didnt mean to migrate this thread into what the other one should have been.



[Edited on December 12, 2006 at 10:16 AM. Reason : e]

12/12/2006 10:14:49 AM

[Edited on December 12, 2006 at 10:18 AM. Reason : you suck ben]

12/12/2006 10:17:20 AM

TIE down ~3.5%

i bought some last week at 33 and some change.

well, maybe it'll bounce me back into the black, like AKAM did for me...

12/12/2006 10:38:48 AM

bobbydigital, i must say i have a new found respect for the people in this thread after taking bus 225

if u were to give one piece of financial advice, what would it be?

12/12/2006 10:40:37 AM

Quote :

"I'd fuck a cheese grater before an annuity."

-bobbydigital

12/12/2006 10:44:24 AM

here's my advice, "save early, save often"

12/12/2006 10:45:37 AM

Especially when using ms word

12/12/2006 10:50:27 AM

i kinda thought annuities seemed like a good idea...huggard made annuities sound like a pretty good option(although i'd only fuck around with gaurenteed annuities)

huggard also says stay away from bonds, stay away from like gold and silver, stay away from coins, and stay away from penny stocks

[Edited on December 12, 2006 at 10:56 AM. Reason : .]

12/12/2006 10:52:23 AM

I would not invest directly in gold/silver but I have one natural resource mutual fund which contains that sort of stuff including oil.

12/12/2006 11:05:16 AM

^ go here and sort by category and performance

http://finance.yahoo.com/etf/browser/mkt?c=0&k=3&f=0&o=d&cs=21&ce=40

12/12/2006 11:11:40 AM

^^^

An annuity is advantageous if you choose a fixed annuity with annuitization (income guaranteed for life) and you end up living a long ass time. The downside is that if you die a few years after retirement the rest of the principal goes to the insurance company, not your heirs. In other words it's like a reverse life insurance policy.. it protects you from [poverty as a result of exhausting your savings by] living longer rather than dying sooner.

Other than that and perhaps a few other corner cases, there are several other options with less restrictions on being able to access your money without penalty that are, in my opinion, better than an annuity.

12/12/2006 11:41:04 AM

when i first learned about mutual funds i really wanted to do them...seems like a good idea to have a lot of different stocks

when i learned that if you have a roth ira, its tax deferred, i REALLY wanted to do my mutual funds through that

what are some other tax deferred type investments?...all i remember him saying was that the roth ira is tax defered...and speaking of taxes, i'd DEFINITELY getting itemized deductions when i'm rich

[Edited on December 12, 2006 at 11:46 AM. Reason : .]

12/12/2006 11:46:38 AM

[Edited on December 12, 2006 at 11:54 AM. Reason : ]

12/12/2006 11:50:51 AM

right... a traditional IRA is tax deferred... you don't pay taxes on the money until you withdraw. A Roth IRA is invested with after-tax income, and not taxed again when you withdraw. but that's more of an argument of semantics.

12/12/2006 11:52:53 AM

anybody else pick up GRMN lately?

12/12/2006 12:15:48 PM

What's everyone's take on participating in Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP) ? I read somewhere not to invest in one's company too much. I don't see why not, esp. coz I'll be getting 15% off of the market value when buying. Is it a good idea to max out (10% of gross) on ESPP ?

12/12/2006 1:27:28 PM

^^^a ROTH is not tax deferred, it is tax-free earnings. because the money you put in is post-tax. The only other way to have access to tax-free earnings are through a variable annuity or variable life-insurance. If you have any specific questions about all he financial stuff out there, let me know. I work for an investment firm in Raleigh and can answer some of your questions.

Matthew Stokes
(919) 341-1636

PS -picked up BMY today. Got out of SIRI. got to take some losses for april!

[Edited on December 12, 2006 at 1:29 PM. Reason : ]

12/12/2006 1:28:00 PM

^^ yes.

A guaranteed MINIMUM 15% return is a no-brainer.

but if your company's stock is subject to a high level of volatility, you're probably better off getting that 15%+ return as soon as you reach the end of the cycle rather than holding and risking a loss if you are concerned about being too heavily weighted in your own company.

The strategy i take is that I keep each ESPP lot for a year (where the tax liability drops to the capital gains amount versus ordinary income) and then sell.

12/12/2006 2:11:04 PM

^good advice. If it is pre-tax, keep it to 5% of your portfolio. Sell some when you are eligible (if it is volitile). Let the rest work for you. If you get it at a 15% discount, get all you can and sell some when you are eligible to keep it to 5-10% of your portfolio. Risk is good, but too much risk can come back to bite you. And since individual stocks are arguably the riskiest investment out there, keep it to around 5%.

12/12/2006 2:15:55 PM

What is the time period you have to wait for the gains to be taxed at 15%, 1 year?

12/12/2006 2:55:36 PM

^^^ & ^^ Thanks for the re-assurance! I have invested 10% of my gross for the 6-month period beginning december. I was thinking along the same lines as BobbyDigital in holding the stock for 1 year to prevent more tax $$$. But then again, I want to play it safe and if there's a considerable growth in 6 months time, I'll be inclined to sell it.

On a related topic, does anyone here look to the analysts' mean recommendation (buy/sell) number in finace.yahoo.com?

12/12/2006 4:06:52 PM

nope.. those mean nothing to me.

You'll have one analyst rate a stock as strong buy, and another one from a different house rate it as strong sell. Most of these analysts have their own agendas, and i consider that piece of data to mostly be noise.

12/12/2006 4:08:27 PM

For better or worse, sometimes the announcement of new ratings can drastically change the stock's price.

12/12/2006 4:10:56 PM

i forget the name...but there is some thick ass report(i think its like 600 pages or something) that comes out every 2 weeks...each page is a different stock with all types of financial info and it has the beta score thing...huggard said they have it at the ncsu library for free...after monday i'm gonna check it out some i think

12/12/2006 7:56:25 PM

The Morning Star report?

12/12/2006 9:25:55 PM

^^ you may be talking about Valueline

12/12/2006 10:05:01 PM

Can someone briefly explain what "day trading" is and why it is "illegal"?

Thanks.

12/13/2006 10:12:55 AM

Do you mean insider trading?

12/13/2006 10:16:15 AM

No.

I was told that the buying/selling of stocks on a daily basis is illegal (day trading).

But, wanted a second opinion.

12/13/2006 10:21:02 AM

As far as I know, day trading isn't illegal...
It probably just isn't smart.

12/13/2006 10:21:31 AM

yeah, there's nothing illegal about it.

Lots of people do it for a living. It's very very risky, but perfectly legit.

12/13/2006 10:25:48 AM

hahaha who teh fuck told you it was illegal?

cut them out of your life immediately

12/13/2006 10:28:48 AM

BD, AKAM has been having a nice run recently...

12/13/2006 10:29:38 AM

You bought in the mid 40's, right? So that's a pretty sweet return for you.

I bought at 52-ish, so i'm up some, but wishing I bought some more when it had dropped.

12/13/2006 10:38:48 AM

Just be sure you wait at least a day before selling any of it so you don't get into any trouble.

12/13/2006 10:40:59 AM

I got in to AKAM at $46.48, so it's been a nice return.
I also got in to STX at $21.50 so again that has been nice as well.

Unfortunately my gains from AKAM and STX have been more or less canceled out by my losses from TRID which I got into at $23.80, $21.25, and $20.35. I'm going to hold onto it for awhile and hope that the reports coming in show good growth in the flat panel markets. I haven't sold any of my AKAM, STX, or TRID yet so it's all still on paper and theoretical at this point.

12/13/2006 10:48:36 AM

Can't remember if I posted it or not but I decided to take a risky play with Delta Airlines a little while ago. Got 250 shares of that at $1.41 just to have some fun. It went down for a while but the past several days have been nice. I'm considering picking up a few more shares; probably should have done that when it was at ~$1.20 instead of now at $1.77.

If they get bought out I can see the share price rising a good bit. Chances that Delta will disappear completely are pretty small, so while it's a risky investment it isn't as bad as some other penny stocks (if you could call an airline stock a penny stock), IMHO.

12/13/2006 10:55:42 AM

just to keep perspective

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?column=Sophisticated+Investor

12/13/2006 11:43:16 AM

Damn, GRMN is up 6% since I bought it on Friday.

HOG has dipped down quite a bit if anyone wants to get in on it.

I still think that its a good time to pick up PFE while its near 25.

[Edited on December 13, 2006 at 3:41 PM. Reason : .]

12/13/2006 3:41:01 PM

I just dropped all my HOG at 74 last week and now it's down in the 68s. I dont think HOG is a good play right now, but could be wrong.

12/13/2006 10:19:15 PM

what investment site/company does everyone use and how much do they charge per trade?

12/13/2006 10:30:47 PM

^^ What tipped you off?

I don't mind holding it and writing covered calls on it.

12/13/2006 11:11:12 PM

^^Scottrade

$7 per

market, limit, stop, stop limit

12/14/2006 2:01:02 AM

^^ Well I had originally picked it up a few years back when it was in the 50s. So it's gone up a fair amount and I had just been reading around that it might be on the down trend a bit so I decided to get out of it.

^ Thanks.

12/14/2006 9:34:19 AM

I have an account with scottrade as well. My last account, tdwaterhouse, started charging inactivity fees hence why I switched.

12/14/2006 9:53:22 AM

Article: The best investment advice you'll never get
http://www.sanfran.com/home/view_story/1507/

long article, but you'll get the gist of it from the first 3 paragraphs:

Quote :

"For 35 years, Bay Area finance revolutionaries have been pushing a personal investing strategy that brokers despise and hope you ignore. The story of a rebellion that's slowly but surely putting money into the pockets of millions of Americans, winning powerful converts, and making money managers from California Street to Wall Street squirm. As Google’s historic August 2004 IPO approached, the company’s senior vice president, Jonathan Rosenberg, realized he was about to spawn hundreds of impetuous young multimillionaires. They would, he feared, become the prey of Wall Street brokers, financial advisers, and wealth managers, all offering their own get-even-richer investment schemes. Scores of them from firms like J.P. Morgan Chase, UBS, Morgan Stanley, and Presidio Financial Partners were already circling company headquarters in Mountain View with hopes of presenting their wares to some soon-to-be-very-wealthy new clients. Rosenberg didn’t turn the suitors away; he simply placed them in a holding pattern. Then, to protect Google’s staff, he proposed a series of in-house investment teach-ins, to be held before the investment counselors were given a green light to land. Company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt were excited by the idea and gave it the go-ahead. One by one, some of the most revered names in investment theory were brought in to school a class of brilliant engineers, programmers, and cybergeeks on the fine art of personal investing, something few of them had thought much about. First to arrive was Stanford University’s William (Bill) Sharpe, 1990 Nobel Laureate economist and professor emeritus of finance at the Graduate School of Business. Sharpe drew a large and enthusiastic audience, which he could have wowed with a PowerPoint presentation on his “gradient method for asset allocation optimization” or his “returns-based style analysis for evaluating the performance of investment funds.” But he spared the young geniuses all that complexity and offered a simple formula instead. “Don’t try to beat the market,” he said. Put your savings into some indexed mutual funds, which will make you just as much money (if not more) at much less cost by following the market’s natural ebb and flow, and get on with building Google."

12/14/2006 11:03:10 AM

Delta's way down. I was pretty happy yesterday but today..whew!

12/14/2006 11:32:46 AM

Anyone have any interesting new for today?
I'm considering buying some more TRID...
edit: bought another 50 shares of TRID...

[Edited on December 14, 2006 at 3:25 PM. Reason : ]

12/14/2006 3:18:05 PM

Just sold 111 shares of AKAM @ 55.95 (bought at 52.17).

Seriously considering a TRID re-entry.

bought 320 shares of TRID @ 19.32

[Edited on December 14, 2006 at 3:36 PM. Reason : i'm a copycat]

12/14/2006 3:30:07 PM

The fist flight of the F-35 JSF is tomorrow.

Might be a good time to pick up some LMT.

I sold a handful of puts on it.

12/14/2006 3:51:20 PM