It is not that difficult to spot current stock prices of publicly traded businesses. In order to know the stock price of a firms, you can visit a few financial internet sites that give that kind of information. Websites like Google Finance and Yahoo Finance are examples of financial sites that give investors with current stock prices and historical stock prices of companies. A dedicated stock brokerage will provide you with much more in-depth facts in comparison to free internet sites.
If you would like to know the stock price of a firm in any financial internet site, try to identify a quotes bar and enter either the symbol of the corporation or if the web site permits the name of the company. As you being entering the name of the firm you will be provided a likely list of businesses that might match you. As you type along a box appears below which displays a probable list of businesses that you are looking for. If the business you are looking for is being displayed click on it. Alternatively, if you know the corporation’s ticker symbol you could just enter it in the Get Quotes bar and hit enter. When you are on the page of a company you will be provided with a variety of information including the stock price of the business. Usually, the price catalogued could be delayed by 20 minutes, and if the prices are being recorded in real time, the stock price listed would be real time price of that business at that particular time.
You should make sure to scrutinize that the stock price that is being catalogued is precise before making any trading decisions. While making a trading choice be sure to know that the stock price is the one at which price it is being traded and not a pre-market or after hours stock price. It is best advised that when you are trading in stocks, you make calls on buying stocks from your brokerage account. Online brokerages give the most up to date prices of stocks and also givehow a number of shares are being traded at a time.
Although it may seem obvious to most stock market swing traders there are a number of simple rules that you can follow which will ensure that you have more success when buying stocks:
In the USA stock market there are 3 major indexes which are each made up of a basket of stocks, they are the S and P 500 (also known as the S&P500), the DOW 30 and the Nadaq 100. These stock indexes generally only contain major blue chip stocks, as long as you buy from these 3 groups you will at least know that you are getting a well known solid stock.
For example the DOW30 contains major industrials and large multinational stocks such as Home Depot (HD) and Johnson and Johnson (JNJ) whereas the Nasdaq 100 mainly contains techical companies such as Apple (AAPL) and Miscrosoft (MSFT).
Always buy a stock that is liquid, this means that it is a highly traded stock, this will enable you to quickly buy and sell at the price you want without having a delay. You will also get a lower spread, thats the difference between the BID and ASK price of the stock. For a stock to be considered very liquid it should trade at least 500,000 shares per day, ideally even more.
It is best to aviod stocks that are bellow $10 as this usually means the company is in trouble, although with the bear market of 2008/9 there have been a lot of good stocks at bargin prices between $5 and $10. Avoid buying a stock below $5 at anytime.
Another consideration to make is options, does the stock has options?, this will be important if you want to trade options around your stock, such as a covered call, or you may want to buy a PUT option inorder to protect your stock.
Be very cautious about buying a stock just before it’s earnings are released, stocks often drop significantly if they come out with a poor report. Earnings releases are 4 times a year with one of them being the annual report.
If you are going to trade options make sure that you learn how to trade by getting some good education. There are many swing trading strategies that work well with stocks in todays volatile markets.
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Do you want to potentially increase the success rate of your stock trading? Then read this quick review of Stock Assault 2.0.
Stock Assault 2.0 is advanced A.I. stock investing software that works similiar to the human brain. The stock market software actually uses artificial intelligence to produce customized results for each user increasing the potential effectiveness of your investments.
The Stock Assault 2.0 program will work anywhere in the world for anyone with a brokerage account, and the program tells you the steps needed so it doesn’t require investing know-how (though it is good to be educated about investing).
Using Stock Assault 2.0
Getting started is pretty easy. Once you install the software, you can begin investing with these 3 steps:
1. The system processes live stock data that gives you your stock picks.
2. You buy the stock picks from any brokerage of your choice.
3. The system keeps tracking the pick and will tell you exactly when to sell.
Benefits of Stock Assault 2.0
1. The software’s advanced A.I. will make you feel like you had inside info.
2. Works worldwide, all you need is any brokerage account.
3. You don’t have to know anything about investing, the software tells you exactly what to do.
4. The software’s programming gives it the ability to adapt to any market condition so you’ll be ok in any situation.
5. You can invest in stocks like the professionals do straight from your house.
6. With as little as $50 to $100 dollars, you can start investing in your first stock pick and use any profits for the next pick.
Final Conclusion
Stock Assault 2.0 is a product worth trying because it gives you the freedom to invest in stocks at your own pace. Without advanced skills or major capital, you can potentially make good stock market investments based on the software’s artifical intelligence. In addition, you also get access to a message board and blog, both offering info from stock trading professionals and analysts.
Technical analysis of the stock market, or any other market such as Forex, Bonds, Futures, is how most traders and investors make their trading decisions. This is as opposed to fundamental analysis which most people more agree is pretty much done as a way of making trading decisions, unless of course you are Warren Buffet!.
You only have to think back to major stock market scams like Enron to know that it is almost impossible for the average, and even very sophisticated fund manager or hedge fund trader to really know what the real financial state of a company is.
Just by reading the balance sheet and other quaterly reports they release gives you a very poor insight into the real health of the company. Whereas the technical analysis charts of the company tend to give the real picture of what the market thinks of the value of the company. In the case of Enron even simple technical analysis told you to SELL when the stock was in the $80-90 range, this is why technical analysis of stocks is so popular.
So what is the secret to technical analysis?, I’m about to tell you, here are my golden rules:
* Only use 3-5 simple technical analysis indicators
* Make sure that you understand how the indicators that you have selected work, what the parameter settings are and in what market conditions they are effective
* After selecting your indicators and parameter settings don’t mess with them.
The real secret to technical analysis is to get VERY familiar with your choosen indicators, and really this can only be done by watching and studying the market, so that you get to the point that you TRUST them.
The fact is that in any market, for each bar, there are only 5 pieces of information, the open, close, high, low and volume, yet there are now hundreds of indicators. Most of these indicators are displaying the same information and so are redundant.
For the record my set of indicators are:
* 4 Simple Moving Averages
* Bollinger Bands
* MACD
* Stochastics
But the way I use them is quite special, to learn more about how to become an expert at technical analysis visit:
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In the investing world, exchange traded funds (ETFs) are the latest and greatest. Although they have actually been around for more than ten years it is not until recently that the explosion of ETFs has occurred.
ETFs are a group of stocks that trade on the stock exchanges as if they are one stock. Generally in the past they have tracked a particular index such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the NASDAQ-100. Recently, however, they are putting together ETFs that have a characteristic in common: they invest in a region or sector of the market, or have a certain market capitalization.
Exchange traded funds have many advantages over mutual funds. They can have a low cost of obtaining since you are paying a commission just like when you purchase individual stocks. If you use a discount brokerage, you can buy for very little money. The ongoing maintenance fees for an ETF are also minimal compared to actively managed mutual funds, and in some cases lower than index mutual funds.
Because ETFs trade like stock they have liquidity. With a simple phone call you can buy or sell. Exchange traded index funds are priced every 15 seconds and trade continually throughout the day. This is not like mutual funds because mutual funds are only bought and sold at the end of the day. Since the exchange traded fund will be kept in a brokerage, it can be traded easily.
Tracking an index means less selling within the fund. This makes for a tax efficient fund. It is rare that an ETF declares a capital gain distribution. This means you determine when the taxes will be paid on the gain by choosing when you will sell.
Index and managed funds keep some of their assets that are investable in cash. This is used to pay someone that is promoting their fund. Because ETFs trade like stocks, there is no need to keep a portion in cash.
There is zero room for style drift in an exchange traded fund. In an actively managed mutual fund, the fund can say it is a large cap fund, but may chase performance by investing in small or mid caps at times. ETFs are required to maintain a 99% correlation with the index or basket of stocks that it represents.
Regarding ETF trading strategies, because ETFs trade like individual stocks you have the additional features of stock. Exchange traded funds can be sold on margin or short. They can have limit, buy and stop loss orders for buying and selling. Call and put options can be bought and sold using exchange traded funds.
There are some disadvantages to exchange traded funds as well. They are not an appropriate investment to use with dollar cost averaging. If you have to pay a $10.00 fee each month when you make that $50 or $100 investment it can be difficult to make up that fee.
With the popularity of ETFs, you have to be careful as to what the fund is using as its foundation of stocks. Sometimes it can be such a narrow focus that you really are not achieving diversification.
Because trading can be easy, you can get sucked into risky strategies. If you take part in market timing or short term trading, it can result in big losses. Buying and selling ETF puts and calls, or buying on margin, is speculating and is riskier than buying and holding.
ETFs make sense under the right circumstances. For your main holding, you can use a broad index ETF. This can be supplemented with targeted ETFs to provide weighting in a particular sector, region or type of market capitalization. As always, be smart and invest slowly.
Do you understand Mutual Fund Investing? What about alternative energy mutual funds? You may be a savvy investor in the stock market or not, but you’ve probably heard the term “Mutual Fund.” A few years back knowing nothing about the workings of stock investing was more common. This can lead to losing some of your hard-earned money in the money markets.
Mutual funds are collections of stocks and bonds owned by a group of people rather than one individual investor. This makes it a more advantageous since it allows investors to buy with less money than it would take to purchase the same amount on their own and it spreads the risks among a group of people.
The performance of any mutual funds depends mainly on the efficiency of its fund manager who will manage a portfolio of stocks on behalf of investors. Making informed decisions, choosing a rated and well-performing fund manager is critical to your financially future in the green mutual funds market. So its critical you understand the basics of Mutual Funds Investing.
Its true that there really is no method or strategy invented in investing that is completely safe and without risks. Mutual funds, have lower risks than many other investment options, that makes them more attractive for those who lack the knowledge in investmenting. Fact is, mutual funds often have much better rates of return than the average savings account and the risks are minimal in this type of investment, particularly compared to other riskier options.
There are basically three types of mutual funds with variations on each.
- Money market funds. These funds are great for the long-term investor who has a slow and steady approach to investing that are better than leaving your funds in a interest-paying savings account.
- Equity funds that provide slow growth over time with some income as you go.
- Fixed income funds that are created to provide a current income over time. This is great for those who have retired or investors that are extremely conservative in nature.
Diversification is one of the key ingredients of a healthy portfolio and energy mutual funds will help you get diversified in a broader way. If you are young and just starting your career and in no real hurry for retirement, this is the one of the safest ways to invest your money for the long haul. But with most mutual fund investing you don’t have the high payoffs that many investors seek to include for their retirement planning.
There is a lot of hype surrounding options trading, and for good reason, it’s a good way make a lot of cash fast, or can be used to grow your capital consistently month after month.
There’s also a lot of hype about how complicated it is and why you need to spend thousands of dollars on options trading education before you get started. Needless to say this last statement usually comes from trading seminar companies trying to sell your their trading course on options.
Lets cover a few of the basics about options and set you straight about a few important points. Firstly yes it is true that you can make a lot of cash trading options, but of course you can also lose just as fast.
When trading stocks your leverage is 1:1, if you go full out on margin you get get 1:2 leverage, but thats about it. With options it is not as straight forward to calculate the leverage but generally speaking you can get between 1:5 and 1:10 when you buy an option on a stock, or ETF.
So with 1:10 leverage, when the stock increases by 5% your option can increase by approx 50%, and this can happen in just a few days, this is why swing trading strategies using options on stocks is so popular.
However the downside is that a big loss can also happen, if the stock drops by 5% your option can also drop by 50%, at which point you may want to close the trade and save some of your option value, it really depends on what your stop loss and risk.
What I’ve described above is called directional option trading where you are betting on the getting the direction of the stock movement correct, this is highly speculative. Options can also be used in option strategies which are much more non directional, such as covered call trades, credit spreads and Iron Condors. In these trades there is much lower dependance on getting the stock direction correct, but it still matters.
So should you learn to trade options?, in my opinion you should not do directional option trades until you become very good at trading stocks. This is because you must be very precise with your entry and exit strategy and trading plan, and be very good at technical analysis.
Whereas if you want to do non-directional option trades you don’t need to be such an experianced stock trader to be successful, but of course it does not hurt either.
Learning how to trade options is a very useful skill you have, but don’t rush into it and blow out your account. Make sure that you get a good options trading education before you start, and also make sure that you have a very solid stock trading education as well, such one from Top Dog Trading Review.
Did you know that there are 4 mains types of trader and depending on what type you are will determine many parts of your trading strategy and trading plan. The 4 types are: scalping, day trading, swing trading and position trading. When you determine the type of trader that you are it will also determine the time period in which you will be making your trade. This will be a very important decision that you need to make when deciding how you want to learn to day trade.
1. Scalping Trader, if you scalp the market this means that you are only looking for a few ticks profit per trade and you may only be in the trade for a few seconds or a minute at most. trading. Some people will also call this day trading but it’s really micro day trading, buying the bid and selling the offer, it’s fast trading and you might end up doing 10-50 trades a day. This is a very stressful way of trading for many people.
2. Day Trader, the true day trader opens and closes their trade within the same trading session, usually this mean the same day, but unlike a scalper the trade may be held for a few minutes up to several hours. Usually day traders make about 2-6 trades a day and most of them will be in the 5-30 minutes range. This is a less stressful way of trading than scalping but it still requires much attention and quick decision making.
3. Swing Traders, swing trading usually means that a position is held for between 1 to 5-10 days, although some swing traders may keep a trade on for a longer time most are within this time period. For many this is the idea way to trade because it allows you to review your trade in the evening, at the very least you have several hours to make your trading decisions.
4. Position Traders, this just means that you are going to hold onto your trade for longer than a few days, maybe even as long as 1 to 2 months.
If you are still working out how to day trade then it may be better to go with the longer time frames as it gives you more time to think.
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One of the most popular technical analysis indicators is the simple moving average also known as SMA, if you learn how to use these correctly they can be a very useful tool to help you to make good trading decisions.
The 50 simple moving average, or 50 SMA, is simply the sum of the last 50 readings for each period, divided by 50, this is a moving window, as time moves on so does the average. Notice that I used the term period because this indicator works on any time period in exactly the same way.
It can be used on monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, 30 minutes, 10 minute and on whatever time period you want to monitor and trade. Although the SMA is the most commonly used there is also the exponential moving average or EMA. This is a weighted version of the formula using the mathematical exponent function to give more weight to the more recent values, this has the effect of making it a much faster average that many traders like.
The truth is that it probably does not matter if you used the SMA or the EMA, what does matter however is that you use one or the other and then be very consistent with it. Do not switch between them, it is more important that you learn to trust your chosen indicator then a slight difference in its value.
The simple moving average is primarily used to determine what the current trend of the stock is, depending on the value used it could be a short term, medium term or long term trend. An important point to note is that moving averages are really only useful when the stock is trending, if the moving average is flat, i.e. horizontal on your chart it can become very choppy, this is a good time to not trade.
The general rule is that if the chart price is above the SMA the trend is up, if below the trend is down. This is very important to understand because it forms the basics of trend trading and trading with the trend.
For the short term trend many traders like using a 5-8 SMA or EMA, here is a trading secret, never trade again the direction of the short term tend, this is really just common sense when you think about it.
Moving averages can often act as support or resistance, many traders use the 15, 21 or 30 SMA for this purpose.
There are a number of other very important moving averages that you need to know about, these are the 50, 100 and 200 SMA, and this mainly applies to the daily and weekly charts. A lot of big players in the markets, like the the mutual funds, investment banks etc use the 50 and 200 SMA as support and resistance, if they decide to buy or sell based on these you need to follow suite, the 100 to a lesser extent. These are very useful averages to watch if you trade EFT’s like an Oil ETF.
A useful tip is that when a stock breaks through one moving average it will often move all the way to the next, for example, if a stock breaks the 30 SMA it may move to the 50 before finding some support or resistance.
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Hoping and praying that the stocks that you just bought will go up is not the best strategy to use, however it is the one very often used by the average Joe stock trader who is stock trading internet. The only salvation they have is that in bull markets most stocks will go up.
Statistics show that in a bull market about 75% of the stocks will follow the general trend and go up, and in a bear market 75% will also go down. Trading with the trend is the best way to trade as 9 out of 12 stocks will follow the trend and give you the best chance of making gains on your stock purchases.
But what if you own some nice stocks and don't want to sell when the market is clearly going down, or about to go down?. There are a few tactics that you can consider, both of which involve the use of options, CALL options and PUT options. There is the well known strategy called Covered Calls, and the much lesser known one called the Married Put.
If you are going to trade options it is essential that before you start trading you get the best option trading education that you can. You should also practice stock trading until you are comfortable with the process. This is a very important point that must be taken seriously, if you don’t understand the terminology and the theory then you should not be trading options. If the terms Put option, Call option, Married Put and Covered Call are new to you then don’t trade until you have studied sufficiently.
Selling calls against your stock in 100 share increments is the basis of the covered call strategy and it can provide about a 2-7% buffer against the loss in stock price. However a bigger drop in stock price will not be compensated for using the covered call strategy, in general.
Stocks in a bear market, and even in a bull market, can drop quickly on news or earnings releases, as much as 15 to 40% within a month. Using covered calls to protect your stocks will only provide limited protection of less than 7% at best and so will not save you if the stock takes a 40% tumble.
The better solution to providing downside stock protection is the option strategy called the Married Put. As the name suggests the PUT that you buy is used to provide protection when the stock goes down because Put options will increase in value when the stock decreases in value. The term married is used because the option that is selected has to be very compatible with the stock, in other words a good match, if the strategy is to work.
The selection of the best Put option is not straight forward and involves several criteria which are listed below:
1. The strike price of the option
2. The current stock price
3. Choice of options, in or out of the money
4. Put expiration time
Even though the married Put protection only has a limited life span if offers much more protection than the covered call. It can provide as much as 90-95% loss recovery in the event of a significant drop in the stock price.
The downside of the good protection is that you have buy the Put which is a cash debit whereas the covered call is a credit. But there are ways of offsetting this expense and there is much more to this strategy when executed correctly. The Married Put can be made to pay for itself and used to generate very good gains if the market, or stock to be specific, moves a lot.
The general idea of the Collar Trade is to combine the covered call and married Put strategy into one, this is what is called the Collar Trade. In effect you put a collar around the stock, you sell a call and buy a PUT. If you do this correctly most of the cost of the Put can be offset by the credit from the covered call so you can protect your stock at almost no cost. Yes this is a great strategy which the general public is unfortunately very ignorant of, and most brokers don’t understand.
The strategy that I have outlined above is unknown to the average stock market trader but is one of the best trading systems you could have.
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