Announcing the INVESTools Forum

We’re pleased to announce our new INVESTools forums. InvestorGeeks is one of the top ranking sites for web surfers looking for information on the high-end investing toolkit called INVESTools. Last year we wrote about the product in an article called “Phil Town and INVESTools.” In that piece we investigated whether these two new faces in (more…)

Getting Started with Margin Trading

I’ve been doing a little research on margin trading, because I’ve recently been using it to float purchases of stock while my sale of some mutual funds clear. So I had a bunch of questions, like “What’s buying power?” and “How much do I need to keep in my brokerage account?” Well, I was once again helped by a terrific tutorial on Margin Trading at Investopedia which answered most of my questions.

I hope you’ll head over there and read it, but let me address some potential questions for you here in case you don’t have time to check it out. (I’ll assume for brevity that you understand what margin trading is)

Prime Interest Rate & Credit Interest Spreads

Almost all of us hear some variation of this from our credit card or car loan company: your interest rate is a variable rate of 14.99% based on Prime plus 6.74%. That means your current rate is 14.99% but may change at any time, so if the prime interest rate goes up or down 0.5% so will your card. Let’s look at the Prime rate closer, and I’ll share some tips to enhance your credit search.

Tips for using Bid-Ask Spreads

I recently have been looking at the Bid/Ask Spread to help me determine the right time to add to my positions. Here are some tips I’ve picked up that you might find useful when looking at your stock’s spread.
 

Introducing digg to InvestorGeeks

Digg, the extremely popular article voting site, is now part of InvestorGeeks! We’ve recently installed a new feature that will allow you to digg your favorite IG articles right from our site. New articles that we feel are digg-worthy will have the familiar digg box in the upper left corner. If you’re not currenly a (more…)

8 Rules to Successful Partnerships

There is a chronic personality flaw that I see in so many entrepreneurs, that unnecessarily impedes their true success — resistance to having partners. I’ve had partners in the past, and I know the difficulties that can be faced by having a partner that is not picking up their fair share. But the secret to success in business is not to exclude people! Having partners is essential when you want to elevate your wealth.

Hunting for Tenbaggers; Catching AERT

Ah, the tenbagger. That mythical creature from stock trading lore that grows 10 times in price. This is what dreams are made of. I like a quote from Jason Kelly’s book, The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing. “It takes only $10,000 and two tenbaggers to become a millionaire.” It’s simple in concept really. Find a fast growing company, hold on to it for 5 or 6 years, and sell it for a long-term windfall. The equivalent of 50-60% annually. It’s every investor-boy’s fantasy but mysteriously elusive. In fact there may only be a few stocks a year that turn out to be tenbaggers. So the question is how do you find them? Maybe I can help.

TD Ameritrade Has Most Mutual Funds Available

I was recently disappointed because I couldn’t purchase the Mairs & Power Growth Fund (MPGFX) or Artisan International Fund (ARTIX) through my T. Rowe Price Roth IRA. After doing some sleuthing on Morningstar I discovered I could purchase both of these funds through TD Ameritrade, from whom I have a standard brokerage account.

I was ready to transfer all my assets over from TRP to TD Ameritrade and it turned out that transferring a Roth IRA was extremely bothersome. So instead of jumping into anything I thought I had better check to see if there was another discount broker that offered more funds, because I didn’t want to have to do this again. I spent some time at it, and put together a screen using the Morningstar Premium Fund Screener (more info) that would show the number of funds each major discount broker had available, and which funds were covered by all of them. The results were fascinating.

New Authors Coming Soon!

I just wanted to thank everyone who submitted applications to become an InvestorGeek last week. We’ve had some great candidates apply and we’re looking forward to great new members! We’ve been reviewing the applications and will be contacting contributers as we decide on them. In the meantime look for new content from us all this (more…)