Day Traders Club

For some “long term” would mean holding a stock position over the weekend. For others, it may mean holding a security for at least 1 year for the purpose of declaring a long-term capital gain, thus saving on taxes.

The rigid definition of a long-term investment in the stock market would be holding a security for a minimum of 5 years, to as long as 30 years.

I’m going to tell you my definition of a long-term investment in a security by telling you a story. A true story!

My Mother worked as a teller in a small bank in Dover, New Jersey. The name of the bank was called The Dover Community Bank. While working at the bank (she eventually became a branch manager) she enrolled in the bank’s dividend reinvestment plan, making purchases of the stock through pay-roll deductions from her paycheck. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 17% [?]

(1) CHK stock price $16.74, NAV $32.5

CHK is my favorite oil or natural gas stock. Here is updated Net Asset Value (NAV) table from CHK July 2004 earning release:

Table CHK PV-10 per share NAV vs Natural gas price

N Gas price NAV per share

$4.50 $16.11

$5.00 $19.60

$5.50 $23.11

$6.00 $26.61

$6.50 $32.5 Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 24% [?]

The World Bank claims that some two billion of the world’scitizens live on $1 per day or less! That fact absolutelyshocked me. With this statistic in mind it becomes important tofocus on all of the things that have served as money over thehistory of civilization. Aztecs used Cocoa beans, Norwegiansused Butter and dried cod, many Indian tribes used animal skinsand some of the early colonists used grains.

It’s worth thinkingabout this the next time you pick up your paycheck. The word”salary” is derived from the word SALT, which is what was thekey currency of the North Africans for hundreds of years. SALTwas a key commodity substance used for preserving food.

A butter and dried cod banking system? Reconciling your monthlybank statement must have been very messy! Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 28% [?]

I made my very first investment in the stock market when I wasten years old. Ever since then I have been hooked! Now I checkout hundreds of trades each year with the same excitement andenthusiasm, and each time try to find that one market at theright time that could dramatically create wealth.

If you would’ve been fortunate enough to invest $1,000 inMicrosoft when it first came public, that initial investmentwould be worth close to $300,000 today. In the last 10 yearsAmerica Online has been up 12,000% and it has come creashing lower as well!

Although statistics like this are advocated regularly by journalists and brokers the majority of investors have a very difficult time staying in an investment for that long of a period of time even though they know they are in a good company The financial markets are a never ending source of temptation trying to lure you into a new position with each passing second. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 26% [?]

A colleague of mine just returned from a scuba diving trip inCozumel, which just happens to be one of my favorite places todive. Anyway, she was telling me about an unexpected difficultyshe encountered while swimming around the corral reef down about85 feet. It wasn’t anything serious but her story reminded me ofsomething my scuba instructor used to say over and over again.”Plan your dive, and dive your plan”.

When you’re down about 90 or 100 feet the nitrogen acts on yourbody in a way that’s not too dissimilar to having one drymartini on an empty stomach. It’s called Nitrogen Narcosis,Rapture of the Depths, or Martini’s Law. So the thing to do isget your planning done while you have a clear head, (i.e. on thesurface). Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 13% [?]

Financial markets provide their participants with the most favorable conditions for purchase/sale of financial instruments they have inside. Their major functions are: guaranteeing liquidity, forming assets prices within establishing proposition and demand and decreasing of operational expenses, incurred by the participants of the market.

Financial market comprises variety of instruments, hence its functioning totally depends on instruments held. Usually it can be classified according to the type of financial instruments and according to the terms of instruments’ paying-off.

From the point of different types of instruments held the market can be divided into the one of promissory notes and the one of securities (stock market). The first one contains promissory instruments with the right for its owners to get some fixed amount of money in future and is called themarket of promissory notes, while the latter binds the issuer to pay a certain amount of money according to the return received after paying-off all the promissory notes and is called stock market. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 38% [?]

Charles H. Dow

It is interesting and amazing to note that not until Charles Dow started compiling the Dow Jones Industrial and Dow Jones Rail Index and started writing about the stock market a little over a hundred years ago, stock speculation was regarded merely as a game for the rich or as gambling for the brave.

Sure, there were the tape readers, but the majority of the public regarded Wall Street as a source of excitement – the entertainment provided freely (unless you were on the wrong side) by figures such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and the infamous Daniel Drew.

In a series of stunning editorials for the Wall Street Journal at the turn of the century, Dow laid out the foundation of his own theory on the stock market. Among them were: Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 17% [?]

Among the largest forces that affect stock prices are inflation, interest rates, bonds, commodities and currencies. At times the stock market suddenly reverses itself followed typically by published explanations phrased to suggest that the writer’s keen observation allowed him to predict the market turn.

Such circumstances leave investors somewhat awed and amazed at the infinite amount of continuing factual input and infallible interpretation needed to avoid going against the market. While there are continuing sources of input that one needs in order to invest successfully in the stock market, they are finite. If you contact me at my web site, I’ll be glad to share some with you.

What is more important though is to have a robust model for interpreting any new information that comes along. The model should take into account human nature, as well as, major market forces. The following is a personal working cyclical model that is neither perfect nor comprehensive. It is simply a lens through which sector rotation, industry behavior and changing market sentiment can be viewed. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 23% [?]

After some forty years of banking and investments, I retired in 2001. But since I do not golf, I soon found retirement to be very boring. So I decided to return to the investment world after ten months. However, those ten months were not a complete waste of time, for I had spent them in trying to utilize my forty years of investment experience to gain perspective on the most recent stock market “bubble” and subsequent “crash.”

There were several people who saw the stock market crash coming, but they had different ideas as to when it would occur. Those who were too early had to suffer the derision of their peers. It was difficult to take a stand when so many were proclaiming that we were in a “new era” of investing and that the old rules no longer applied. Since the beginning of 1998 through the market high of March 2000, among 8,000 stock recommendations by Wall Street analysts, only 29 recommended “sell.” Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 15% [?]

Is really not as important as to how you invest in the stock market. And how you invest in the stock market should take into consideration what goals you are setting for that stock market investment.

For example, are you investing for capital appreciation or for income through dividend paying stocks? Or is the investment in the stock market for the combination of both capital appreciation and dividend income?

Are you investing through a Mutual fund(s) or selecting your own individual stocks?

Do you invest with a lump-sum dollar amount or dollar-cost average into your stock or Mutual fund positions (buying the same stock or Mutual fund at different prices over the years)? Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 16% [?]