t do any worse then what my fund managers have been doing for the last 3 years. Actually I could, for example, wear a blindfold and shoot darts at the S&P 100 wall charts and do as well. Barring that, some dedicated time, research and investment courses have helped me realize much stronger returns on my investments and honestly, it has opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities.

I urge you all to take the time and interest in learning on your own and like me, take over your own financial destiny. It can be daunting and sometimes scary, but in the end I truly believe you will be much farther ahead this time next year. In the coming months I will be blogging a few of the great websites and tools that I use to help me in making my decisions.

The first installment I suggest you go to AMAZON (AMZN) and look for some beginners books on trading. The first decision you will have to make will be what type of researcher you are, whether Fundamental or Technical. From there you will then discover what type of personality of trader you are.  I am sorry not to give you more information here, but I could write forever just on these two subjects alone. But there are so many good books and articles already on them, I am sure you will find everything you will need.

This is one of my favorite websites. They do an incredible job and provide you with valuable tools to help guide you though the many challenges of Wall Street and the World Markets in general. It is called BestFreeCharts.com (is now www.FreeStockCharts.com) it is an awesome site and above is a snapshot of their site and one of my charts. Speaking of which the last three months I have invested in a company by the name of JoS A. Bank who has actually made me a few nice returns for my investment. Who’d of thunk you can make money investing in of all things mens clothing in this down retail economy, well you can.

FreeStockCharts.com check it out and all of it is FREE. Cheers and best of luck!!!

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Posted by Glenn on Nov 5 2009 Filed under MONEY, SELF HELP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry