Funds are the way to go. They offer diversity and professional management. Investing in stocks requires constant attention. If you are on vacation when one of your stocks bombs, you will have a very unpleasant surprise waiting for you on your return.
My family goes into "debt" since most of our investment seems to turn pretty good profit and my mom has a 1.9% life time APR on her credit card. (crazy penalty if she lapse but so far she's been on the ball )
Neno technology, that's the next big thing. Whoever build a commercially viable firm with that wins big in the next round.
My current IRA asset allocation is: 5% Money Market 25% Domestic Bonds 5% Junk Bonds (Vanguard High-Yield Corporate) 5% Intl Bonds (2.5% PIMCO Foreign Bond + 2.5% PIMCO Emerging Markets Bond) 25% Domestic Stock (15% Vanguard 500 Index + 10% Vanguard Health Care) 10% Small Cap Stock (5% Royce Micro-Cap Trust +5% ETF : DJ Small-Cap Value Index) 10% Intl Stock (Vanguard European Stock Index) 5% Emerging Market Stock (Templeton Dragon Fund) 10% Real Estate (Vanguard REIT Index) Market bets are with Vanguard Health Care fund and with the Templeton Dragon Fund. Harrisment, this is just an illustration of an asset allocation strategy. Your 401K will not provide you this many options. Your 401K should provide you with a SP500 index fund (asset class : domestic large cap stock) a bond fund (asset class : investment grade midterm domestic bonds) money market foreign / interntional stock fund domestic small cap fund eg an extended market index fund REIT fund (real estate investment trust, asset class : real estate) You could create your asset allocation from the above funds. I would use a little of each asset class. The basic premise of asset allocation is that not all of your eggs are in one basket. A bad year in one asset class will be balanced out by a good year in another. Year to year you should see positive growth in your bottomline without the wild swing up or down. Depending on your risk tolerance and the lenght of your investment horizon, you could add more weight to the equity funds.
I think he meant Neo technology. I hear in the future the Matrix is going to be a heavy growth industry.
First Eagle Overseas Fund Class A - SGOVX Calamos Growth Fund Class A - CVGRX First Eagle Global Fund Class A - SGENX A recent addition up 8% since July Calamos Conv and High Income - CHY And my fixed income Fund is: Opppenheimer INTL Bond Fd CL A - OIBAX (A nice dividend investment) Most of these pay dividends. DD
Older and smarter. I am 45. I am planning on living to my 90s so my investment horizon is not short. My asset allocation for fixed return assets is 40%, which is fairly aggressive. 10% of the 40% is in the high risk / reward end of fixed return asset class (intl and junk). Thus, this might not be as conservative as you think. BTW, what if stocks underperform over the next ten year to counterbalance what happened in the 90s? We talking about 7-8% pretax return. Bonds don't look so bad then.
All I can say is China!!!!!!!! China's economy was up by 9.5% last year, most big businese around the world are trying to do businese in China.
Keep it simple is good advice. You can analyze individual stocks until the cows come home, but for the vast majority of them to do well, the overall market needs to do well. With this in mind, why not buy the market and achieve diversification in the process? ProFunds has a family of funds that I like quite a bit (the Ultra funds). They provide you leverage to selected indices. For instance, I currently hold two of their funds, one provides 2x the return of the QQQQ (Nasdaq 100), the other does the same for the S&P 500. If the market is up 10%, I'm up 20%. However, if the market is down 10%, I'm down 20%. You can see how it works. I complement this investment with an investment in a yield oriented, energy stock. Probably a better way to complement the investment in the ProFunds Ultra is to invest in a high yield bond mutual fund. You want something whose return is not highly correlated to your other investment. I don't waste time trying to outsmart the market. It's risky and it has the potential to eat up a considerable chunk of time. If I were starting over today, my invested portfolio would look like this: 25% ProFunds Ultrabull (ulpsx) 25% ProFunds UltraOTC (uopsx) 25% High Yield Bond Mutual Fund 25% Another yield oriented investment
Self directed plans include whatever you want. I have housed both of these investments in 401k's. I think it's hilarious that people still denigrate high yield bonds by calling them "junk". We are talking about yields as low as 7% being called "junk". Hilarious.
