I dabble in the stock trading game. I like gambling in general, and the stock market is a socially respectable and reasonably safe way to gamble. Over the long term, unlike Vegas, in the stock market it’s possible to beat the house.
I don’t invest too much, I have a small investment club with my family and friends, and each of us has put in a couple hundred bucks over the past 6 months. We’re getting killed, of course, because the market has been shitty (c.f. todays Nasdaq, S&P, or Dow Jones). But the best stock we’ve got is still up a few percent since we bought it, which is saying a lot. The stock is for an industrial robot maker, who makes robots for car plants, lumber mills, anywhere that robot assembly lines are phasing out human workers. It was my recommendation, and I’m pretty proud of it. I figured robots were going to be big in the near future, so I found a company that is poised to take advantage of that trend.
I’m planning on exposing myself to more risk this week. The market is falling hard, but from what I hear it’s a great time to buy. Even if we haven’t bottomed out yet, we’re close, and the market should rebound substantially over the next couple years.
Does anyone else dabble? Anyone else have a black hole where their portfolio used to be? Anyone riding it out ?
Me and the wife have made a bunch of money on land and houses since 2000, but no stocks and shares so far. We’ll have to wait till the kids bugger off and stop spending all our money.
With the bailout rejected and the politicians playing chicken with the economy, I think I’d wait just a bit to see if there is a bottom or a sucking black hole… I don’t want anyone I know jumping out of windows…
The reason for this is because there is NO bottom to the housing market. It will keep plummeting down & down until houses become worthless, because they generally are. There’s no purpose to live in houses anymore. People are being forced to assimilate into the city-states or die.
Suburbs, SUVs, neighborhoods are going to drop out of sight until they’re negative assets. This is funny…
Capitalism is dead. Socialism is in.
Also, the whole middle class is going to kick the shit out of the political parties. They’re going to vote [b]everybody[/b] out of office, or worse, revolt.
Stay away from banking stocks, stick with good tech stock and hold your stock, do not sell. Wait and be patient. Even if it goes down it will go back up eventually. You may find in 5 years you were smart to hold on… Do not spend more than you can truly afford to lose. The best stocks are ones that have been around for awhile they will lose right now but, they will bounce back and move up. Find out what the big companies are investing in. Buy that if the price is right.
RU its not out its just changing, its going through growing pains. A normal process.
This no time to lose your head. The sun will still come up in the morning. BMWs may lose a bit of lustre for awhile, but people will find ways of getting along just as they did in the '29 crash. We’re nowhere near that scenario yet.
If your doom and gloom scenario plays out, who will have the money to buy a Toyota? No one. A crash hits EVERYONE. At that point, there is no “safe” investment.
The stock market is a representation of the stock prices and values. Only a drop in the dollar affects everybody equally. They’re two different causes.
I just meant that in the long-term, Toyota will be the safer investment. But yes, you’re right, everybody is going to get hit by this in the short-term.
(Sigh.) When are people going to learn? It was socialism that got us into this mess - mistakes by the Federal Reserve and bad practices of government-sponsored entities like FNMA and FHLMC. And now a potential bail-out that takes all the risk away. This is what happens when the government and business are in bed together. This is socialism, folks. Now we see it clearly displayed naked in front of our very eyes. Now we see what governmental influence over the economy brings us. Now we see what happens when the markets aren’t allowed to function naturally.
I don’t know, but it seems to me that the last 30 years of deregulation was an attempt to remove government from the market place. The Reagan rationale was that deregulation would encourage competition which would put the foxes in charge of watching the foxes. This was supposed to let the market have free rein, and that would lower prices and keep everyone honest. Something obviously got lost in the translation. I suspect that universal greed was the sticky wicket. I don’t think socialization created this mess, it was the attempt to move away from it that created the problems.
If deregulation and hands-off on oversight works so damned well, why are things the way they are?
Because it didn’t go far enough. We still have the Fed. We still have a tax code that’s set up to influence behavior, notwithstanding market conditions. Deregulation? We need non-regulation. We’re a little bit pregnant with regulation.
Hopefully the tidal wave will have died down a little by the time it reaches Turkey. We can afford to sit on the properties for a good while longer anyway.
If it’s not hurricanes, it’s financial apocalypse - wtf did you American types do to God to make him this pissed at you…? I blame the heathens on ILP among others, you’d better track them down and burn them as offerings in front of that big bull statue.
Capitalism is the competition between individuals for large sums of money. Without regulation, this tactic assumes that making money in itself, despite the costs in real-time of lives being lived, and starved, and killed, is sacred. Fuck Average Joe & Jane; I want mine! And the CEOs got theirs. This is the result of free-market capitalism. Socialization and regulation disallow this kind of competition from being profitable. But it is profitable. Therefore, it is ridiculous for people to say that capitalism is going to be allowed-for in the future of the American government. It simply cannot be! Because, as long as it is, there is nothing to stop the wealthy fucking over the non-wealthy. Socialism is what curtails these powers.
That is what is going to happen. Socialism is going to take over America’s capitalistic society, past, present, and future, because the real-costs are too high. It is no longer safe to buy a $500,000 suburbian home with a gas-guzzling car. These families, the middle class of America, is going bankrupt because of this. All the while, the wealthy CEOs who anticipate this are making money. It is a lose-lose situation and America simply cannot move forward into this direction. Because when you have the middle class losing all their wealth, they get pissed. And changes start occurring. They start begging & pleading for socialistic intervention. This is why there is almost no doubt in my mind that Obama is going to win the election, despite being black, despite McCain’s risk in choosing a woman VP, and despite every other fault that he may have. I honestly do not care which presidential candidate wins, because both support the status quo. However, America is quickly becoming a socialist society, as a result of pressures within and outside the market…
I don’t see another way around it, unless somebody can point out where I am mistaken.
It already has. Long ago. The battle for free markets populated by free people unfettered by the arbitrary whims of government has been lost. This is your world now. Enjoy.
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