Thanks everyone for your help!
Thanks Rien, Bernie and Toofuzzy for your ideas. It's great to learn from the more experienced AIMers :)
A few points in reply. First of all, I may have misled you about the 10 "speculative" stocks.
My thoughts here were to pick 10 "risky" stocks and AIM all of them. By risky I mean several things. One, they trade for less than $5/share (maybe this is a misconception, by I've read a few Motley Fool books that strongly recommend against investing in stocks that trade for less than $5/share). Second, their price has tanked in the last year. However, they still have good numbers (P/E < 20; PEG < 2; Price/Book < 5;) and a decent Beta (> 1.5). A few examples: ACF, OVER, INMT (keep in mind I haven't studied the financials for these guys...just ran them through a screener).
Maybe "speculative" was the wrong word...perhaps should have used "high risk" instead.
I got this idea from reading on some AIM site, but I don't remember which as I've now read too much!
Given this new info, do you still feel the same way about the idea? I would definitely use AIM to control them. One thing I wonder is whether $1000 in 10 stocks is just going to cause my commissions to be too high...maybe it wouldn't be worth doing for that reason.
Also, Rien said that speculating 10 companies would take up too much time. Given this new info above, do you still think that's true? If I'm planning on AIMing all 10 of these guys together, it shouldn't take that much time as long as I've done the upfront homework, right?
Moving on...thanks Bernie for the info on SPY. I will check that out. I've heard good things about it before.
Toofuzzy, thanks for your advice about ETFs. I am seeing the wisdom of AIMing a fund instead of stocks, especially starting out. There's no way I want to lose my entire account by picking the wrong stock.
However, what is a good method for picking/screening funds? With stocks it's fairly easy. I have gone to Yahoo Finance and used their screener to find stocks with certain criteria (I mentioned a few above). How might you do the same with mutual funds though?
take care,
Matt
