D_House
Footballguy
This is a good posting. Just for kicks I went to the first two pages of the thread (from Jan 2013) and looked up tickers that were being discussed as buys.A word of caution here.....
You say this is the money you play with, so I hope you are indeed understanding that this will be play money. A LOT of the stocks mentioned in this thread have extraordinary risks associated with them and due to these risks you need to receive a premium return to justify these risks. You are up a lot of money in the past few months which is great, but you need to understand that this is a very small amount of time. And stocks, believe it or not, do not always go up. The only reason I even dare mention this is because I worry about some of the people in this thread. I cringe at some of the trades being made, in fact, I probably have a good half dozen posters on ignore in here because I am sick of hearing about every damn trade they make, and how they make 15 bucks here or a 3.5% return in 4 hours, and so on and so forth. You are dabbling with retirement money.
I am in the same demographic region as Nigel - married, 3 kids, relatively same ages, college expenses, yada yada yada. I really hope people aren't blindly following these trades with retirement funds, but alas it seems like a lot of people are. I don't mean to sound like debbie downer at all, but this stock run from last April till now has been unbelievable. I am also years ahead of retirement, in fact, I could probably retire now if needed, but I'm going to wait 3-4 more years or so, just in case.
I hope that people that are chasing returns like this are using money they can afford to lose. I will not liken this to flat out gambling, but.....
I am a very active participant in the stock and options market. I self manage all of my and my wife's accounts. I am by no means an expert, but I did stay at a holiday inn once, do have a degree in finance, and have been investing since I had to phone in trades, and they cost $99. I was amped when I could do trades for $49 and then it was so awesome when the internet came around and I could do all my trading for $19 each. I'm old.
Anyway, these comments have been brought to you by the peanut gallery. I am firmly on the train with you all, and pray it doesn't end for awhile, but I really do hope everyone understands there is a price to be paid eventually (be it stock market correction, taxes, inflation - oh that is coming).
Only two (QQQ and something called CPRX) of about fifteen tickers beat a boring S&P index fund if held until today. Five lost money. And this is in a near-continuous bull market.
Notably, there was heavy AAPL discussion - but mostly people unsure of whether to stay with it or sell, not buy. AAPL subsequently did twice as well as an S&P index. There was also someone who shorted AMZN (didn't go well).
I enjoy reading about the trades here, but I don't have the stomach for it. I'm sticking with my target date fund.