Talking stocks, trading, and investing in general

[Omega Male]

especially as BTC is nearing 18k again

Time to re-up this again.

 

[Lizard23]

I know relatively little about the stock market. Other than stock from my company and my 401k, I have a financial advisor who does whatever money re-arranging he does and I have seen modest returns i am happy enough with.

A couple of years back, maybe less, i took one quarterly bonus check and started to try my luck with individual stocks. I bought into companies that I personally liked or whose services I used. I have little finance background (engineer) so this seemed like as good of a reason as any.

Stocks I purchased:
Apple
Amazon
Sonos
Tesla
Coca-Cola

 

[brokencycle]

I know relatively little about the stock market. Other than stock from my company and my 401k, I have a financial advisor who does whatever money re-arranging he does and I have seen modest returns i am happy enough with.

A couple of years back, maybe less, i took one quarterly bonus check and started to try my luck with individual stocks. I bought into companies that I personally liked or whose services I used. I have little finance background (engineer) so this seemed like as good of a reason as any.

Stocks I purchased:
Apple
Amazon
Sonos
Tesla
Coca-Cola

I make a lot of jokes in this thread, but this post is 100% serious.

I'm always suspicious of financial advisors because they normally don't have a fiduciary duty, and their primary job is to sell you stuff. If you think about it like this: you're not paying them, so who is and why? Most are glorified sales people, and they sell you funds that have way too high fees because they have convinced you stocks are complicated.

If you're interested in learning more, ask questions here or look at a place like boggleheads. The reality is you can put your money in 3-4 index funds and diversify your risk and it costs you almost nothing in fees. A place like Vanguard or Fidelity have great funds with incredibly low fees that will do a lot for you in the long run.

I stole these graphs from Vanguard, but below is a link to the SEC that shows something similar. If you invest $100k and averaged 6% return for 25 years, you would lose more than half your earnings with a fund that has 2% fees.

Here you can see the impact on returns because of fees. At 6.9% return after 30 years, your investment would be worth 7.4x what it was at the start. At 7.8% over 30 years, it would be worth 9.5x, so you could easily be talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars that are being taken from your pocket by financial advisors. To me, that is worth educating myself.

Personally, I don't actually invest in individual stocks at this time because I have more I can be investing in my 401k, but I don't think there is anything wrong with any of those choices. I would just urge you to make sure you don't fall into the common investor trap of selling when the market is down and buying when it is up.

Investment education, resources, & guidance | Vanguard

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https://www.sec.gov/investor/alerts/ib_fees_expenses.pdf

Edit: My undergrad is in engineering, and I started my career as an engineer. You're smart enough to understand market stuff.

 

[Lizard23]

Point taken and I am probably not financially savvy enough for this thread... was mostly just excited about what sonos did recently (probably mostly because I bought that arc and sub last week).

That being said I understand math and get what you are saying, but my advisor is a flat fee per year and also assists with tax stuff, college planning, insurance, refinancing, etc so I dont think it has quite the same compounding effect you describe. He is also a personal friend. I assume what you describe above would be more with a commission based advisor, and one who provided no other services.

But I am always open to learning and would be happy to learn more if my perceptions are incorrect.

 

[brokencycle]

Point taken and I am probably not financially savvy enough for this thread... was mostly just excited about what sonos did recently (probably mostly because I bought that arc and sub last week).

That being said I understand math and get what you are saying, but my advisor is a flat fee per year and also assists with tax stuff, college planning, insurance, refinancing, etc so I dont think it has quite the same compounding effect you describe. He is also a personal friend. I assume what you describe above would be more with a commission based advisor, and one who provided no other services.

But I am always open to learning and would be happy to learn more if my perceptions are incorrect.

If you're paying your advisor a flat fee and he's providing other services, that's good. I'd just ask him to share what funds he has you invested in. You can post them here or just pull them up online and look at the expense ratios. Example: Vanguard is at 0.04% vs WP Large Cap at 2.67%

 

[Omega Male]

If you're not paying two and twenty you're investing in cuck funds.

 

[venividivicibj]

If you're not paying two and twenty you're investing in cuck funds.

If you’re not in a closed-end fund you’re a pleb

 

[nootje]

If you’re not in a closed-end fund you’re a pleb

Funds? How does that work? And can I ask my family office to look into that? Is that better than buying companies outright?

 

[Darkside]

Point taken and I am probably not financially savvy enough for this thread... was mostly just excited about what sonos did recently (probably mostly because I bought that arc and sub last week).

That being said I understand math and get what you are saying, but my advisor is a flat fee per year and also assists with tax stuff, college planning, insurance, refinancing, etc so I dont think it has quite the same compounding effect you describe. He is also a personal friend. I assume what you describe above would be more with a commission based advisor, and one who provided no other services.

But I am always open to learning and would be happy to learn more if my perceptions are incorrect.

Read “A Simple Path to Wealth” by JL Collins and it will all start making sense.

 

[Piobaire]

We joke about triple leveraged funds, and to be 100% transparent I did once put 10k into one which is where I think that joke started, but I believe the majority of us are mainly index fund investors with a "buy and hold" philosophy.

 

[jbarwick]

Agree with what was said above. My brother and sister in law have an advisor and it was hard to compare the American Funds the advisor put them in with other funds. I think AF took the route of not disclosing or having a benchmark so you can't easily compare across companies.

While you are paying a flat annual fee, I could easily see how the advisor directs your funds to a specific company then they get a kickback on the AUM. I don't know if it happens but seems like an easy method to say you are flat fee then also get a % on top...

 

[Omega Male]

"Internet-of-cars"? It's a stretch. Sometimes valuations get so silly that analysts have to invent ex post facto justifications to back into them.

Morgan Stanley says Tesla will surge 22% from current levels in its first bullish call on the stock since 2017

Morgan Stanley's upgrade derives in large part from the inclusion of Tesla's services revenue in its valuation of the electric-car maker.

markets.businessinsider.com

 

[jbarwick]

Monetization of TSLA's core strengths? So car sales? Also, I wonder what happened to that engineer, TSLA fanboy who used to come around here and the car thread. Ram...something.

 

[otc]

Only plebs invest in funds, stocks, or other financial instruments.

If you want to be a real success, you must invest in the most dangerous game: Man.

You buy controlling interests in specific people in order to influence how they spend their time. Through these payments, you guide them into achieving your vision and implementing your ideas. The truly successful take it even further--they become so confident in their ability to control these men that that they allow their most trusted investments to to take stakes in other younger and weaker men on their behalf.

The germans have a word for this: They call it Unternehmerschaft

 

[lawyerdad]

Only plebs invest in funds, stocks, or other financial instruments.

If you want to be a real success, you must invest in the most dangerous game: Man.

You buy controlling interests in specific people in order to influence how they spend their time. Through these payments, you guide them into achieving your vision and implementing your ideas. The truly successful take it even further--they become so confident in their ability to control these men that that they allow their most trusted investments to to take stakes in other younger and weaker men on their behalf.

The germans have a word for this: They call it Unternehmerschaft

Eh, I hear it’s hard out there for a pimp.