Minch00

Does anyone have any tips for taking roughly $1000 and turning it into more, with cheaper stock. Like maybe around $1/$2 a share? Thanks guys...

Also, what type of broker should I go to? Are the online ones worth a damn?

gdubb

Yeah any guys that can give good advice for some people without a whole lot of cash on hand.

Scrib

Anytime you invest in speculative stocks; penny stocks... You're basically giving that money away.

Now that's not to say you can't make any money, but it's really not a wise way to try and make a buck.

Now if you're established in a portfolio, looking to just diversify and try to get lucky, then I could maybe recommend it.

But being young and just looking to make some easy money starting off. I don't recommend it.

dfreder371

WOW! this really happened! Thank you soopa!

I'm no donald trump, but I have made money in the stock market. In fact last year, 20% of my income came from a market gain.

I'm gonna deal strictly with stocks. I do not understand bonds, or futures.

With stocks, you have to understand that everything is relative to your position, money wise.

Four scenarios, and I'll start with you, Minch, with $1,000.

#1. Realize your $1,000 is more like $900. Brokers charge fees, on the way in, and on the way out. So right off the get go, you are down 10%. So in #1, you buy a responsible stock like say, Intel (INTC). You won't really lose here, but you may not gain. The key to this is in checking the charts, and the P/E ratio, price to earnings. This is a solid, real company, and your best chance for making money is to hope for a stock split, so your shares double (but are worth half as much after the split, more about that later.)

#2. With your $900, you buy, say, UPS, another solid company. Now what's gonna happen here? Stock prices do not change based upon what a company does, they change as the public percieves what they will do in the future. Until UPS figures out how to send packages through space and time, I see no advance in the near future.

#3. You invest in 1-2$ stocks. This is basically suicide, but I got away with it, and I will explain in #4. Any stock priced under $5 is very risky.

#4. I went long with Xybernaut (XYBR, nasdaq), wearable computer equipment.

first buy: 50 shares at $20.48
second buy: 250 shares at $2.81

At this point, XYBR was about $0.75 per share, so I was losing my ass, but their product was good, and the military was interested. So, I decided to cost average down

I bought at $0.19, $0.38, and $0.76. I managed to bring my cost per share basis down to $0.75, holding 10,250 shares. I sold at $1.59 per share, for a 107% (or so) gain. My $7,688 input yielded a check in the amount of $15,941. But I gotta pay 16% tax on that.

Keep in mind there are dire tax consequences if you hold for more or less than 365 days. 16% vs 28% tax rates.

I guess my point is two fold.

1. You're not gonna get rich on 50 shares of anything.
2. You're taking a big risk investing in stocks under $5.

This is homework time for adults. There is money to be made here, but it is all about research.

Is the company viable?
Does it have financing?
Does it have a product the people want?

Some companies to research. You should check 3 month, 6 month, 1 year and five year charts. Look for something that has been descending over time, but is now assending, then, research them and evaluate their benefit to society.

XYBR, INVN, GLW, UTX, KKD.

Expect to lo se before you win, but this is how you learn.

Remember, the next time you see Bill Gates sitting on a chair, he is not that tall. Just sitting on his wallet.

Scrib

Global Crossing is going public again this coming week, I think. Thursday???

Worth looking into.

Scrib

My bad...

It was this PAST Thursday.

GLBC

einsatz

I don't think there are many places that will even let you open an account with $1000. I'm probably wrong, but isn't it usually $5k or 10k to open an account with most places?

dfreder371

An ammendment here.. I mislead. $15,941-7688. Whatever that is, I have to give the government 16% for profit for holding long term.

Still, ok by me.

Scrib

Most places will gladly take your money. People have to start somewhere...

danny25

what do you mean by that? what other option is there, holding for exactly 365 days??

dfreder371

Danny: The tax rates change if you hold for more or less than a year. Hold longer, less tax. Hold shorter, more tax.

Minch00

I've been using a program on Stocks Quest to "practice" stock management. Over a period of 5 days with an initial investment of $100,000 (I wish, right?), I've managed to make $440.11. My stock are very unstable, I have Ford, Honda, McDonald, Reebok, and a few others. The only one that has been consistently up is Fortune Brands (FO), and I only purchased them because of a tip from a friend.


Is this a good way to start? So I learn how everything works?

dallison

what you need to do is find a stock like nextel, bottom at 2 and high of 30 within 1.5 years

dfreder371

Scrib is 100% correct. Most people wil gladly take you r 1,000$ for anything!

Jonesi

This absolutely the best way to start out...! Do that for another month before you start investing..

danny25

gotcha, that's what i figured you meant, but i wasn't sure

elliot

Scottrade has $500 minimum with $7 trades.. and a good reputation..

einsatz

Thanks for the info

Davediego

if you want to speculate... check out EMA
when you speculate you have to accept you may never see your money again. a good safter gaurd is to place a stop on your trades, ie if the stock drops 20% its automatically sold

Davediego

whoops that shoulda been safety guard

and dfreder370 i know it was just an example, but intc might not be as reliable as usual this year they certainly wont be losing any money, but they're having some trouble with their next round of pentiums (prescott) and anyone who plays the market should know that good financials and fundamentals arent worth shit to a stock price if theres bad press or public uneasiness

Doc.Booty

I hope some more of you investment people weigh in on this thread, i'm in the same boat.

I have a feeling i'm gonna like this foum

NOVAwhiteTypeS

SYMC -> i work for them and we beat wall street estimates 29th quarters in a row Jan 21st 2004. Who doesn't use symantec / norton?? hehe

RHAT -> the next big thing

Jnpr -> did REALLY strong last year. and over all better product than cisco will ever be.

KavexTrax

what happened to the Yahoo Stock Trading Game?

that was real fun back in the days... I can find any simulations anymore. I went to stocks quest but the interface of buying and selling felt rustic and outdated.
Plus penny stock (value <$5) trading was not allowed.

Dom418

It's foolish to try and focus on the number of shares you can buy...

$1000 isn't a lot of money to invest in the first place... and certianly not enough to diversify.

Anyway.. you have to look at what percentage you can make on your $$$. It doesn't matter if you buy 1000 shares at $1 or 10 shares at $100.

If the two stocks each go up 10%, you make the same amount of money.

Davediego

here's a coulpe recs for you guys, mind these are intended to be long term investments (at least a couple months). maybe later ill go into fundamentals about when exactly to buy

PANL - makes OLED screens, the flat "roll up" kind of display among other things. OLEDs will be used in cell phones, tvs, and computers. should pretty much replace the LCD

ATYT - ATI, makes video cards, has contracts with microsoft/nintendo to make video chipsets for their next consoles. just started getting into the handheld and motheboard market. strongest competitor to NVidia

AMD - you all should know them. just posted their first profit in 2 years of 12 cents a share. good demand for their new 64 bit chips should continute all throughout the year, so they should have a few more quarters of profit at least. also biggest supplier of NAND flah memory (that goes in cell phones, mp3 players), many of you may not know that.

if you're more the speculating type... check out NGEN (nanotech company), ALTI (another nanotech), and EMA (another OLED maker).

also DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH before you decide to buy anything anyone else reccomends. its always good to be an informed investor. goodluck

Dom418

This is a scary statement

Water-S

Personally I just bought 5 shares(it's not much but i only had 100 bucks) in Nissan Motors.

If you look at their performance of stocks it's impressive. you could with about 1 grand about 50 shares.(without selling fees and provided it doesn't spike).
mine for 5 shares was 110 bucks(without fees).

fuzzy02CLS

iTrader: (2)

My firms mim is $25K! That's for a margin account.

I'm not allowed to give stock advise, however I can say that $1000 is not much to start with. You be better off finding another way to make that grow. The saying "it takes money to make money" really applies in the stock market. You need to buy size in this market & that takes $$.

dfreder371

DAVEDIEGO: LONG TERM: A COUPLE OF MONTHS?

Davediego

trying to get the point accross that you shouldnt expect to double your money in a week or something thats all. i own all of these stocks and probably will for the remainder of the year

darrinb

yea i wish i could invest my money and be safe... but its all risky when u wanna make lots of dough

LegendC

While it is true that it take money to make money don't let these big rollers discourage you. $1000 is the perfect amount to start investing and saving....otherwise how are you going to get to that eventual 25K minimum?

I started with less than $1000 3 years ago and now have about 15K ( 1\2 Roth IRA 1\2 personal investing) thanks to good market timing, and constant investing to dollar cost average.

I use Sharebuilder which is perfect for a starting investor. There is no minimum, you can buy fractional shares and it is very easy to setup for continuous investment. The monthly fees are low too depending on how you setup your plan.

Not that I am pushing this paticular service, but it worked for me and I had a very modest start like yourself.


http://www.sharebuilder.com

dfreder371

I see some diversity developing here. Let me tell you how I got started, just for a frame of reference.

And I certainly DO NOT discourage anyone with as little as $1,000 to start investing in the stock market. But, $2,500 is more reasonable, and I would be more comfortable with $5,000.

Going back 8 years or so, I won't say poor as a church mouse I was, but, living paycheck to paycheck, definitely.

I had a condo fire that wiped me out entirely, save my 1994 Acura GSR, my wallet, and my keys. Total devistation. And that brings up a point: insure your belongings, document them with several videotapes (in several off sight places) before even THINKING about investing in stocks.

After a fair settlement with the insurance company, I ended up with an extra $6,000, only because I chose to give up snow skiing. I did not replace the clothes, the equipment, the car racks, shit, this stuff cost plenty. So, I finally had some money, and I decided to invest it.

Basically, I lost every penny, but I saw the potential, so I kept going.

Most of you are younger than me, trust me. Investing in stocks is way more complicated than just hearing stock XYZ did good today, calling your broker, and throwing money at it. It don't work that way.

You need to research, you need to be cagey. This takes work.

For instance, for that $1,000 to invest, how about UALAQ: United Airlines. Right now, around $1.50. This is a large airline, but is dealing with bankruptcy. $1,000 will buy you about 750 shares. Not bad, that is a reasonable amount of shares to hold.

The flip side of the coin: If bankruptcy is granted, all UALAQ shareholders (who formerly held the parent stock UAL) get their share prices reduced to $0.00. It is one of the rules of bankruptcy. And a sure way to spend yourself into oblivion.

You NEED to KNOW the rules of the game here, folks.

A good money management tool here is to go to any decent bookstore and invest $25 or so in any book written by Anita Van Kaspel. She will show you a lot of the ropes. Even still, you have a long way to go.

However, it is true. To make money, you must spend money.

I've made a lot of mistakes investing, and all I am trying to do with my rhetoric here is to save you the pain I went through. I can almost guarantee you will lose first off, but if you pay attention, the learning curve is pretty steep, but understandable.

Davediego

I started off 5-6 years ago with only $500 (I was a freshmen in high school at the time). I bought a stock I though had a good future, but was really clueless to the technical workings of the market at the time. I got extremely LUCKY with my first stock and made my initial investment into a cool $5000. I want to stress that even tough I picked what I thought to be a good company, this rediculous % gain was largely luck. (if anyones interested I bought NVDA essentially at its all time low and sold essentially at its all time high).

Needless to say I wanted more, so I put another $2.5K in, and had success albeit nothing near my first stock. It was good for me in the end however because it forced me to learn fundamentals of how the market works, and how to recognize when to buy and sell. These are things I shold have known before getting in the market at all, and things that anyone who wants to do serious investing should know before starting. If you dont, you are simply gambling. Since my start, I've turned $3k into $16k (now I'm 19) so I like to think I sort of know what I'm talking about when it comes to the market but I'm still goign to say don't just take any tips or financial advice you read on this forum or anywhere else withough checking it out thoroughly yourself. Its not terribly hard to make money in the market, but its extremely easy to lose money. You just have to spend the time to learn.

dfreder371

More rules you need to learn: You own stock XYZ, and it has been hovering around $10 for a year or so. Say you bought at 7$, the number of shares doesn't matter. A breakthrough comes, and it rockets to $15 in one day, so you sell, doubleing your money. Good for you.

You've watched the market for a while, say a couple of years, and by now you know the stock will be down to around $11 in three or four days. Should you buy it again, three days later?

No. When you sell a stock, you are not prohibited from buying it again very soon, but the government want you to wait 30 days before rebuying. A substancial penalty will apply, although this is not illegal.

The government does this, because this is how a stock price can be manipulated, and is pretty much one of the main factors the stock crash of 1929 happened.

Pretty theoretical here, but let's say 10 investors, all working together, own 10 percent of the total shares of XYZ. They all sell XYZ at the same time on the same day. XYZ price is diluted by 10% instantly, because 10% more shares are available. If the same 10 guys bought on the open the next day, BAM! an instant 10% profit, and hence, manipulation.

Another thing you guys want to watch to get a clue about how things work (believe me, I am no expert) is the volume of shares on a stock. I got a clue on the last stock I won on when I saw their volume go from 750,000 to 2,000,000 shares a day on average go to 25,000,000 to 35,000,000 shares a day with increasing frequency. It means something is going on. Couple that with the trend that the stock price is increasing or decreasing, and you get a pretty good clue as to which way the stock is going. My two cents.

JRock

It's very much like gambling to play penny/OTC stocks, so really you're just going to have to hope you choose the right stocks. No one, NO ONE can predict the future of any stock with certainty. It's all risk related and lower stocks are cheaper so you can buy more and if it works out the reward is greater because you own more shares, but the risk is greater because they're smaller companies which are more likely to fail than to succeed.

dets

wha????? fuck, i gotta check that.


scrib, if you're right, you da man!!!

dets

ah man scrib. they haven't been listed yet.

i own 30,000 shares that were de-listed a couple of weeks ago. i lost big if it doesn't go back on the market.

they jumped from .2 to .10 and i sold and rebought at .7

next thing you know, puff, gone.

trying to keep my fingers crossed.

JRock

I take it being de-listed is not the same as a bankruptcy where your shares become worthless and disappear, eh? Yours actually stick around and you just have to hope they come back on the market?

JRock

Uhm weird... this shows that they are listed...
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GLBC&d=t
at $26.92/share



http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/040122/telec...rossing_2.html
If you have 30k shares of that, you could make close to $1 million dollars selling it. Are you sure you have that many and that's the stock you have??