Too Hot Investment Thread

Probably lives in his parents basement

 

Ok guys, how did you do last year? From a pure dollars perspective, last year's stock market was my best year yet. Total portfolio gain was about 30%, and the vast majority of that was in "boring" index funds.

 

That's up some 80% in two weeks! Beginners luck? Ha. That's great.

If you sell anything in under a year you'll pay taxes on it as if it were regular income. That's short term capital gains. If you sell after a year, you'll pay long term capital gains, which depend on your income level but are lower than your regular income rate.

Before you get too active, understand what a wash sale is. And don't do that.

Many people make trades inside IRAs or Roth IRAs to avoid paying taxes on gains. But you can't get to that money til 59.5 years old.

If you did so with a different broker (Fidelity, TD, etc) you'd find it fairly easy to navigate now, too.

Starting small is smart!

 

God biotech is some scary stuff

 

Nice. Yeah - the S&P returned about 30% so that's great (but not sustainable).

I took a growing chunk out of my SPY-like funds and parked it in some growth stocks, which hurt me from an opportunity cost perspective as much as anything, but I'm hoping for big, big things out of them this year!

 

RDGL isn't a nasdaq company, it is an OTC penny stock. High risk, high reward. To see the potential you need to look at their experimental cancer treatment RadioGel™ (OTCMKTS: RDGL) and read the recent news, they have partnerships with Johns Hopkins and even had Mayo Clinic doctors with them at the recent FDA meeting. This play is all about getting the IDE approval for human testing.

 

That's what all otc bio plays are usually: plays on getting FDA approval. That's why they scare the crap out of me.

I'm a big believer in investing in what you know. I definitely don't know what the FDA will and won't approve. Source: I tried a few times. Lol

So personally, I'm done with them.

.... Right after I sell the rest of my NVAX

 

Thank you - yeah completely beginner's luck & I took a little hit today but, again, this is totally for me to learn. And I didn't know you could do this same thing in IRAs. Considering Robinhood doesn't offer them, maybe I'll take my tax refund & put it into one of those & keep the Robinhood account for "learning/playing". I lose my alimony in about 5 years so I'd like something I can grab in an emergency. 59-1/2 is further out than that so that may not work for me *shrug*

Don't know about wash sales at all. Just learning what a DRIP is though.

 

A great way to invest IMO. When I was much younger with kids in the house, money was tight and DRIP made a lot of sense to me - I could invest just a little bit each month automatically directly from my checking account. I used what I had invested in KO (coke) for a downpayment on our first home.
There are well known companies that offer DRIPS like Exxon that offers a no-fee DRIP and pays a 5.99% dividend.

 

I found this site to be very helpful in so many ways... It's has everything you need to learn about investing.

Just the Dictionary in the Education tab alone is incredible. It's very useful as a learning tool and there are tons of rabbit hole definitions in the definitions that takes you all over the spectrum of investing terms and other phrases and explanations.

Stocks

 

Agreed - Investopedia is a really good primer on investing.

 

About the same. And I'm also in mostly ETFs. I have long since stopped buying individual stocks except for a select few. It has stood me very well over the test of time.

 

I've been tracking my investments since 2004. Each year I plug contributions and gains into a spreadsheet. My average annual gain (factoring out the new contributions) is over 13%. And that's including the near-40% dip in 2008. Since 2008, it's been more like 16% annually. It has truly been a great time to be an investor.

 

Same here.

Almost nobody thinks that if they followed the same training regimen as Mike Tyson that they could become a world champion boxer. We shouldn't expect any different of an outcome with our investing. A very small handful of individuals or institutions have ever shown an ability to outperform the US stock market over an extended period of time.

You can spend all your time and energy trying to find the best individual stocks, or you can save yourself that time, set up regular auto-investments in a broad exposure ETF or passive fund, forget about it for 20-30 years, and you'll probably make more money in the process.

 

Exactly. This is what I preach to the 20 somethings I work with. I try to get them to realize that they don't need to spend time trying to "get a handle" on the market before investing because they end up never feeling like they fully understand it and end up not investing. I stress the worth of time and compounding interest and use simple savings calculators to illustrate to them what they truly can save by retirement if they follow a simple and disciplined plan that doesn't require deep market insight or a lot of their paycheck.

 

Another in a long string of red days today. Down $18K just today. Some of that is softened by the Dividends that come my way every month but still this year is brutal so far. Been an investor since the early 80s and once watched my investment portfolio drop 30% in an hour and then eventually come back gangbusters so I'm not going to panic. I have invested in good companies for the most part with only a little bit invested as a speculation so I expect good companies to come back and regain value and for the value of their stock to grow over time. I don't need the money any time soon (house and car paid for, no other debts) so I can wait it out but it causes me some some self reflection beginning with the fundamental:
Why Do I Invest? For me its:

• To preserve and grow my capital (duh) to provide for family
• To fund college funds of (so far) 3.5 grandkids from dividends
• Freedom with options - retired and fortunate not to have to work post-retirement. Allows me time to volunteer
• Charitable giving
• To travel some (difficult for me though)
• To provide for my wife's coming medical needs

What about you guys? Other than getting rich quick why do you invest?

 

There were bigger loss days last year and see what happened. I invest for the long term to enable me to live comfortably and do whatever I want once I retire

 

I think a big ole crash is a-coming in almost all assets.

 

I lost more Tuesday than all the work income I earned until I was about 24. It’s the weird dichotomy of having enough money to be in the position to get upset over a bad day.

Growing up we were not money secure, I vowed that would never be me. Sacrificing other things for that goal is totally worth it to feel they sense of security and freedom. I am still years from retiring, so for me it’s very much still invest and hold. But, even if I’m not ”rich”, it’s really comforting to see the extra zero or zeroes behind some of the numbers and know that I am likely never going to need to be paycheck to paycheck again, even with a decent downturn now (and it would take a lot more loss before I was behind on my investments anyway). And every paycheck where more money goes in feels like a win. Right now I am essentially getting a 10 percent discount on that with the downturn, so that’s nice too.
If were at retirement I might be concerned though, because the medium term outlook for both stocks and bonds isn’t great. Hope those folks can weather the next few years, which could be dicey. Especially considering how underfunded we are as a society for retirement.

 

It seems like there's just this downward spiral to an extent. I know these cycles happen, though, so planning on staying put & maybe reevaluating in a couple of months. If I had a ton of money at stake I'd be freaking out.

Half my stuff is in the red the other half green so can't complain. Wish I'd grabbed more sofi earlier though LOL