. i avoided google, microsoft, and time warner tho they seem to be trading very low right now but i hate them all so there! let them grovel to the govt for money. bah.
How low is low? I don't follow the stock market much, let alone individual stocks. But, I've seen Google trade between $400 - $500 per share. I can't imagine buying one share of stock for that much money. If Google is under a $100, snag it, no matter how much you hate them.
i would but id hate myself in the morning. lol. google was one of the stocks that went down today. it ended somewhere around 257 a share. the 52 week high for it was 724 tho. for ONE share. yikes. thats too rich for my blood. i dont have enough moolah to play with to make that worthwhile.
i was seriously thinking of investing in citibank since that stock is in the toilet and the news rumor has it that they will be bailed out in the am. it occurs to me tho that they might still go in the toilet or get bought out even with a bailout and because i know absolutely nothing about this stock stuff i dont know what happens to company stock if they get taken over by some other corp? anybody know?
I saw the Citibank story this morning when I woke up and thought the same thing. If you own stock in a company, and it gets bought out by another company, you own stock in the new company. It is usually something less than your original stock purchase, but it depends on the buyout agreement. For instance, if you bought 100 shares of Citicorp, and Citi was bought out by Chase. Chase could offer to buy the stock of Citi for 50% of par. You would then own 50 shares of Chase at the end of the merger. However, your basis in your Chase shares would be the full purchase price of the Citi stock.
ok, thank you! thats good to know. id read that goldman sachs was the likely purchaser of citi so i bought that instead. it did really well today it was up 18 dollars a share at one point but ended somewhere up around 13 dollars a share. for the first days experiment things went pretty well. the three solar stocks i bought went up a whole lot. sunpower went up 8 dollars a share, first solar went up 17 dollars a share and at one point today was up 23 dollars a share. holy moley. the third was trading at 2.20 dollars a share to begin and went up to 3.50 which is a big increase percentage wise which people tell me is a good thing and you can buy more of them when they are that cheap. those did the best. oh and apple, that did well too. it rose 10 dollars a share. so i didnt lose anything....yet....the ones that people told me were great stocks, verizon, alcoa, johnson and johnson all had very small gains and pepsi was actually losing money all day but ended with a small increase. i guess they pay dividends tho and are considered good long term investments. thats the original intent of the stock market isnt it? to invest in the future and not to day trade. i was tempted to dump those stocks that had big gains today. honestly, i did feel like i was at the blackjack table and ya just know the next hand is gonna wipe out everything that you just won. and that is prolly what will happen. i checked them all around 330 with the idea that tomorrow will not bring the kind of gains that today did but didnt do anything. i suck at gambling so it seems inevitable that tomorrow will bring the big sell off (and when i looked at the after hours trading all had dropped some from the closing) so hopefully i wont lose it all. it is interesting tho to do this. prolly very irresponsible to be throwing the last of my savings at it since really it does feel like im at the casino. prolly wiser to stuff it in the mattress or buy gold bullion or something.
If you are going to play in the stock market, be sure you keep accurate records of all purchases and sales for income tax purposes. When you sell a stock, you will need to report the sale on your income tax return, but you have to provide the date and amount of purchase. Another tip to make your life easy, sell the stock in the same blocks as your purchase them. If you buy 100 shares, sell 100 shares. Don't break it up and sell 25 shares at a time. You'll go insane trying to keep up with the basis if you buy and sell a lot.
this is all good to know, thank you so much! ill start a folder for it i guess. i dont know how long ill do this, prolly only till i lose a lot of it and then get scared and stop. ive done occasional purchases of stock before on a whim or a tip and sold them quickly i have some that my parents did for me when i was growing up and i still have them and get quarterly checks and some of these should should be sold cause they are real turkeys now. for instance i received a check for 30 cents. it cost more to mail the thing yanno? but i have no idea where the original certificates are so i keep them tho id love to cash them in. but ive never sat down and done something so involved as this.
Of course this last paragraph doesn't apply if you're only using retirement money to invest.
no my retirement things are not self directed so alas i cant play with those. id feel better about it if i were. less frightened about the outcome i guess. like 90% of america most of my assets are in my home and retirement accounts. i have my emergency slush fund which ive tried to keep at the 6 month salary level tho i have to keep dipping into it. i recently had to get a used car for one of my student kids since his head gasket blew and i used some to pay off the medical bills from my health disaster earlier this year. my original intent was to play with the money till i made enough to cover those and maybe bring the safety net up to the one year level. its not money i can afford to lose tho. i invested the whole thing and if it blows up i really will be living without a net.
I always thought I should own stock in Pepsi and Tampax. These are products I've used consistently throughout my life.
tampax! now why didnt i think of that? i wonder how it did today? who makes it?
two of the environmental stocks i picked were trading in the 80s which appears to be the ytd low but the 52 year highs for both were in the mid 300s. that might work out if things pick up. another was trading at 18 as of friday but the 52 year high was 89. the everyday ordinary ones were things i either use or like that seem like they would survive the recession. i avoided google, microsoft, and time warner tho they seem to be trading very low right now but i hate them all so there! let them grovel to the govt for money. bah.
How low is low? I don't follow the stock market much, let alone individual stocks. But, I've seen Google trade between $400 - $500 per share. I can't imagine buying one share of stock for that much money. If Google is under a $100, snag it, no matter how much you hate them.
i was seriously thinking of investing in citibank since that stock is in the toilet and the news rumor has it that they will be bailed out in the am. it occurs to me tho that they might still go in the toilet or get bought out even with a bailout and because i know absolutely nothing about this stock stuff i dont know what happens to company stock if they get taken over by some other corp? anybody know?
I saw the Citibank story this morning when I woke up and thought the same thing. If you own stock in a company, and it gets bought out by another company, you own stock in the new company. It is usually something less than your original stock purchase, but it depends on the buyout agreement. For instance, if you bought 100 shares of Citicorp, and Citi was bought out by Chase. Chase could offer to buy the stock of Citi for 50% of par. You would then own 50 shares of Chase at the end of the merger. However, your basis in your Chase shares would be the full purchase price of the Citi stock.
If you are going to play in the stock market, be sure you keep accurate records of all purchases and sales for income tax purposes. When you sell a stock, you will need to report the sale on your income tax return, but you have to provide the date and amount of purchase. Another tip to make your life easy, sell the stock in the same blocks as your purchase them. If you buy 100 shares, sell 100 shares. Don't break it up and sell 25 shares at a time. You'll go insane trying to keep up with the basis if you buy and sell a lot.
Of course this last paragraph doesn't apply if you're only using retirement money to invest.
so heres a question for you all. what are your favorite things to buy? what things do you still need to buy in tight times? and if it was in the budget what else might you buy? im a diet coke junkie but i think pepsi would be a better investment. im looking on my xmas list and companies like yankee candle and black and decker and ll bean are represented. of the three of those i suspect only one would make a good investment.
I always thought I should own stock in Pepsi and Tampax. These are products I've used consistently throughout my life.
since the plan managers of my 2 retirement accounts have seemingly left for the bahamas or something, ive decided that if i am gonna be broke i might as well go all the way and get totally cleaned out. so ive been doing some serious looking at picking stocks these past few weeks and took the plunge tonight putting in my order for the am. what i decided to do was look at companies who are "green" and up and coming and invest the majority of the mad moolah there. im counting on at least some of the new jobs that obama is going to try and create to be "green" jobs and these companies supply those sorts of efforts. and then i decided to pick 5 everyday stocks that have continuously paid dividends and are strong yet undervalued because of general market conditions and put the rest there. ill add here that i know, like nothing, about the stock market. nada, zip, zilch. im either gonna be really happy in 6 months or jumping out of the top floor of some building (jk) but either way its been kind of a fun experiment. i may say later of course that it would have been just as fun if i hadnt thrown away the rest of my savings and played on paper like using the blackjack trainer rather than the online gambling sites. but nothing ventured...
two of the environmental stocks i picked were trading in the 80s which appears to be the ytd low but the 52 year highs for both were in the mid 300s. that might work out if things pick up. another was trading at 18 as of friday but the 52 year high was 89. the everyday ordinary ones were things i either use or like that seem like they would survive the recession. i avoided google, microsoft, and time warner tho they seem to be trading very low right now but i hate them all so there! let them grovel to the govt for money. bah.
i was seriously thinking of investing in citibank since that stock is in the toilet and the news rumor has it that they will be bailed out in the am. it occurs to me tho that they might still go in the toilet or get bought out even with a bailout and because i know absolutely nothing about this stock stuff i dont know what happens to company stock if they get taken over by some other corp? anybody know?
so heres a question for you all. what are your favorite things to buy? what things do you still need to buy in tight times? and if it was in the budget what else might you buy? im a diet coke junkie but i think pepsi would be a better investment. im looking on my xmas list and companies like yankee candle and black and decker and ll bean are represented. of the three of those i suspect only one would make a good investment.
