In the previous posts, we talked about how important it is to invest in software that would help us manage our finances and investments, as well as continued learning experiences for our continued growth. Today, we’ll talk about another equally crucial investment: investing in the right, great stock broker to help you keep your money revolving, even as you sleep.
Crucial Investment #3: Great Stock Brokers
We’ve already worked towards finding the right tools to manage our financial flow. We’ve also worked towards constantly upgrading our skills and our knowledge for our business and career. Now, we should work towards finding the right people or tools to help us create our passive income flow. We’re now about to explore our options for great stock brokers!
First up, your stock brokers need to be:
- Trustworthy
- Excellent at what they do
- Would customize your portfolio and match this with you: who you are, and your personality as a trader.
Great stock brokers need not be from the top brokerage firms. You just have to find the right gems and be willing to pay the price they command for their expertise. However, people like these are hard to find, but great online brokers, discount brokers and investment websites are available.
Online brokers like TradeKing would help you get started on your stock portfolio without the hassle and the wallet drain of human brokers. Other options would include Zecco, Etrade, Scottrade, OptionsHouse and OptionsXpress. These are my top picks according to ease of use and value for money.
If you’ve read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, then you understand the urgency of why you need passive income. And as the rest of life teaches us, trustworthiness and reliability are equally important. Thus, if you are thinking about investing, choose a (human) stock broker that you can trust with your life, so that you can trust him with your investments, or if you are thinking about working on the investments yourself, then choose an online stock broker service that you can count on. Trust that my picks are the best around, and if you’re not yet convinced, here’s the link for a full review of the Best Online Stock Brokers For Cheap Stock Trades.
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Investing is not just about #3. It’s all about #1 and #2 as well. Investing is a holistic exercise in constantly putting your resources into what will bring returns to your career or to your business. So, invest in the right places, and see your career/business soar!
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Other articles in this series:
Invest in Great Budgeting Software: Invest In Yourself Part 1
Invest In Your Continued Learning – Invest in Yourself Part 2
Resource List:
Discount Brokers – Learn How To Trade On Your Own
In the last post, we discussed about how great budgeting and personal finance software would benefit you by helping you manage your finances and even your investments. In this post, we’ll talk about investing in education, in order to keep upgrading YOU.
Crucial Investment #2: Continued Growth and Education
While getting an MBA would definitely be a feather in your cap, constantly learning and getting educated, continually, in your field is more than that. When I say that you need to continually grow and be educated in what you do, you don’t need to go out and secure a degree for yourself. All you really need to do is to find those opportunities to learn more and grab them.
Learning opportunities could be as close to you as the nearest bookstore, the nearest convention center in the local malls, or even your bedroom. Yes, webinars were hot, and if you want to keep growing, you shouldn’t care if the fad has passed. If the webinars offered seem relevant to your career or business, why not drop in and make the most out of free or affordable resources on the Web?
Here is an informal list of where you can find great ways to learn new things, or to at least add to what you know about your field of expertise:
- Through books that you can buy, either at your local bookstore, or online, via Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and even the eBook stores, like Amazon Kindle and the iPad Bookstore (iBook Store). There are even some titles that you can have for free. There are some websites that offer condensed versions of their products/books, so you can actually “Try before you buy” for some eBooks, and even paper books.
- Webinars were the rage around the Internet since last year. And while the hype has died down, they are still pretty much in existence, and you can still definitely learn more when you attend events like these.
- Alternatively, if you don’t want to attend webinars with interaction, especially if they charge very expensive fees, you may want to just watch tutorials and even lectures on YouTube. There are YouTube publishers who actually provide great, informative content. Videos on Revver.com are also pretty informative, maybe even more so than YouTube. If you even want to learn how to cook certain dishes, Revver.com may help you. But I digress. One great YouTuber that may help you learn how to watch the stock market is ShadowTrader. He actually gives tutorials and market updates. Maybe you may even get started investing in stocks thanks to his help!
- Podcasts: a lot of podcasts are available on iTunes, for free. Some are in radio show format, while others are in seminar, lecture or full speech format. The latter may prove more helpful. The topics range from short tips recordings, like “Quick and Dirty Tips,” magazine and news recordings, and even full academic lectures. Podcasts worth subscribing to, if you’re on the lookout for stock market, investing and personal finance resources, would include American Public Media’s “APM: Marketplace – After the Bell,” Slate Magazine’s “The Big Money Podcasts,” NYTimes.com’s “Your Money,” BusinessWeek’s “Mandel on Economics,” and others that are suggested in the personal finance and investment genre. Not only is this a treasure trove of ideas, the best part is that podcasts are FREE.
- While most people do not trust free content, in today’s Web 2.0 world, websites, especially the influential and high-authority ones, are now trustworthy sources of information. Need to learn how to cook meals in under 10 minutes? Just google it. Need to know how to mod your old laptops, google it, read it, and then work on your machines under the supervision of an expert. In like manner, you may want to start investing by learning more about the ins and outs of it. You may want to start a new business by researching about your chosen niche, as well. And while these resources are free, no one can deny how big a help these would be in getting you started in any endeavor.
- Courses and seminars are still great sources of continued education. While for some premium seminars, the kind that book authors and celebrity motivational speakers conduct, do charge a premium for their events, other seminars just charge a minimal fee. The premium seminars may be worth your time and money, however, and it could prove to be a great investment either way.
Continuously learning is more of an attitude and perspective towards life rather than the media you use to achieve that end. If you face life with the desire to keep learning, you are still investing in yourself and your career or business. This is definitely a worthy place to spend your resources: your time and money on. And with these investments, your career and business are sure to grow, because the knowledge you gain, when applied, translates to growth: building blocks towards the success you aim to achieve.
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Coming Up: Last installment of this series, Use Great Stock Brokers – get started in investing!
Previously: Invest in Great Budgeting Software: Invest In Yourself Part 1
Want more? Here are great articles on how to budget, why you need a budget, making budgeting fun, among other personal finance topics.
If there are three things that one needs to invest in, in order to be able to maximize earning potential, aside from these points outlined in this post, it would be these:
- Great budgeting software
- Continuing education
- Great stock brokers
Crucial Investment #1: Great Budgeting Software
A budget is your cornerstone in managing the finances that would come your way. Without a plan to tell your finances where they should go, a.k.a. A budget., there is a high possibility that you may spend your money through. Chances are, some of us may even just come out of a spending haze, not realizing where all that money went. Remember, a huge income is nothing unless you know how to manage that income.
In order to make things easier for you, great budgeting software is needed. While YNAB or You Need A Budget software is great for usability and for people who need simplicity in their personal finance, Quicken software is great for those who need something more comprehensive than YNAB.
The Quicken 2010 line comes in different variants: the Quicken Starter Edition ($29.99) is for basic, personal use, such as creating and managing budgets, as well as upcoming bills. Quicken Deluxe ($59.99), on the other hand, includes features which would help you save for a large purchase. Quicken Premier ($89.99), has an additional feature: the ability to track and manage investments. Other Quicken variants include Quicken Home and Business ($99.99); then Quicken Rental Property Management ($149.99).
Quicken software is possibly the closest approximate to MS Money. Since Microsoft discontinued the development and sale of MS Money, Quicken has since replaced that niche. While it has been said to be too bloated, Quicken, on a positive point, is a robust and comprehensive budgeting software. This would be great for business people who need something more intuitive than a personal budgeting software. With the investment tools of Quicken Premier, and for those who are into rental property, Quicken Rental Property Management, software tools such as Quicken software definitely make managing your business a lot more easier. And an easier time in doing tasks like keeping track of expenses, financial influx and investments would free up your time and your energy for more productive pursuits, like expanding your business.
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Coming Up: Invest In Your Continued Learning in order to upgrade yourself, and learning how to invest in stocks when you Use Great Stock Brokers.
More tools for financial freedom.
I was like everyone else in this recession who wanted to hunker down and conserve resources; the urge to hoard my money was over-powering. Yet, every good business owner knows that it takes money to grow money. Then, I thought: “If I haven’t the funds to invest in my own future success, it’s doubtful I’ll convince anyone else to do so either.” That’s when I made a commitment to invest in myself and my business. If you want to use that growth to get an edge on the competition, then hoarding is not the answer. Now is the perfect time to learn where to invest your funds in order to maximize small business opportunities for growth, as we anticipate an economic recovery by 2010.
Understand How To Invest For Business Growth
Your money should be planted like a seed in the Spring, and you should expect a harvest when it matures. That’s why the investments that you want to look at for your business should offer the promise of significant returns, if not immediately, at least within a reasonable time period. Some investments, I learned, can produce a return immediately; for instance, updating infrastructure is one investment that can pay itself back fairly quickly.
As a work-at-home business owner, I’ve realized that I could take government incentives that provide energy rebates on my home’s infrastructure and create future savings, releasing that money for my business. Many businesses are starting to see the wisdom of adding a thin film solar roof to an establishment, of updating their furnaces or other energy systems to offset rising energy costs, and of keeping infrastructure costs low. While some of those returns are immediate, the final recouping of costs may take years. Other types of investments take longer to mature, but it’s still worth investigating.
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What’s ahead for crude oil traders? How do things bode for our economy? Here are some speculations.
The following INO.com video discusses the behavior of the crude oil market over the past year. There’s been a lot of volatility over the past 12 months, but if you’re a trader, you’re probably more interested in what INO.com’s resident expert, Adam Hewison, has to say about the trends.
Check this link or the image below to watch the video:
According to Adam, the charts for crude oil are pointing to an uptrend, which are in conflict with the seasonal behavior of crude oil prices. At this time of the year, the typical price movement is downward, but prices right now look like they will buck this trend.
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Spot gold (FOREX: XAUUSDO) is currently trading over $1,000 an ounce, and as the dollar falls, the price of gold rises. Overall, the gold market has been doing pretty well lately, being on a general uptrend since October of last year (which coincidentally, was when the financial crisis reared its ugly head).
Now that gold has broken through the thousand dollar an ounce level, what’s next for it? Well, I follow a few technical analysts, including the guy behind INO.com, a well-known investment research site. In the following video on spot gold, he mentions that gold has the potential to hit $1,200 to $1,300 an ounce.
Check this link or the image below to watch the video:
The same analysis has been applied to the GLD ETF, known as the SPDR Gold Trust ETF, which is another market that tracks gold. As expected, its behavior is pretty much similar to the XAUUSDO, but is considered less volatile.
Are you thinking of buying gold right now?
More reasons to build a diversified stock portfolio.
I read this article on Motley Fool that reminds us just how important it is to diversify our investment portfolios. A pure U.S. stock portfolio will make you pretty vulnerable right now. Why? Because of the threat of inflation. And if it’s not that, you can also worry about deflation, which can also be devastating to your investments.
Here’s why inflation is so tough on our domestic equities. With costs for doing business rising across the board, it begins to put a damper on companies and their performance. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way to look at it is this: the stock market rises when it faces a recessionary environment and falls in a stronger economy. This is because the stock market looks ahead: during a slow economy, the market expects the Fed to take on an “easy credit” approach and will expand the money supply. When inflation is around, the Fed will instead control interest rates and the money supply, by tightening.
On this note, there’s an economics professor named Charles R. Nelson who’s come up with this interesting trading rule that is based on the relationship of the consumer price index and inflation:
“When CPI inflation is on the rise, stay out of stocks; when CPI inflation is on the decline, buy stocks.”
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We’ve explored day trading vs long term investing before. Let’s now take a closer look at stock market timing.
Market timing is a strategy that people use to determine when to stay or leave the market, or when to buy and sell their positions in a particular asset class. Active traders try to make money by predicting future moves in the market. Whether or not they’re successful at this depends on their skill, luck and experience.
So why do people day trade or perform market timing? Different investors and traders time the market for various reasons. For some, it’s because they believe that they can beat out average stock market returns, which typically range between 8% to 10% annually over the long term. For others, it’s because they want to protect their positions and reduce risks to their portfolio. And for many others, it’s all of the above!
I’ve seen all kinds of market timing over the years. While many people use online stock trading tools, trade on a daily basis and make high volume trades with small gains per trade, others use a different strategy and simply trade occasionally: their time between trades is long and they time the market as more of a long term strategy. If they sense the market shifting away from its long term trend, they may make a move to either buy or sell.
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