Google Finance has just been launched in Beta! A must see! http://finance.google.com
As small, inexperienced investors, we are unable to take advantage of the full range of available investment opportunities. In an effort to protect small investors, the 1933 Securities Act enacted rules about which securities must be registered with the SEC and which can be offered privately. Because registration is time-consuming and expensive, companies with smaller needs may prefer to promote their investment opportunity privately, but because there is less oversight, the SEC allows only wealthy and experienced individual investors to participate, along with qualifying organizations.
Phil Town’s new site is up at RuleOneInvestor.com. Check it out for podcasts, news, and calculators! Also check out FreeMoneyFinance who is holding a “Phil Town Day” with articles dedicated to Phil Town all day long.
First, here is an article by former Google employee Ron Garret on why you shouldn’t buy Google stock. His argument can be used for nearly any stock these days. Paraphrased it is: why buy stock in a company that has no chance of being bought out and has no dividend? As seasoned traders often say, stocks are just pieces of paper. Of course that doesn’t mean you can’t a make a lot of money trading paper.
Read on for an update on some of my stock holdings.
Phil Town’s upcoming book Rule #1 is sure to become an investment classic. I had the pleasure of reading the book after receiving an advanced copy from Crown Publishers, the distributor of the book which is scheduled to be released in March. What I found was a practical, no-nonsense approach to stocks that will do for investing what David Bach’s The Automatic Millionaire did for personal finance. While Town himself admits that the techniques he describes have been used for years, his true genius lies in his ability to translate classic investing principles into a straight-forward approach that can achieve at least 15% returns a year with little risk.
I know you came here looking for another insightful article by Chris. You can expect to be wowed again by Chris tomorrow. In the meantime, here are some recent items of interest: How Warren Buffett Invests The folks at BusinessWeek have built a stock screener around Buffett’s investing principles. Check out What Would Warren Do? (more…)
Things aren’t looking to good for SIRI. Meanwhile, Yahoo! is down $3 from when I recommended it a couple weeks ago.
Read on for some suggested reading.
Last Friday, SIRI dipped below $5.50, which was my level to pickup another 70 shares as planned. I’ve been meaning to try out some options trading, and with the stock so low I thought what the hey. Why not buy 500 options rather than 70 common shares?
Here’s my first lesson for options trading:
1. Make sure you can purchase options through your broker before you look for some to buy.
Pro forma earnings (sometimes spelled “proforma” or “pro-forma”) are included by some companies in their quarterly or annual reports as a way to discount “unusual and non-recurring transactions” to more accurately reflect their true financial health. But while actual earnings are calculated using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (“GAAP”), the US standard for corporate accounting, pro forma earnings are used as guidance for investors to demonstrate how much money a company would have earned had unusual and one-time charges not occurred. As one would expect, pro forma reporting has had a history of abuse and therefore should be approached with great care.
Ramit Sethi from www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com proposes a financial makeover for 2006. And I give updates on SIRI, AMD, and YHOO.