Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
I would call up the number they gave you and have all your questions written down and thought out before you make the call.
Mutual funds are a pool of all different companies (if it is a stock fund). There are small cap funds, large cap funds, tech funds, mixed funds, etc. Once you are in, they are managed by a professional. You don't have to do anything. You will get a statement each month - or you could go online to watch it. My advice would be to NOT watch it too often. It is money for your future that you don't need now so peek at it once a month. Call up the number that your company gave you. Tell them that you would like to invest X amount of dollars a month. Some companies allow you to make changes to your 401k a couple of times a year. So say you had most of your money in small cap companies and then decided to be a little more conservative, you could move some of the money (they usually let your do this on a % basis)into a large cap fund and leave say half in the other. Maybe I misunderstood your original question. I thought you wanted to put your 401k into a scottrade account and trade it with your other account. If your employer is using ML that is not a problem to have two separate accounts. Have your 401k with ML and you can do your side trading with scott.
cintrix,
"Did your company give you the names of any financial advisers who manage their 401k? Most of them get paid through the actual fees from the investments. I know when my daughter got her job there was about three or four different companies she could invest in and she called one of those guys and went with him and he allocated her weekly contributions."
I was not given this information. My employers tend to lack in providing employes with knowledge about benefits. I will be sure to ask at work today.
cintrix,
"Your 401k should give you a list of what funds you can invest in - do that - put them in mutual funds - don't try and trade them yourself."
I don't plan to trade my financial benefits from my employer. I wasn't aware trading mutual funds was possible or profitable. I was under the impression I would distribute a fixed income each paycheck that would go towards that investment(s).
"If you want to trade, then do that on the side with other money. Not with your 401k money. I am really not sure what you are talking about when you say I plan to keep 401k investments separate from stock investments - if you are in mutual funds, a good deal of them are stock funds. Some are bonds, but those are the more conservative funds and you are young so I would suggest you put more in the stock funds. Maybe you mean your trading account. That is fine. Put whatever you can afford to lose in that and trade and get a feel for it and you can even compare how well you are doing vs your 401k."
I'm sorry for not being clear. I meant keeping employee financial benefits separate from trading benefits. Good idea about coming the two investments though.
"Usually when a company allows employees to buy stock at a cheaper price there are restrictions on when you can cash them. Some companies do matches - say for every 20 you buy they give you 5 - but you usually have to wait until they are vested to sell - probably every company has their own time period."
I'll be sure to ask my employer today at work.
Usually when a company has a savings plan they have a representative you can talk to regarding how to allocate your money.
Because our company is small, but growing quickly. There is not human resources nearby. I would have to reach them over the phone.
"And please watch this:
Did your company give you the names of any financial advisers who manage their 401k? Most of them get paid through the actual fees from the investments. I know when my daughter got her job there was about three or four different companies she could invest in and she called one of those guys and went with him and he allocated her weekly contributions.
Your 401k should give you a list of what funds you can invest in - do that - put them in mutual funds - don't try and trade them yourself.
If you want to trade, then do that on the side with other money. Not with your 401k money. I am really not sure what you are talking about when you say I plan to keep 401k investments separate from stock investments - if you are in mutual funds, a good deal of them are stock funds. Some are bonds, but those are the more conservative funds and you are young so I would suggest you put more in the stock funds. Maybe you mean your trading account. That is fine. Put whatever you can afford to lose in that and trade and get a feel for it and you can even compare how well you are doing vs your 401k.
Usually when a company allows employees to buy stock at a cheaper price there are restrictions on when you can cash them. Some companies do matches - say for every 20 you buy they give you 5 - but you usually have to wait until they are vested to sell - probably every company has their own time period.
Usually when a company has a savings plan they have a representative you can talk to regarding how to allocate your money.
And please watch this:
cintrix, also do you know if the financial advisors will take commission from me if I were to go in and speak with them rather then enrolling over the phone or online?
cintrix, what you're saying is, don't use 401k profits to trade stocks? I plan to keep 401k investments separate from stock investments. If I do invest in a 401k, I wouldn't draw money from it tell retirement. Haha, I understand where you're coming from. I'll do my best to save as much as possible. I thought we were just talking about 401k's though. Are mutual funds similar? I'll ask if there is a limit on the amount I can buy. What do you mean by vested? I'll ask them that question also.
I was also wondering if I should talk to someone face to face about this? There are two Merrill Lynch branches here in my city. Do you think I should schedule an appointment with one of them? I would feel much better speaking to someone face to face rather then talking to someone over the phone.
Thanks for your help.
Here's my opinion and I know you are only 21 so you can take it or leave it. Don't be using your 401k money to trade. If you want to trade use some money you have on the side.
I'm only 21 and I don't feel retirement planning is best for me right now.
Oh my gosh! If you were my kid I would be trying so hard to slap you out of that remark. I have a kid your age who is putting away a small amount of her check every week in an employee savings plan. Put away as much as you can afford right now.
You should consider yourself lucky that your job is offering you a decent savings plan and take advantage of it. Put the money into a few diversified mutual funds. Believe me...they will do better than you will if you trade that money. At your age, you can put the money into more aggressive funds because you don't need the money for a long time.
If your company is offering stock at a discounted price, is it limited in the amount you can buy, and do those purchases have to become vested?
Good evening! I have the opportunity to receive financial benefits through my employer. This is the first employer to offer me this option. I'm overwhelmed and looking for some guidance and a point in the right direction.
1.) I currently use Scottrade's investment service. Though my employer uses Merrill Lynch investment service. Would Merrill Lynch be willing to transfer my investments to Scottrade? Would I be better off pulling investments from Scottrade in the future and transfer it to Merrill Lynch? Could anyone tell me more about Merrill Lynch's investment platform and how it compares? It's not important if investments are separate, though I would prefer my investments be together if I can benefit. I like Scottrade because they have branches, and I can speak to someone in person. I also enjoy the education seminars. They have a reasonable trade fee and the platform is simple to use. Could anyone chime in?
2.) I'm only 21 and I don't feel retirement planning is best for me right now. I'm more interested in risky investments such as stocks. Though my employer matches 401k's investments, so I'm interested. Could anyone tell me more about 401k's and this subject in general?
3.) I'm also subject to a discounted stock purchase through my employer. I see this as a good and bad. Good being, I can purchase the stock at a percentage cheaper then PPS. Bad being, since I have investing knowledge, I see the bad and good in my employer more so then the average employee. I feel I have mixed emotions about how the company is run meaning, I see the dirt and grime. It could effect my decision. Any help here?
4.) What questions and information should I ask from my employer?
If you have any resources or you can point me in the right direction, I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks, Gulley
Regarding Think or Swim, does anyone know if you can customize the colors for L2?
Think or swim is the platform that is free with a TD Ameritrade account. It is an awesome trading platform. Check out www.thinkorswim.com
You can download it free and paper trade if you like. It has a great scanner too.
What is think & swim?
I use both at the moment. I have been purposely watching to see if there were any differences and have found very little. I am in the process of switching my accounts to think or swim and doing away with the service with ihub simply because of the duplicity and no need for the extra expense since the level 2 is free with TOS. Good luck and Happy Trading.
Every level II service differs a bit from one another but they basically provide the same info. From an aesthetic point of view you may like one over another. I don't use either service so if someone reading this does, please chime in. My concern would be if their service works properly all the time and if their feeds provide valid quotes.
No, not necessarily. I have seen stocks drop below the offering price and trade over an offering price.
does this info below mean that the stock will stay at .80 until after the stocks are released to the investor? can someone explain this message.
announced today the signing of an agreement to raise $6 million through a private placement to a high net worth private investor in Asia. In the private placement, the Company will issue (i) shares of Series A Preferred Stock convertible, at a conversion price of $0.80 per share, into 7,500,000 shares of common stock and (ii) warrants with a three year term to acquire 2,625,000 shares of common stock at a cash exercise price of $0.90 per share.
Does any one no if the level two is the same on i hub as it is on think or swim. I would think it would be bit ive never seen another level two besides think or swim
Personally, I am not a fan of buying in pm or ah. I generally use both pm and ah to sell. Sometimes if something very important comes out during these hours I will buy if I think I won't have an opportunity to pick it up at a good price during regular hours.
mm's don't generally show aon's. AON's aren't priority. If the mm's want your order they will buy it from you - they don't need to do what you explained. Don't forget that they don't always have to have a buyer with a seller. They can use their own inventory too. If you placed an aon order and the mm wanted it, they could buy it from you and add it to their inventory.
if a stock is doing well in pre-market is it good to bid then or wait till open. I'v noticed a drop in some when the market opens
What I'm trying to get at is whether there is a manipulative strategy for bid whacking, say, if you want a price of a stock to be low... is there some way to make the MMs work for you.
Scenario: If you were already holding a large amount of a stock and you wanted the share price to be as low as possible so you could buy more at a cheap price. You were keen on accumulating as much as you could, but didn't want to alert anyone to your actions. You would place a large AON sell order below the bid or even just at the bid. This action would cause the MMs to start working to buy your large sell order because they would know that there was little chance of a single person being able to make that trade. So, the MM would start shorting into bids or setting ask sizes (short) that folks would hit (the ask size would be small, but may not change because A. they didnt want to scare people off with a large size and B. they could sit there absorbing as much buy pressure as possible before it dried up).
Say the AON seller canceled the order before the MM got enough to make the full trade... Would that AON seller be able to get away scot-free without having to pay anything for the amount of sell pressure they just created? Perhaps then, the MM would have to cover on the open market, so one could reason that it was equal in the end... But, by that time the AON seller would have created a negative stir in the market which would no doubt cause others to sell! Therefore they have initiated the rolling of a snowball of selling at no cost to them. Once the MM covered, they could repeat the process, thus laddering down a stock without ever selling a share.
Is that possible???
If there is someone with an unusually large sell order marked AON, does the MM have to show that order when it is the lowest ask for that MM? Could the bid ask spread go above this sell order's limit? Wouldn't it actually be in the MM's favor to let the bid ask spread go above this order so they could short high and cover low? To fill that large AON sell order located below best bid, an MM would want to short down bids or absorb ask hits with an ask (marked short) right? Because then they could cover their short position (once it is large enough) and therefore buy the sellers large AON sell order in one trade. What if the seller canceled the order prior to the MM shorting the full amount for the intended cover. When any of this happens, are T-trades involved in some way?
cintrix, so if this is the inverse. Is it still important to use it? Other words, if company A has a P/E ratio of 1 and company B has a P/E ratio of 2. Is it possible that company B has a lower earnings yield then company A? Since the lower the P/E ratio, the higher the earnings yield?
The earnings yield (aka earnings-price ratio, E/P ratio) for stocks is the inverse of the price-earnings ratio (P/E) of stocks, and is equal to the earnings per share of common stock divided by the market price of the stock.
http://thismatter.com/money/stocks/valuation/earnings-yield.htm
if the fundamental sites don't give the ratio you may have to figure it out yourself
That depends on the terms of the buyout agreement.. It all depends on what deal was made between the acquiring company and the acquired one and must be approved by the majority of stockholders.
What happens if a company that you own stock in gets bought out?
For example I own 54000 shares of company A at 1$ a piece
Company A gets bought by company B which is trading for 3$ a piece.
What happened since to my shares?
cixtrix, I found what I believe three value stocks that I'm digging deeper in. Berkshire Hathaway Inc. (BRK-B), Sony Corp. (SNE) and Met Life Inc. (MET). I'm using the tool you gave me, by using Yahoo Finance to look up most of the information (which has been a big help). I'm now looking for the earnings yield. Though I can't find it in the "Key Statistics". Is there another word or abv. for earnings yield?
cixtrix, very good read. I have been busy with school, so I haven't been able to look at the key statistics for the list of companies I wrote down. Though the first thing on my list is to find a few companies that's trading %30 under book value per share. Afterwards I plan to look at other factors including P/E ratio, earnings yield, insiders, current ratio, expenses, revenue, profitability, comparing to industry and dilation. Seeing which looks the best out of the three.
There was a time when only Canadian brokers allowed shorting pennies.
Too late. I already picked them up. Most of them were written from 2011 to 2013. The library is still generally behind the times. Also, I am going to highlight the crap out of these books for my second info extract read.
Thanks for clearing that up. Now, the baffling part is how some brokerages allow penny stocks to be shorted and others don't.
Libraries are for poor people who can't afford E readers or someone who just likes paper books and the hot librarian that works at said library :)
Who goes to the library anymore? I use the virtual library. They download any book to my kindle for a certain amount of time the same way you borrow a book. Now they have a new service where they allow you to download three songs per month. Not sure how that is legal but it is the public library allowing it .
Before you go out and buy those books go to your local library and borrow them for free
Yes, they are related. You can't short a stock if you don't have a margin account. When you short a stock the brokerage needs collateral because you are borrowing shares and they are giving you the proceeds from those shares you don't own.
In order to short a stock, do you have to buy it on margin or is shorting and margin not necessarily related?
I am trying to figure out how to short through eTrade.
I am lazy compared to you. I could never spend the time you have n the past few days trying figure out formulas. lol Just wanted to add...There are loads of companies that trade over book value. You have to remember that book value is a very conservative number and doesn't always represent the real value. And then when you find a company that is trading well below book value you have to wonder why it is. Why would a company be so undervalued?
Value Play or Value Trap?
If it's obvious that a company is trading for less than its book value, you have to ask yourself why other investors haven't noticed and pushed the price back to book value or even higher. The P/B ratio is an easy calculation, and it's published in stock summaries on any major stock research website. The answer could be that the market is unfairly battering the company, but it's equally probable that the stated book value does not represent the real value of the assets. Companies account for their assets in different ways in different industries, and sometimes even within the same industry. This muddles book value, creating as many value traps as value opportunities. (Find out how to avoid getting sucked in by a deceiving bargain stock in Value Traps: Bargain Hunters Beware!)
cixtrix, this is perfect! Of course your not lazy. Work smarter, not harder. If I have any further questions I'll be sure to ask, thanks!
Very nice! Thanks for that info.
You can actually access some of that online - for example:
http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/comparing-book-value-and-book-value-per-share.html
For Dummies Investing Books: don't sleep on them!.
I have read the following For Dummies books recently:
1. Trading
2. Investing Online
3. Technical Analysis
4. Fundamental Analysis
5. Currently reading Candlestick Charting
These books are written in such a straight forward manner. Very easy to understand and provide tons of additional resources.
After the first full read through, it is a good idea to go for a second spin to extract what you need to develop your investment / trading plan and paper trade. While some of the information briefly touch on another book's topic i.e. Trading talks a bit about Fundamental and Technical Analysis, the level at which these books break down some complex things in an easy to understand manner is great.
Highly recommended for the beginner.
Not to sound lazy, but I am. I never figure it out mathematically for myself. I just look it up. Why don't you look it up on sites that provide fundamental analysis? It is much quicker. There are so many sites that provide this information. You don't have to do the work. Here are a few - I plugged in VZ as an example:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=VZ+Key+Statistics
http://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=VZ&ty=c&ta=1&p=d&b=1
http://www.gurufocus.com/financials/VZ
cintrix, I understand the difference now. Though something is wrong with the formula that I showed in my earlier post for finding book value. Using this formula shows all companies extremely overvalued. I found the formula from Investopedia. What am I doing wrong? I know it's not my math. It has something to do with what's included in the asset and liabilities figure. Something should be excluded. I've found other sites that don't include certain figures like tangible assets or long term debt. But all sources include and exclude different numbers. I don't know which source is correctly calculating book value. Understand where I'm coming from?
I sent that site a note regarding the wording of that line. I beleive they should have used the word "latter" and not "former" and I think this is why you are so confused. Here they say the opposite:
Investopedia explains 'Market Value'
1. In the context of securities, market value is often different from book value because the market takes into account future growth potential. Most investors who use fundamental analysis to pick stocks look at a company's market value and then determine whether or not the market value is adequate or if it's undervalued in comparison to it's book value, net assets or some other measure.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marketvalue.asp
I will let you know if they respond, but their two different explanations are contradictory imo.
I think you are thinking way too hard here. What you need to know is that market value is what the stock is trading at. A lot of the times a stock will trade over book value. Like for example, tsla,the price it is trading at is market value which is higher than its actual book value. If you really want to be a value investor you would want to find a stock that has a book value lower than where it is trading. Do a google search for "growth vs value" investing. You will find examples of how they differ.
cintrix, so if I understand correctly. Market value of equity doesn't take into account the company's growth potential? Sorry for being difficult.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/market-value-of-equity.asp
Definition of 'Market Value Of Equity'
The total dollar market value of all of a company's outstanding shares. Market value of equity is calculated by multiplying the company's current stock price by its number of outstanding shares. A company's market value of equity is therefore always changing as these two input variables change. A company's market value of equity differs from its book value of equity because the former does not take into account the company's growth potential.
Investopedia explains 'Market Value Of Equity'
Market value of equity is basically a synonym for market capitalization. It is used to measure a company's size and helps investors to diversity their investments across companies of different sizes and different levels of risk.
| This board is for general questions regarding investing/trading. NO IHUB QUESTIONS OR COMPLAINTS! |
Questions relating to Ihub site - post here:
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/board.aspx?board_id=504
NO STOCK PICKS ON THIS BOARD!
Investors Hub does not endorse nor is it responsible for the content of the information posted on this message board. We have not independently reviewed the information, claims and testimonials provided within this message board and make no guarantee or warranty regarding such content. The information, opinions and recommendations expressed on this message board are not those of Investors Hub nor the Moderators. As always, please seek professional advice before investing in any marketable security and do your due diligence.
Volume | |
Day Range: | |
Bid Price | |
Ask Price | |
Last Trade Time: |