Showing posts with label nervous investors. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nervous investors. Show all posts

Friday 11 June 2010

How To Start Investing In Stock Market – Ultimate Guide For Beginners

How To Start Investing In Stock Market – Ultimate Guide For Beginners

Stock market proven to be the goldmine to most sophisticated investors. However, not many beginners really know how to start investing in stock market. As a result, they end up losing their hard earned money. In this article, I’ll share with you my personal insight on how beginners should start their stock investing career.
How to Start Investing in Stock Market with Long Term Stock Investing

From my personal stock investing experience, invest for long term growth proven to be the most profitable money-making strategy. Most importantly, due to its nature that prone to short to medium term price volatility can offer the least downside risk for most beginners. After all the wealthiest people in the planet (Warren Buffet) make fortune from this exact same strategy!

Sound’s too good to be true?

However, if you have significant short term financial commitment (retirement, children’s education, medical expenses etc) for your investment sum, it’s better to avoid this strategy in the first place. Reason being, you might lose money to short term price volatility should you cash out on such situations.

In order to make thousands if not millions from this simple strategy, you must first start with short listing great stocks that have huge growth and profit potentials. You may use several key financial ratios to begin with; such as Return on Equity (ROE), Earnings per Share Growth Rate (EPSGR) and Debt to Equity Ratio (D/E).

Secondly, determine how much the company worth for. You can do this by calculating its intrinsic value. As there are various ways to calculate intrinsic value, evaluate each of them with grain of salt. The truth is nobody knows exactly the intrinsic value of the company; including the CEO of the company itself.

Therefore, you must consider margin of safety when investing in such stocks to reduce risk exposure. Depending on your risk tolerance, buying stock that is below 40 to 60 per cent of its intrinsic value should be good enough. This will not only reduce the risk of losing money, it will also reward you with more than 15 per cent return per year!

How to Start Investing in Stock Market with Momentum Stock Investing

Despite huge benefits of long term stock investing mentioned above, the real challenge to new stock investors are buying great stocks at discounted price. I said it is the real challenge because you might have to wait years before the opportunities come to you or you can be sceptical when the opportunity nicely presented to you.

The first one should not be a big deal, but the second one is.

Reason being, great stocks can only drop in price when most investors pessimistic of the overall future of the country, industry or the company itself. At that situation, you must be tough on yourself and proceed with your investment plan. Otherwise, you have to wait for years before it can come back to you.

While waiting for the opportunities come, you can ride on the bull market with momentum stock investing strategy. If investing for long term is about “buy-low-sell-high”, momentum investing is about “buy-high-sell-higher”. With this method, you are basically betting on the trend as the stock price rallies.

The real challenge of this investing method is you don’t want to buy the stock at its peak since you can be the ultimate prey when the trend reverses. There are two ways to overcome this; keep yourself informed on news that relates to your stock and implement stop lose strategy. This will not avoid the risk of losing money though, but at least, you can minimize the losses.


You can rake in millions of dollars if you know how to invest in stock market the right way.

Wednesday 17 June 2009

Financial crisis: The options for nervous investors?

Financial crisis: The options for nervous investors?
For everyday investors who have so far stood firm and headed the calls not to panic, they must be wondering whether their courage will pay dividends.

By Paul Farrow
Published: 9:10AM BST 30 Sep 2008

The FTSE100 has fallen to four year low leaving investors wondering whether worse is to come.

Henk Potts at Barclays Stockbrokers, said: "Inevitably this will be an extremely volatile market for sometime and there are some big hurdles to overcome. But many people with a brave heart are seeing this as a buying opportunity - our ratio of buyers to sellers yesterday was 72:28."


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This time a year ago the overall message was also to stay calm – although one stockbroker was a little more frank: "If you are going to panic, then panic early."

Those that refused to hold their nerve and did indeed panic, will be feeling smug right now because the bear market has long arrived. The FTSE100 has fallen from 6,200 to below 4,600 since 2004.

All but the most hardened investors will be wondering whether it still makes sense to cut and run. It is easy to be advised to stick with it, but seeing the pounds drop day by day is difficult to take – and with further woe widely predicted then who can blame investors from saying enough is enough.

Mark Dampier, head of research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: "In all honesty no one has experience anything quite like this so any view is just that a view. In the UK the financial/property crisis will herald a UK recession for the whole of 2009. But stock markets are a discounting mechanism and will bottom well before the economy does which makes it very difficult to judge, as bad news will predominate.

"September and October are notoriously bad months in the stock markets and are living up to their name but we are now nearer the end game with markets. The politicians in the US will have to swallow their pride and egos as John Major did in 1992 and comeback with a package. This is not a bail out of Wall Street rich kids – it hits everyone and especially those in the real economy. It will be messy until economically illiterate politicians are made to see sense by the markets.

"At times like this I am reminded of the words of St John Templeton that 'the time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy'. We are surely getting very close to that point."

Andrew Merricks, at Brighton-based Skerritts Consultants, says: "Thinking logically, not every company will go bust (far from it), so there must be a floor to which valuations can fall before bouncing. Perhaps we need to take notice of other regions than the UK, which is traditionally where we feel most comfortable. The positives are, admittedly, relative, but there are some. Firstly, the dividend yield on the FTSE All Share has exceeded the yield on the 10-year gilt.

"This historically has been a great indicator to future share price rallies, with the last time this happened being in March 2003 just as the markets took off. The other similarity with 2003 is that there were articles at that time questioning whether equities would ever work again and we had entered the “capitulation” stage, when the everyday investor had given up hope. Today feels somewhat similar. The world will be a different place as a consequence of September 2008. If this is so, it should be at the top of everyone’s priorities who has savings, investments or pensions to reassess how theirs will fare as events unfold."

Boll Doll, vice-chairman and chief investment officer for global equities at BlackRock, said: "The current situation ranks among the most difficult investors have faced in memory, and perhaps in generations. De-leveraging and re-pricing of risk have been exacting a heavy toll on the housing, credit and equity markets. The volatility in oil and other commodity prices, coupled with uncertainty about the direction of government policy and the outcome of the coming election, have made it difficult for investors to find their footing.

Nevertheless, investors should recognise that we are in the midst of panic and outright liquidation conditions, which are usually signs of the climax in selling. While the U.S. financial sector (which has been at the heart of the problem) has experienced a significant downturn in recent weeks, that sector has not broken through the lows it established in mid-July. To us, all of this suggests that equity markets are still in the midst of a bottoming phase."

Anthony Bolton, the Fidelity fund guru – who has delivered the goods – says that if you find it difficult to stay invested in the bear market and are panicked by the bad news, then perhaps equity investing is not right for you. If that's you, cash is the obvious alternative. You can get rates of more than 6.5 per cent on the market. Bolton has started to buy shares over the past few days.

Gold is the other classic safe haven and despite its price rising in recent days as investors search for low risk assets, it is still viewed as such. About a year ago, the gold price was $667 an ounce, but it rose to a peak of over $1,000 on 17 March – coinciding with the collapse of Bear Stearns – before falling back to its current level of around $900 this week.

If you are worried about losing money, consider a guaranteed equity bond (Geb). These are fixed-term savings plans that pay out a proportion of any gains in the stock market index or indices to which they are linked. If the market falls, the initial investment is returned in full. But be aware that any index growth excludes dividends, which make a huge difference to overall returns. And ensure the plan gives you a cast iron guarantee that your capital will be returned in full whatever happens to the stock market.

For those happy to remain invested in shares, Bolton says to focus on large, good quality companies. Avoid at all costs smaller and medium-sized companies with weak balance sheets, he says.

And if you want to stick with it then take these words from Maynard Keynes, perhaps the most famous investor of them all for comfort. He wrote in 1937: "It is the one sphere of life and activity where victory, security and success is always to the minority and never to the majority. When you find anyone agreeing with you, change your mind. When I can persuade the board of my insurance company to buy a share, that, I am learning from experience, is the right moment for selling it."